The Simply Bake Bloggers’ Bake Off

In my last post I shared a recipe for duchesse potatoes especially created to pair with a meal from Young’s new Simply Bake range of frozen cod meals. Today here’s how I got on making the recipe again with Young’s charming in-house chef Serge Nollent in a bloggers bake off event.

Watch this video for a taste of our efforts… The evening began at L’Atelier des Chefs’ cookery school in Central London.

We had provided our recipes in advance and our work stations were set up with ingredients and equipment to go.

I had had the benefit of having just made my recipe that afternoon so it was a bit weird making the same thing twice within the space of 3 hours but at least this meant I was very relaxed about proceedings. Waiting for the spuds to come up to the boil left me time to chat to the others and sip my drink in a leisurely fashion! (Just like at home really)

We had a little hold up as my induction hob wouldn’t come up to the boil for ages so by the time my potatoes were cooked and mash was ready, everyone else had finished.

I must confess I let Serge take over my piping to hurry things up. He must be more used to piping with hot bags and my mitts couldn’t wait for the hot potato to cool down!

15 minutes later and they were out.

Here are the other side dishes from the other three bloggers to accompany their respective dishes;

Em from Em Talks made sweet potato colcannon to go with Cheese & Leek Bake,

Stacey from Crummbs made Panzanella Rocket Salad to go with Mediterranean Bake ,

Kavey from Kavey Eats made Giant Couscous Salad with Balsamic Roast Tomato and Baby Spinach to go with Cheese & Leek Bake.

Serge served Carrot and Roasted Cauliflower Salad to go with Florentine Bake and Potato Salad with Celery and Spring Onion to go with Broccoli Mornay Bake.

And of course my own dish (below), duchesse potatoes with sun dried tomato to accompany the Mediterranean Bake. You can get the duchesse potatoes recipe in my previous post.

Now all the dishes were ready we were able to taste all the versions of the range with the wide variety of side dishes everyone had created. It was quite remarkable we’d each come up with something entirely different just showing how many things you might serve with these meals.

Tasting how good these were, I am definitely going to pay more attention to frozen fish meals in the freezer aisle – I must admit I’d tended to stick to plain fish fillets before but am now tempted to stock up on a few of these for nights I’m not home to cook from scratch.

And when we ate one of the meals at home, Ted, who can be very picky about fish, gobbled up the lot.  So yes I will be buying them in future. Thank you to Young’s for turning my head!

This post was commissioned by Young’s to launch their new Simply Bake range of frozen cod meals. Find out more about Young’s via Facebook, Instagram and their website.