GBBO 2015: Week 6 Pastry - Raspberry and Almond Frangipane Tart

After the hideous free-from week last week which just went awfully for me, I was happy to see that sweet bakes were back. Pastry week was the one I was looking forward to the most as I have never made pastry and always intended to.
Making pastry was actually easier than I expected. I used this recipe to make 400g worth of pastry.

Ingredients:

200g plain flour 

100g butter

1 egg

pinch of salt

First combine the flour, salt and the butter in a mixing bowl using your hands until it resembles bread crumbs. Then add half of the egg in so that the mixture comes together. 

Wrap the pastry in cling film and put it in the fridge to chill for half an hour.

After half an hour, take the pastry out of the fridge and roll it out with a rolling pin. My tart tin is not the normal metal type with fluted sides, but a clay one with straight sides which is rather a difficult shape to work with as you can tell from the bodged sides of the pastry in the photos.

I put fork marks on the pastry as I think this is something that you do to pastry. I then placed greaseproof paper in it and some pasta shells on top to weigh it down and this went into a 200 degress celcius oven for fifteen minutes to blind bake. Then I took it out of the oven to remove the greaseproof paper and the pasta and put it back into the oven for another five minutes. 

Once the pastry was out of the oven I started to make the actual cake part of the tart. The frangipane tart I chose to make is a raspberry and almond one. I love frangipane so wasn't too fussed as to what flavour I made but my mom requested a raspberry one. I used this recipe.

Ingredients:

100g butter

100g caster sugar

100g ground almonds

2 eggs

10g plain flour

125g raspberries

1tsp almond extract

This recipe asked for 375g of pastry base but I went with 400g and I'm glad I did as I think any less and it wouldn't have covered the pan.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius - this kept changing as I was baking as my family were cooking dinner at the same time. 

First whisk together the butter and sugar and then add the eggs in one at a time.

Then add in the ground almonds, almond extract and flour.

Lastly, fold in the raspberries into the mixture.

Pour the mixture into the pastry case and put it into the oven for half an hour.

This was so delicious, it tastes like a bakewell tart as I think they are made from frangipane too. My pastry wasn't the best as it was perhaps too thin or had been in the oven too long, but I can improve on this next time I make pastry.

GBBO 2015: Week 5 Free From - Sugar Free Carrot Cake

This was tough. I have never made anything that is 'free-from' nor ever wanted to really. This carrot cake bake was actually my second attempt at this week's task. First I tried to bake a sugar free sponge cake, but this turned out awful. As in, the cakes came out of the oven closely resembling frisbees as well as tasting god awful. So they went in the bin and I searched for a new recipe to try. This second attempt was more successful than the first, but not by much.
For the sugar free sponge cake I used this recipe, and it produced this;

So this went into the bin where it belonged and I found a new recipe to try. I tried to find a recipe which used ingredients that I already had in the kitchen, as baking a new recipe every week is pretty pricey.
I found this recipe for a sugar free carrot cake on a bbc website, hoping that being from a bbc website it would mean my cake would work.

Ingredients:

225g plain flour

4 eggs

175g grated carrot

4tbsp honey

200ml sunflower oil

2tsp baking powder

1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tsp vanilla essence

pinch of salt

First preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius so it can heat up while making the cake batter. In a mixing bowl whisk together the eggs, sunflower oil and honey.

Once this is mixed, add in the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and vanilla essence. Also, grate the carrots and add this into the bowl too. I was confused here as I didn't know if it meant 175g of carrot, then grate or 175g of grated carrot - and yes these actually were two different things I found. I chose to go with 175g of grated carrot.

With all the ingredients in the bowl, stir them all together.

Then, pour this mixture into a cake tin. 

This then needs to go into the oven for an hour the recipe said. My cake was in the oven for longer - perhaps the oven temp is different for a fan oven I don't know - but the inside was still uncooked even as the top of the cake was becoming very dark in colour. 

The recipe I found came with a recipe for the frosting, but as it's main component was icing sugar and I wasn't sure if this was allowed, I altered the recipe slightly. Instead of the icing sugar I just added a ton more cream cheese than stated and added more butter, but I kept to only using 1tsp of vanilla essence. So the frosting you see here is mainly cream cheese. I was trying to drown the cake in frosting so it would taste better.

I won't lie to you, this tasted awful. I don't think it was even the fact that it had no sugar, it was the fact that I had clearly gone wrong somewhere in the recipe. You can tell from the dark colour  and lack of rise of the cake that something is wrong with it. Needless to say, I won't be putting vegetables in my cakes again any time soon. This whole baking week was not a success. Let's hope next week will be better.