Pancake World Cup Continued

Half Way Point Review
After all 32 countries had had a pancake eaten I wrote down some observations and thoughts on how the day had gone so far. We stopped for a bit as people were starting to get full and the kitchen was getting hot due to the heat from the pancake machine. There was rather a lot of mess as well, obviously. 

Favourites

At the half way point I'd have definitely said that the most likely candidates to win would've been chocolate sauce, caramel ice cream and bacon and maple syrup. Unfortunately when I wrote down which toppings would be competing against each other, it turned out that chocolate sauce was against bacon and maple syrup, which I thought was a shame given that there were a few toppings left in that seemed a bit underwhelming to me, such as banana, peach and meringue, and apple and raisin. But I suppose this is why it's important to have a variety of tasters.

Surprises

For me, regardless of what happened after this point, today was a success because of how many new pancake toppings I discovered that were really nice. I thought the grapefruit and sugar one in particular was really, really nice. Alongside this were other surprises, coconut, cinnamon and sugar, nutella and cocount, grapes with pepper and cinnamon, and bacon with maple syrup were all very nice. 

I was surprised however at a couple of exits. I thought that vanilla ice cream would go further, although I suppose the fact that caramel ice cream got through means that there's more variety left. Alongside this, I had a lot higher hopes for the pineapple pancake, especially given that it was in a pretty weak group on paper.

General Observations

Whilst it's not really a surprise, it seems like the sweeter pancakes are being more successful, with sangria, chilli and tomato, prawns, cheese, mint sauce and green tea all going out. 

I also noticed that all the toppings representing African countries failed to get through. Whilst I'm not surprised that mint sauce didn't get through, I'd have given all the others a fair shout at getting through, and like I said, I think the biggest surprise for me so far was how nice the grapefruit one from Nigeria was. 

The strangest thing I noticed is that earlier on in the day, the tasters were starting by deciding which pancakes they didn't want to go through. But then as the day went on that started to reverse, which is a good thing because it makes me feel like they're enjoying it more because they're having a harder time distinguishing between good options rather than doing it by a process of elimination.

Second Stage
For each match-up in the second stage I cooked a new pancake each time so that the taste of each pancake was fresh in the mind/mouth of my tasters. I didn't feel the need to take photo's of the pancakes from here on as I already had photo's of every pancake from the first round. The result of the second stage is below.

There weren't really any surprise results in this round. At a push I'd say apple and sugar being chosen over jam was a slight surprise as I didn't really rate apple and sugary. I was also slightly surprised that chocolate was chosen above bacon and maple syrup given how excited the taster was about a bacon and maple syrup pancake. It would've been interesting to see how far it would've got had it been matched up with something else.