There were gorgeous cakes on display in a tasty week at Park just before Christmas when the Customer Care team came up with a novel way to create a little excitement at work.

A festive bake off was held to test Park staff's creativity, and to have a little fun before the Christmas holidays.

June Potts, who heads up Customer Care, explains. "We wanted to do something a little different before Christmas. So we gave each team in Customer Care a swiss roll and asked them to be creative"

The Chocolate swiss rolls provided the basis for a Christmas Yule Log, which would be decorated individually by each team. The brief was to produce something Christmassy.

Eight teams entered and had to work together to come up with their design. They had just twenty minutes to develop the idea. Then, just like the Great British Bake Off, they had to submit their cake design to the judges anonymously, with just a team picture so that they could unveil which cake belonged to which team.

"In the end we actually had three winners" says June. One was a trampoline inspired by the John Lewis Christmas advert. The other two were based on a Park Express train and a Santa and reindeer sleigh"

The cake decoration inspired by the John Lewis advert, used the sliced swiss roll as the base of the trampoline. A snapshot of Buster the Boxer, and the other animals from the 2016 advert, are held in place with the chocolate sponge as a stand.

The "Park Express" team covered the swiss roll with chocolate and used chocolate blocks to build the different elements of the train. Party Ring biscuits were used as the wheels while cotton wool added to the decoration as smoke from the train. Whereas the sleigh used the log to provide a comfortable seat for Santa which was pulled by a team of brightly coloured tinsel reindeers.

The other 5 entries were impressive in terms of imagination and creativity but with competition being so high they were pipped to the post by the other three winners.