Ready, set, write! (A GBBO-themed writing contest!)

It’s competition time – and there are prizes!

I had this idea just over a week ago, on a work trip to Lisbon. A café near my hotel was advertising churros for breakfast, and as soon as I saw the sandwich board outside a story started to form in my head. When churros also popped up on that evening’s episode of The Great British Bake Off it felt like a sign, and I wrote it up the next day as this piece of flash fiction.

This is actually the first year I’ve watched GBBO. Its mix of cheery, Home Counties enthusiasm and relentless innuendo quickly won me over, and I doubt I’ll miss an episode between now and the end of the season. It also has huge potential as far as erotica is concerned, and not just because of all the filth! A hot, salty-sweet churro really is the tip of the iceberg – Viennese Whirls, mirror glaze, heart-shaped lace pancakes…these are all baking challenges that in some way have made me think about sex over the last five weeks.

So here’s what we’re going to do. The list below contains everything baked since the start of this year’s GBBO. I want you to bake me…wait, no…I want you to write me a piece of erotic fiction, no longer than 1500 words, using one of those 15 options as a title, a theme, or both. It’s that simple. Make it as kinky or vanilla as you like. Make it straight, gay, bi; period, sci-fi, supernatural; explicit, coy…just make sure it fits the prompt in some way, even if that way has absolutely nothing to do with baking.

1. Drizzle cake
2. Jaffa Cakes
3. Mirror glaze
4. Iced biscuits
5. Viennese Whirl
6. Gingerbread
7. Chocolate loaf
8. Dampfnudel
9. Plait
10. Yorkshire puddings
11. Lace pancakes
12. Churros
13. Danish pastries
14. Bakewell Tart
15. Amuse-bouche

The (new!) deadline for submissions is Friday 14^th October and you can enter as many times as you like. If you have a blog of your own, post the story there and send me the URL; if you don’t, you can shoot it over by email (dulce.et.decorum.est@gmail.com). I’ll set up a separate post with links to all the entries, and announce the winner(s) on the weekend of the 8^th/9^th October.

Thanks to the lovely people at Sh!, hands-down London’s best sex shop, the winner will get a £20 voucher to spend either in store or online, plus a Paul Hollywood or Mary Berry baking book of their choice – which is pretty awesome.

There will also be at least one runners-up prize of paperback or Kindle-based erotica, depending on location/preference – Best Women’s Erotica of the Year vol.1 (2016), in fact, edited by the fabulous Rachel Kramer Bussel! If you (or your company) would like to donate another prize (and get your website/blog/business featured on this page), please get in touch!

Just finally, please do share this contest with anyone who you think would like to enter. It might not make judging any easier, but when it comes to writing competitions it really is a case of the more the merrier!