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.

GBBO 2015: Week 3 Bread - Banana Bread

I have been intending to make bread for absolute months, and now I actually have no choice but to make it! I decided to go with the signature bake of this weeks GBBO; quick breads. I had to google what these were, and found a list of examples of quick breads - and praise the gods, Banana Bread was on the list! I absolutely adore banana bread. Normally the things I bake take at least four days to get eaten by everyone in my house, but when I made this, it was gone in less than 24 hours - mostly into my mouth. This is just so easy to make and it is going to be a permanent feature in my kitchen from now on. I used Mary Berry's Banana Loaf recipe to make this.

Ingredients:

100g butter

175g Caster sugar

225g Self-raising flour

2 eggs

2 bananas

1tsp baking powder

1tbsp milk

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius (fan oven) and then grease the loaf tin and line it with greaseproof paper. The bananas need to be mashed up with a fork until it is practically a liquid.

This recipe really is simple. Weigh out all of the ingredients and add them into a mixing bowl. 

Then simply mix them all together. 

And it's done! Ready to go into the oven. Let it bake for an hour. 

And voila! Heaven on a plate.

GBBO 2015: Week 2 Biscuits - Biscotti

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Week 2 of the GBBO made me nervous as I am not great at making biscuits. I have only had one successful previous attempt at making biscuits as often I make them too thick or thin or I over work the dough. But then when I read that it was biscotti I thought well that's different, it might turn out quite well. I have never made or eaten biscotti before, and honestly I couldn't think what it looked until I went to Costa for lunch and saw they were selling little packets of biscotti.
I chose to use a recipe by GBBO host Paul Hollywood as I thought this would surely mean that my bake would succeed. You can find the recipe here. He has the recipe for three types of biscotti and I chose to make the chocolate, almond and orange flavoured biscotti.

Ingredients:

280g Plain flour

250g Caster sugar

3 eggs

1/2tsp baking powder

1/2tsp vanilla extract

50g dark chocolate

50g chocolate chips

100g blanched almonds* 

zest of 1 orange

*One difference I made to Paul Hollywood's recipe was the blanched almonds; his recipe states 135g blanched almonds, I only bought one packet of 100g so that it how much I used, which I found was plenty once chopped up.

First off, the usual preparations of oven preheating at 140 degrees Celcius and placing some greaseproof paper on a baking tray - I put a smidge of butter in the corners of the tray to stick the paper down.

Mix the flour, sugar and baking powder in a mixing bowl.

Then in a second bowl, beat three eggs together. The recipe said I won't need all of the egg, but I definitely needed more than two.

This was the easy part, and here endeth the easy part. The mixture then became really difficult to mix and did not look like a dough to me. The recipe said that it should not be sticky at all, and well, it stuck my fingers together and to the mixture and to everything else in the vicinity. Cutlery was lost to it. It was like trying to climb out of quicksand.

Anyway, after a brief cry as I thought my mixture had gone wrong, I decided to just carry on with it. So now it was time for the flavourings. First I added the vanilla essence as this was the ingredient which required the least preparation. I then chopped up the blanched almonds into halves or thirds, melted the dark chocolate over a pan of boiling water, weighed out the chocolate chips and grated the orange as only the zest was needed. 

I then added the ingredients to the mixture and mixed it by hand. The mixture was too difficult to use a spoon to mix it and although my hands got very stuck together and I forgot what my hands actually looked like, it actually all looked a lot better when it was mixed together. 

I scraped the mixture out of the bowl and onto the sideboard, which I had floured. Then I cut the dough into two (roughly) equal pieces. 

The recipe said to roll the dough into 'a long log, about 4cm in diameter'. I do not know how long 4cm is, especially on uneven dough which had already made me cry twice by this point. So I roughly rolled the dough into two long blobs. 

And finally into the oven for 30 minutes. 

After 30 minutes, I took the tray out of the oven and let it cool for 10 minutes. Then, I cut the logs into diagonal strips and turned them onto their flat sides. This was when it finally was looking like biscotti - or what I think biscotti looks like. 

Then, back into the oven for another 35 minutes. 

Ta da! The finished product looks a lot better than I thought it would, and I think it actually looks quite fancy and pretty. And tastes crunchy and chocolatey which is good! 

GBBO 2015: Week1 Cakes - Black Forest Gateaux

For the first week of GBBO I decided to make two of the bakes because why make things easy for myself? I have never made this cake before, or even considered making it before, and it had more elements to it than I usually try to do for a cake so I knew it was going to be a challenge for me - which is the whole point of this! 

I searched for a recipe online and a lot of recipes varied quite a bit with ingredients and quantities, so in the end I settled on a recipe from a reliable recipe website - bbcgoodfood.com

Ingredients:

300g plain flour

175g butter

375g golden caster sugar

2 eggs

25g cocoa

200g dark chocolate

200g natural yoghurt

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

100g Morello cherry jam

500ml double cream

3tbsp icing sugar

425g tin of pitted cherries

1 punnet of fresh cherries (optional)

I should firstly mention that I did not use kirsch in this recipe as I don't like to use alcohol in baking - just a personal preference! I replaced the kirsch with the juice from the tin of cherries. 

So first is the usual preparations; preheat the fan oven to 160 degrees Celsius, and grease and line with greaseproof paper three round 20cm cake tins.

To make the cake batter firstly combine the flour, sugar, cocoa and bicarbonate of soda in a mixing bowl.

In a separate mixing bowl place the eggs and yoghurt and whisk them together.

Then add this to the first mixing bowl with the other ingredients in.

Take the butter and 75g of the dark chocolate and place them into a pan on a low heat, then stir until melted.

Add this to the mixing bowl of ingredients. Add 100ml of boiling water to the bowl.

Whisk!

Divide the mixture equally between the three cake tins - this is actually way more difficult than it sounds. Pop the tins in the oven and bake for 25 minutes. Time for a sit down after all that.

Time for the cakes to come out of the oven to be dressed. I think this is where I went a tad wrong. When the cakes come out the oven, THEN pour over them some of the liquid from the tinned cherries and let them cool. I made the error of letting them cool and then putting a few tablespoons of the liquid onto each layer of cake. This made the cake too moist and you will see the result of this further down the page.

Take the tin of cherries, drain them, and mix the cherries with the jam.

Measure 200ml of the cream and put this into a pan over a low heat. Leave on the heat long enough for the cream to get hot but not boil or burn. Then pour the hot cream over the remainder of the chocolate and stir it until the chocolate is melted and it mixture resembles Nutella.

Whisk together the icing sugar and the rest of the cream (300ml) until it looks good and creamy.

Time to assemble everything! A layer of cake first, then half of the cream and then half of the jammy cherries on top of that. Repeat. Then when the third layer of cake has been stacked, get the bowl of Nutella-looking chocolate and spread that all over the top. I finished it with a few fresh cherries on top as I thought this would make it look fancy and pretty. I don't really recommend this step though as cherries are more expensive than gold it turns out and they don't even get eaten as people take them off the top to eat the cake.

The final product turned out fairly well considering I have never made or even eaten this cake before. I did have a problem with the cake layers though; the liquid from the tin of cherries made them too moist and they had stuck a little to the cake tins so were quite uneven to start with. When the cake was finished it looked good - if not very messy, but then slowly as the minutes passed a crack formed down the middle of the cake on the top layer. Ten minutes later the crack had turned into the Grand Canyon of cakes.