Bakers compete with timeless recipes

A table laden with baking, using family recipes that have been around for generations, brought back memories for New Zealand’s original MasterChef Brett McGregor who helped judge Summerset Richmond Ranges’ Great British Bake Off.

Village residents used their favourite recipes to tempt the taste buds of Brett and Summerset’s sales manager Linda Farrelly to find a winner among the cakes, muffins, brownies, and even a traditional pumpkin pie using molasses.

Dianne Nicholson won the accolade for best baking with a simple biscuit that gave Brett “goosebumps” because it took him back to his own family and showed true baking skills with a simple recipe.

“With simple recipes you have nowhere to hide”.

Like much of the baking, Dianne’s baking had a story behind it and had become a family tradition. Her biscuits hark back to 1955 when biscuit forcers were the fashionable kitchen gadget and her mother bought a ‘Tala’ forcer.

She found a recipe in the Straight Furrow farming newspaper called Favourites and they became such a winner that Dianne and her two sisters baked them for birthdays and Christmas. The biscuits have since become firm favourites for her grandchildren who have changed the name to Nana’s Flowery Bickies.

Her biscuits were perfect on the day, but Dianne admits she was woken by a nightmare before the competition where she dreamed the biscuits had burnt in the oven and when she took them out, they were black underneath.

Among the other baking was a sultana cake with a dash of Grand Marnier, made from a recipe that had been around for more than 100 years and had been given by “Mrs Williamson, an old friend of the baker”.

Another was an old-fashioned gingerbread loaf made from a recipe found in a New Zealand Women’s Weekly magazine in the 1980s. Farm buns from another baker had long been favourites to take out duckshooting.

The story behind the chocolate cake with a large slice removed was: “my husband ate it”.

“These are the recipes that we can not lose,” says Brett, who wants to see the recipes put together in a cookbook.

“I don’t want to lose these now. Otherwise, we’ll never see it again or taste it again.”

He described the bake off as the “best table of baking I’ve tried in a long time”.