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Saturday, 15 October 2011

Great British bake off and the technical challenges

Love it or not bothered about it the Great british bake off has a lot of people talking, baking and blogging!   I personally have found it fab and really enjoy trying out some of the technical challenges.  It's not always possible to fit some of these tricky bakes into a busy family life.   They can be quite time consuming and things I wouldn't normally bother with, but the programme has the effect of encouraging you to indulge yourself and find the time to take on the challenges.

I've successfully made lemon tart before and also the odd Focaccia ..... but I can see from GBBO that the Foccaia in particular could be so much nicer and so will try that again.    So thats another reason I like the programme, us amateurs love to try something new,  but we also like to try and do it better.  We don't mind if it doesn't turn out exactly as the professionals say it should, but we've tried, are always appreciated for our effort and highly praised on the occasion it all goes to plan.

Here are a few of my technical challenges

The first one I tried was battenburg.  I didn't use the recipe from the show but  from Mary Berry's book




Next I tried macaroons - This effort, I am sad to say was a complete disaster.   My daughter was very taken by the very pretty ones made by all the contestants and so had been particuarly keen for me to try this.  We scrapped them off the baking parchment, filled them with cream and they tasted delicious,



I'm not sure what I did wrong but that recipe is on the back burner for another day.  

I then tried Iced buns .....OMG, they were so delicious and are definately on the family favourites list.  


Next I tried Sachertorte 


The cake and it's shape were the business but the icing didn't quite come right.  Since watching Mary's masterclass ... perhaps it was overheated.  I also made the mistake of using cooking 70% dark chocolate, which made the icing a wee bit bitter .... thats important because otherwise my chief cake eaters leave it all to me and thats not good!

Going to try Pork pies tomorrow, so watch this space.






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