GBBO 2015 Bakealong: Week 1

It can hardly have escaped your attention that the Great British Bake Off is back on our screens (though actually, I almost missed it yesterday, so perhaps that's not *entirely* true) and it began in style last night with Cake Week.

In my excitement, I decided that a new year of Bakealongs would be appropriate, so I have dredged up the password to this blog from the deep recesses of my mind to bring it to you - don't all thank me at once!

For variety (and because I thought the technical challenges were getting a bit, well, desperate last year), I have opted to bake along with the signature bakes this time (though happily, because I am not being judged, I do not have to add any of my own "twists") so here we go - Madeira cake...

And just for added excitement (and because I didn't have any), I also candied some lemon peel.

I have no idea where this recipe comes from - it's just one I know (I'm pretty sure it's fairly standard) - so apologies if it's yours and I haven't credited you!

Ingredients

175g butter

175g caster sugar

Zest of one lemon

220g SR flour

50g ground almonds (for added niceness)

Pinch of salt

3 large eggs

Optional candied peel to decorate.

Method

I preheated my (fan) oven to about 160.

Although the recipes seem to say that you should just chuck everything in together and mix it, I can't quite bring myself to do that, so I creamed my butter, sugar and zest together first.

The I just chucked everything else in and beat it for a minute or so to make sure everything was nicely combined.

I greased and lined a 2lb loaf tin, chucked the mixture in it and baked for an hour.

If I had been super organised, I'd have taken it out half way and stuck my candied peel on top, but I wasn't and the candying (that must be the right word?) was still underway at that stage.

When I took it out of the oven, I glazed it with the syrup handily left over from my candied peel exploits and stuck a couple of bits on top.

And here it is!

It looks fairly convincing, I think, and it does indeed have the requisite crack in the top (I had no idea this was such a stringent requirement till watching the show last night - I just thought it was a thing that happened).

Madeira cake by its very nature tends to be a bit "boring", I think - which I guess is where the actual Madeira comes in (though I think that slices with jam and butter are also a valid option).

Shockingly, our wine cellar is a total Madeira desert at the moment, but I feel reasonably sure that can be addressed.

Now - anyone for some candied lemon peel?

Baking Along With GBBO: Week Six and Seven: Prinsesstårta and Kouign Amann

I've been doing a bit more catching up this weekend - two quite fun technical challenges in the most recent episodes, I thought...

Week six brought us the Prinsesstårta (Swedish Princess Cake, as seen in Ikea and also, presumably, Sweden), a rather bizarre looking green monstrosity - sponge, jam and creamy stuff covered with green marzipan and a pink rose, said to have been invented in the 1930s for some actual Scandinavian princesses.

The GBBO recipe for this is (and clearly was on the actual programme too) completely bonkers, requiring that you not only make the cake and the cream and creme patissiere fillings, but also the jam and the marzipan. I'm pretty sure that in Real Life, I wouldn't bother with many of these things, but, for the sake of authenticity, I did as I was told this time.




I definitely wouldn't have wanted to do this one in the time - I did mine over two days - I made most of the bits and pieces on day one and then the final cream whippage, marzipan and assembly on day two.



Next time, I would definitely make my creme patissiere a bit thicker - it would be easier to deal with and would give thicker layers.

I *might* also consider making the green a bit less green for authenticity, but I quite like my leafy colour - those gel colours are just too awesome to waste on pastel shades!

Again, not great for taking to work, but I shall see what I can do, as I don't think it's really reasonable to expect poor husband to eat the whole thing.



The Breton Kouign Amann from episode seven, on the other hand are an entirely different prospect.
Nice and straightforward to make, the main problem they seemed to create on TV was just the fact that nobody had any idea what they were making!

I, obviously, having seen their efforts, didn't have the same problem, so breezed through the recipe (admittedly at a far more leisurely pace).

They seem a bit like making croissants - bread dough with layers of butter - rolled and folded in the manner of puff pastry, with a bit of caramelly added sugar.

These are MUCH more transportable, and I'll have to hide them from husband, as they are utterly delicious.

I will definitely make them again - sweet and flakey, they would be ideal for breakfast or elevenses.

