Bloggers Bake Along to GBBO: FINAL WEEK: Classically British Cake

As mentioned in my previous post, I decided to make TWO bakes for the final week, instead of my usual one. This of course meant I set myself far too much work, raised the bar far too high, and ended up getting myself stressed. However something decent actually came out of it!

As soon as I hear the term Classic British Cake, I immediately think Victoria Sponge cake. It's so quintessentially British to me, that I just knew I had to make one. I also didn't just want to make your bog standard sponge cake, so I thought to myself... 'What is the most British thing I can think of in relation to cake?'. The answer of course, was tea... Tea and cakes, afternoon tea, what could be more British. So I set myself the (what I thought was easy) task of making a Teapot Cake! So here's how it all came into being...

It all started with a sponge. I mixed all the ingredients together in my mixer, and then used some Hemisphere tins that I got from Lakeland to make to half sphere cakes. This was probably the easiest part of the whole process truth be told...

Then I moved onto making a jam... this was the first time I had ever attempted a jam, and considering I didn't have a fancy sugar thermometer I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I'm going to be making this often because it tastes so much better than supermarket cheap jam, and it only took me about 30 minutes to make!

Then I made a simple butter-cream icing which simply involves creaming butter and then slowly bit by bit adding icing sugar. This is probably the simplest of all icings to make, so still didn't run into any issues here!

Then came the putting together of the cake... WOW was this a flipping nightmare. So I crumb coated the sphere halves with the butter-cream icing so that my fondant would stick. and then I made one of the spheres flat on the bottom so it would stand. Then I topped that with butter-cream and jam, before putting the final sphere on top. Next I rolled out my fondant, which I happened to colour myself, which just took such a freaking long time that I wanted to cry. Then the WORST step of all... putting the fondant onto the cake. This was my first time covering a cake with fondant, so picking to do it on a sphere cake was probably a bad move on my part. It just didn't go smoothly... literally. Once I was relatively happy I moved on to the other decoration. So I made a little lid by rolling out white fondant and using a cookie cutter. Then I rolled a small ball for the little lid handle. For some unknown reason I decided to make a polkadot tea pot, so I also spent half an hour piping little dots onto my teapot, before using toothpicks to add a handle, and spout. Finally adding gold accents with a brush and gold edible paint.

There we have it, my classically British victoria sponge cake! I am so happy that it turned out OK, considering the blood, sweat and tears (figuratively) that went into this.

What have you baked this week?

Bloggers Bake Along to GBBO: Salted Caramel Chocolate Tart

I know... I know... another salted caramel recipe... I just can't help myself because it tastes so good! Plus it was honestly the first thing that popped into my head once I decided to make a chocolate tart.

As I sat watching the Bake Off on Wednesday, listening to the bakers say how difficult it is to work with chocolate pastry, I almost laughed. 'How difficult can it really be?' I thought to myself. The answer to that question is of course very difficult. I can honestly say I will never underestimate chocolate pastry again. It was just difficult to combine, difficult to roll, and then difficult to tell when baked...

One I had my pastry case in the oven I set about making my salted caramel sauce, which involved boiling brown sugar, cream, and butter together until it looked vaguely like caramel. Then once my case was baked I poured a little of the caramel sauce right into the base of the case and left it to set slightly. Then I got to work on the chocolate filling, the process of which is very similar to the making of chocolate ganache. I boiled cream, sugar and vanilla essence over the hob and then poured them over chocolate and butter, whisking until smooth. I then simply spooned the mixture over the top of my caramel and smoothed it over. This then went into the fridge to set for two hours.

For some reason I decided that my decoration hasn't really been up to scratch and us such I decided to attempt to pipe an intricate design onto my tart. I did this using left over white chocolate I had from last week's bake, which I then piped into a swirling pattern.

Overall I am very happy with my tart, and even happy with my piping! Considering is was my first attempt at free-hand piping a design from my head (rather than a picture), I'm very pleased! Trust me when I say it tastes as good as it looks, already can't wait to have another slice...

What have you baked this week?

Bloggers Bake Along to GBBO: Mary Berry's Tennis Cake

I'm so pleased that I have gotten to week seven and have manage not to miss a single bake so far! Although I had been looking through all my other bakes fior this challenge and I realised that I hadn't managed to tackle a single technical challenge... So this week I remedied that by making Mary Berry's Tennis Cake from this week.

Making the cake mix involved preparing a whole bunch of fruit, I have literally never seen so much fruit in a cake... like ever... In fact when I first started mixing the fruit into the cake batter I was convinced that it was about 90% fruit!

Making my own Marzipan was surprisingly easy, although I didn't think it was going to come together at first because of the tiny amount of wet ingredients involved... Also have to mention that I didn't make my own fondant, I had to buy white fondant and colour it myself! It wasn't that I didn't want to, in fact I had all the ingredients in my basket ready to go, but Tesco had sold out of Glycerin, and as I was running out of time to get my bake done before I start my new job next week, I admitted defeat. Having said that, colouring shop bought fondant is no easy task! Cutting both into rectangles and getting them on top of the cake without breaking them was a challenge... The royal icing was something I have made several times before, so I had no problems here. Piping the Tennis court was an absolute nightmare... and as you may be able to see I was a little bit wobbly. Although it was fine once I got the hang of it!

