It's the most wonderful time of the year... yes, Greggs has got its full festive menu live and available to buy in stores across the land.
For many people, it's not properly Christmas time until a Greggs festive bake has been consumed, and this year the pastry connoisseurs have given us a new version of their classic creamy savoury treat.
Buoyed by the success of their vegan sausage roll and steak bake, their vegan festive bake hit stores for the first time on Monday and was swiftly selling like hot cakes.
READ MORE: We cooked Christmas dinner from Aldi and Lidl to see how they compared
Keen to see if it measures up in the tasty pastry stakes, I was among the thousands of customers heading to Greggs stores to give it a whirl on Monday.
And I was pretty lucky to bag one - I got the last vegan festive bake in my local Greggs shop when I headed along at 11.30am with staff at the shop saying they'd been "rushed off their feet" serving them up.
I also snapped up a traditional turkey and bacon festive bake to see how the taste of the meat and non-meat versions compared.
The first thing I noticed was the sturdiness (or lack of) of the two pastry partners.
The original festive bake was firm and sturdy, it's crusty pastry rising to a mound, while the vegan version was somewhat floppier and a tad pale in comparison, bending alarmingly in my hand as I posed with it for a photo.
Keen to get it eaten before it folded completely in two, the first thing that hit me was the lightness of the pastry, with a rich buttery taste.
Chomping further the mushy innards soon melt into the pastry, and at first I felt the slight tang was a little jarring.
But the more I ate the more I warmed to the cheesy-flavoured sauce inside - if you did not know it was vegan you would never think this was dairy-free.
It did, however, seem to lack any blobby bits as substitute for the festive bake's traditional turkey, bacon and stuffing combo although I'm told there's Quorn in there somewhere, but there was a nice hit of festive spice.
Having not had a traditional festive bake for a while (well, 12 months naturally) I had assumed it would hands down beat the vegan version in the taste test.
But I was in for a bit of a shock. For fresh from eating the vegan version, the meaty take didn't actually seem as good as I'd always remembered it to be.
The vegan pastry for me was a much lighter and pleasant taste.
And as for the mushy stuff inside, even with the knowledge it did have chicken and bacon in there, it was hard to really establish those flavours within the intense clag of grey goo, speckled occasionally by a brown blob that presumably was cranberry but the taste of it was also lost within the mire.
Both bakes were priced at £1.85 at the Greggs concession I visited inside a petrol station (which I believe charge slightly more than high street stores) but for my money, it was the vegan festive bake that won the day.
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