Baking Along With GBBO: Weeks Four and Five: Tiramisu Cake and Wee Pies

Husband makes a fuss about having to watch the Bake Off with me - he would prefer to mainline Game of Thrones (it's as well that we have to ease off that sometimes, in fact. We're coming ominously near to running out of episodes).

However, he is more excited about the Tiramisu Cake from the Puddings episode than he has been about any foodstuff for a long time...

What with that and Ice Cream-gate, it was a pretty exciting episode all round.

Now, I can take or leave tiramisu, generally - I don't really like coffee and chocolatey puddings don't do that much for me, but any recipe which has the nerve to include THREE entire tubs of mascarpone has to be tried at least once in a lifetime, I reckon.

Turns out I don't have a square tin (hard to believe, I know), so mine is round.




Also, who can be faffed with making silly chocolate decorations? Honestly... *sigh*




Because of being on Champagne Holiday last week, I have a bit of catching up to do, so I have also shoehorned Pie Week into this post.




I love pie. I love making pie and I quite like eating it too.

I was hoping that the custard tarts would be the technical challenge of the week, as I am partial to a bit of tartage (as many people that have been here for force feeding dinner here can testify). However, it was clearly not to be, and pear mini pies were the order of the day.

When I saw these on TV, I thought that they were a bit lame, but now that I have made them myself, I am COMPLETELY in love with them - they are gorgeous. Simple and gorgeous.




Definitely one to make again and again (possibly with apples, which are a good deal yummier than pears in my humble opinion).




I'm going to make my family eat all these things at a barbecue this weekend, as the technical challenges are becoming increasingly impractical for transporting into work (BBC, please take note ;) ).

Tune in again for (equally, if not more, impractical) princess cake.

Baking Along With GBBO: Week One: Cherry Cake

Like much of the rest of the country, I tuned in to watch the first episode of the Great British Bake Off last week.

I'm not certain I love it that much as a concept - it's all a bit "reality TVish" what with the tears and recriminations and whatnot - but I do like cake and, as with all these things, they are very good at making it compelling viewing, even if it makes the viewer feel a bit grubby 😀.

Anyway, I thought that maybe I could use it to channel my baking energies and become an Awesome Baker, so I'm going to try to "bake along" with the technical challenges.

(In all likelihood, this will only last for a week or two - I have a very back track record with consistency...)

Here's the first one, then - the Mary Berry Cherry Cake, which can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/marys_cherry_cake_17869

It seems like a pretty straightforward one to start with - I don't think it was too challenging for the TV people, or, happily, for me...

I've never washed glacé cherries before, though - that seems like utterly bizarre behaviour to me.

Here is my cake. I think MB would be disappointed with the consistency of my icing, but otherwise pretty good (and it was her recipe, after all 😉).

And here is the inside - good distribution of cherries, I'd say, though a wee bit dry for my taste, perhaps.

I also made a big (entirely unnecessary) pile of doughnuts from the Justin Gellatly book of loveliness.

And a birthday Iggle Piggle cake for the lovely charity that is Free Cakes for Kids Hackney.

Lemon Cake (or A Recipe for Late Night Baking)

Last night, I asked Twitter what would be a good thing to bake, given the lateness of the hour and my general lack of interesting ingredients...

The delectable (and very clever) Miss Jordi suggested that I should make a lemon cake, so, being very easily led, that was exactly what I did.

So, here we go - Jordi-cake:

Ingredients (this is pretty small - you could easily scale it up).

For the cake:
100g unsalted butter
55g fat free yogurt
155g caster sugar
3 eggs - mine were Cotswold Legbars - yummy, but small.
150g plain flour
1tsp baking powder (obviously you could just use self raising flour instead, but I didn't have any)
a pinch of salt
the zest of two lemons

For the syrup:
the juice of the above two lemons
2tbsps icing sugar

For the icing:
2tbsps fat free yogurt
2tbsps melted white chocolate
a splash of vegetable (or other flavourless) oil
icing sugar (probably about 150g)

Method

For the cake:
Preheat oven to good baking temperature - probably 180 (160 - 170 fan)
Cream together butter, yogurt, lemon zest and caster sugar until pale and fluffy.
If your lemons are the posh kind with the leaves still attached, be super careful not to stab yourself on the spiky spikes and then drip lemon juice into the stab wound. That would be both painful and stupid.
Add the eggs one at a time and beat in - add a little bit of flour if necessary to stop it curdling.
Add the flour, salt and baking powder and fold in gently till combined.
Scoop the batter into a prepared baking tin - I used a little flat rectangular one for a slab cake shape and bake for 20 minutes or so, till cooked.