 Then all I had to do was pipe my pink and yellow border, which after doing the tennis court was really easy. Then I piped myself some little tennis rackets and a net, which I left overnight to dry. Despite this however I still managed to break my net... you can see the damage above! So my tennis cake is unfortunately net-less, and I have no idea how some of the bakers managed to get a completed net on their cakes...

So there we have my Tennis cake! Overall I was pretty happy, and I'd like to think that if I was on the Bake Off this week that my cake would have been in the middle, judging wise.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the cake, and what you thought of this weeks episode...

Bake Along With GBBO: Ex-Contestant's Bake

I am so excited that the Great British Bake Off is back with a vengeance next week, we all know how much I love that show right? Also how Mary Berry is literally my complete idol... Anyhow... I announced a few weeks ago that myself and a few other bloggers were going to be baking along to the bake off, putting up a new post every week after the airing of an episode of bake off, you can read that post here. If you would like to take part you can join at any time, just check out our Facebook group.

So myself and the other bloggers taking part decided that we were far too excited about the bake off to wait until next week to bake, so we thought we'd do one in the lead up to the bake off. The prompt for this week was to recreate a bake made by one of the Ex-Contestants of GBBO.

I decided to recreate a bake from the one and only, 'King Louis' from last year's batch of bakers. Louis was an amazing baker on the show and he always seemed to know what he was doing, and I honestly don't remember ever seeing him getting in a fluster. His calm and organised baking style clearly paid off as he made it all the way to the final! I'll admit Louis wasn't my favourite on the show and I actually wanted Richard to win last year, BUT I really like Louis' recipes, and finally settled on his Pain au chocolat blanc with raspberries that he made during the final. Mainly because as the moment I am facing a serious White Chocolate addiction... Also because I wanted to finally give dough lamination a go, because no doubt I'll face again during the 10 weeks of GBBO right? You can find Louis' recipe on the BBC website here.

Here is how they turned out, admittedly they are probably a little under baked, but I am beyond chuffed that you can see the layers of dough, considering this was the first time I had done the lamination technique! I can confirm that they are delicious, and very unique from your standard Pain au Chocolat... 

For the dough mix you will need:

For the filling you will need:

Firstly place all the ingredients apart from the water and butter in a free stand mixer, with a dough hook attachment. It's really important that you keep the salt and the yeast on separate sides of the bowl for this part.

Then add 3/4 of your milk (lukewarm), and mix until combined, then turn up the speed and mix for seven minutes.

At that point your dough should look beautiful like this! wrap it in cling film and place it in the freezer.

Roll your butter out into a rectangle between two pieces of parchment paper, then place it in the freezer with the dough for fifteen minutes!

This is the part of the recipe where you do a lot of fancy 'turns' so that you laminate the dough... oooo fancy!

Combine the cream cheese and lemon zest and then place into a piping bag (look at me getting all fancy again!)

You also want to prep your chocolate by making sure the squares are only 1cm wide, but the length doesn't matter.

Once you are done laminating the dough, you need to cut it in half and then roll each half into a rectangle.

This is where it gets fun, and a little messy! You start by placing a line of white chocolate along the dough about 2cm down from the edge, then you roll the dough to encase it. Next you pipe a couple of lines of your cream cheese mixture right next to that, then place a row of raspberries on top. Then you simply roll it up to encase it all! Once that's done trim the ends of your sausage and then measure six equal pieces.

Cut the pieces out and place them onto a baking tray lined with baking paper, and then cover them with clingfilm and leave them to rise for 40 mins. Then simply bake them for 25 minutes!

I hope you've enjoyed my adventure in baking this week, and I'll see you again next week for the first challenge week of the Bake Along!

Don't forget to check out the bakes from the other bloggers taking part in the challenge below! The challenge runs until next Wednesday so keep checking back to see new recipes...

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Bake Along With The Bake Off

Who doesn't love The Great British Bake Off? Mary Berry is my absolute baking idol, so it's a no brainer for me to love GBBO. Knowing that it's only about a month away I have been rewatching the last series, which had some of the most talented bakers ever seen on the bake off!

I have mentioned before that I am a keen baker, but to be honest since Tim and I moved out of the flat, and I started my makeup course I haven't baked a single thing. Which is such a shame because baking makes me feel so happy, and I love getting complements from people regarding what I have made...

With all this in mind I decided that this year I wanted to do something alongside my favourite show, so this year I will be 'Baking Along With The Bake Off', and I want you to join me!

The idea is we will watch an episode of bake off, then in the week before the next episode will make something related to the episode, and write a post about it. For example you could either make your own signature to the same challenge as the bakers, recreate the blind challenge, or create your own show stopper to the same brief the bakers were given. The post would go up before the next episode aired, and then we would all link up together and share what we have made. Now I am aware that GBBO probably won't grace our screens until August, but it's good to be organised right?

If you would like to get involved then please fill out the contact form below and I will email you nearer the time! Alternatively I have created a Facebook group for us all to share our posts when the time comes, so feel free to join that.

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