You can officially blame the Competition Hunter blog, if after reading this, your summer barbeque includes seven different styles of pumpkin soup or unusual mince pies! We take full responsibility – haha
It’s never too early to start thinking about winter recipe competitions! But it will be far too late to leave preparations until the winter. Like all good magazine moguls and top companies – working one season ahead – keeps our pro-active eyes on the prize if we are to scoop them!
Halloween and Christmas periods are the prime times for recipe competitions to crop up – but once they are here, all the Christmas preparations make it hard to enter – especially like me, you are still a bit of a novice. With such a potential low-entry point, it seems a shame to just do nothing about it! Current recipe and foodie photo competitions have been appearing to win BBQ’s and outdoor cookery prizes and while there’s still a few here and there – they really are few and far between now we are in the middle of summer.
So! How are you going to prepare? These are our top tips, please feel free to add yours to the comments:
Browse last year’s recipe competitions. A new food website will do just this. They won’t want to replicate exactly, but they will get ideas – so, websites like the Great British Chef’s (http://www.greatbritishchefs.com ) will be doing this. As for more established promoters, you can have a little look to see if they maintain the same type of competition – if they have run a Christmas cake recipe competition for the last three years, then it’s a good bet that they will do so this year.
Browse recipe books and tailor your favourite recipes to astound the promoters. Usually, these recipe competitions ask that the idea is your own. But recipe books will provide you with loads of inspiration and – with a few tweaks of your own, you could be cooking up a prize-winning storm.
Cut out and keep the good pictures. Some competitions will require a photo. Trust that recipe photographers know what they are doing and aim to replicate the result. It’s essential to stand out from the crowd, so pay particular attention to unusual angles and interesting backgrounds.
Borrow accessories. Your non-comping friends and families will have a host of little seasonal winter decorations that they wont be using – now is the perfect time to borrow them for a few weeks while you create your prize-winning creations.
PRACTICE and be innovative! – Innovative tastes and textures and unusual presentation skills will make your entry stand out from the crowd. If it works for Heston Blumenthal –it may well work for you!
Do you have any tips or advice for others? Have you ever won a foodie competition? Have you ever prepared in advance for seasonal competitions before? Let us know all about it in the comments.