For the syrup:
While the cake is baking, squeeze your lemons - mine were pretty big, so I got lots of juice.
Set aside a couple of tablespoons of the juice to use in the icing.
Add your icing sugar to the remaining juice and mix until dissolved.
This gave me a pretty tart syrup, which is all good with me, but you could easily add more sugar if you preferred something sweeter.
When the cake comes out of the oven, prick it all over with a fork and pour the syrup over it (this is definitely the key to a delicious juicy cake - it works with anything, not just lemon - even just sugar syrup will do).
Leave the cake to cool in the tin.

For the icing:
Melt the chocolate, if you haven't already. I did mine slowly in the microwave. Be careful - white chocolate burns very easily.
Stick all the ingredients in a bowl (including the reserved lemon juice) and whisk furiously.
You may need more or less icing sugar than I did, so add it a bit at a time.
Once you've sugared as much as you like, keep whisking for five to ten minutes (or unit your arm falls off, if you're doing it by hand) until it's fluffy.
When the cake is cool - spoon/spread this over the top.
Turn out of tin and cut into slices.

Voila - cakes!

A Happy Accident or What to Do With Italian Meringue

This was supposed to be a post about a passion fruit meringue pie, that I made to take to a BBQ (which, in fact, turned out very well), but has morphed somewhat, due to the need to use up the leftover meringue.

I had been planning to recycle the meringue that I didn't use into macarons or similar, but eavesdropping a few conversations on Twitter gave me another idea...

I knocked up some quick shortbread rounds (using the infallible 1-2-3 recipe)

Then I piped meringue circles round the edge (to avoid seepage) and spooned jam (almost the end of the final jar of wedding strawberry jam, in fact - it's lasted nearly a year) into the middles

I chopped the end off my meringue filled piping bag, to make a bigger hole, and piped meringue over the top.

Can you tell what they are yet?
Husband couldn't, and they're practically his national dish ;-)

I stuck them in the fridge to chill while I tempered some chocolate, then I smothered them and left them out to set while I went off to eat meat and Big Prawns at the BBQ.

And later, when we returned, hey presto - Not-Tunnocks Teacakes :-)

Cakesperimental

So, as twittered earlier, I had a burning cake making desire today, but tragically no butter at all, and little inclination to venture out and forage for any...

I did, however, have a great big tub of full fat Total yogurt, which husband had accidentally bought in a fit of supermarket overenthusiasm.

So I thought to myself "Yogurt - that's quite like butter, right?" and proceeded with the following cakesperiment (you'll have to forgive the dreadful food styling and photography - you'd think I'd be getting better at it by now, wouldn't you?)



Jennie's Experimental (but successful) Raspberry Yogurt Loaf Cake


You will need:

• 3 large eggs
• 7oz caster sugar (plus extra for topping)
• 7oz SR flour
• 7oz full fat yogurt
• Raspberries (mine were frozen)
• Orange zest (optional)
• Pinch of salt

And here's what you do:

1. Pre heat oven to 180 (or reasonable baking temperature)
2. Break eggs into bowl and whisk until fluffy
3. Add sugar and whisk into eggs
4. Chuck in flour, salt, yogurt and zest and fold into mix (but don't mix too hard)
5. Put into loaf tin (or similar) and poke raspberries into top (I usually do this with fruit in cakes, rather than mixing into mixture as it seems to stop them sinking too far and stops the whole mixture going pink)
6. Sprinkle the top with a reasonable layer of sugar
7. Stick into the oven and bake for about half an hour (or till cooked)
8. When cool (but sill warm), turn out of tin and stuff slices into mouth, preferably garnished with further yummy yogurt and a glass of amontillado :)

I was really pleased with the way this turned out - quite muffiny and definitely tasty. 

I'm going to put in more raspberries next time (blueberries would also be nice - I love baked blueberries) and maybe a bit of juice as well as the zest.

No butter = Not a disaster at all :-)