iguana | Great British Bake Off "Bake-Along" 2014

Over the last two-and-a-half months we have been using the time between me finishing work at 17:30 and the Great British Bake Off starting at 20:00 (and sometimes my lunchbreak too, and sometimes Emily has been doing prep during the afternoon) to make a recipe of our choice on the same theme as the evening's episode. Then we would sit down to watch the show, tasties in hand, and see if we'd made anything that happened to be on the show!

So this post is mostly photos! (And the links to the recipes.)

Nom, nom, and nom

Cake

We made Chai tea cake with honey and ginger icing (adding half again the number of spices in the cake and fiddling with the icing a bit to use less honey and sugar).

We had some coloured fondant icing leftover from a previous cake, so Emily made a nice ginger plant to finish off the icing.

This was one of my favourite bakes for the taste, although being someone who doesn't tend to drink caffeinated drinks, I did find that it kept me awake at night!

Biscuits

I've always wanted to make a model out of gingerbread and this week presented the perfect opportunity!

The gingerbread recipe I chose wasn't particularly tasty (a better one is here) but I found it made quite solid biscuits, which was what I was after.

Two and-a-half hours to make dough, cut out pieces, bake them (I did it in two batches in case the cylindrical tank didn't work) and assemble and decorate (while waiting for icing to dry stiff) was very tight, but I just about finished in time for the start of the programme.

It was a bit wobbly and the tank melted a bit in the oven before solidifying, so the far side looked rather less good, but overall I was very happy with how it turned out!

The "glue" was some leftover frosting from the ginger cake, which dried solid in the fridge.

Emily was at her mum's this week so she made something else: peanut butter chocolate sandwich cookies, which were also really good.

Bread

We made rosemary and sea salt focaccia using a recipe from Emily's copy of Truly Italian and served it with a salad and some rather nice soft cheese (capricorn, a goats cheese suggested by the counter guy at Waitrose).

It was a little bit salty (which is probably why it didn't rise as much as we wanted) but was still very nice.

Desserts

We made lemon soufflés and they rose and they were awesome!

Pies and tartes

Emily wanted to make a tarte tatin but I remember finding them overly sweet, so when we found a recipe for savoury tomato tarte tatin we decided to give it a go. I'm glad we did because it was one of the best things I've ever tasted.

We made the puff pastry ourselves, before that evening if I recall correctly. It puffed, so we can tick that one off the list and go back to shop-bought pastry now!

We also made some lemon shortcrust pastry and some creme patisserie, so we had something to do while the tarte tatin was cooking. We turned those into fruit tartes.

European cakes

Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (black forest gâteau) was the obvious choice for us both (especially after having failed to find any to when we visited Berlin a while ago!). Emily had to visit a small speciality shop called The German Deli near Borough Market to find the Schattenmorellen (sour morello cherries in sugar syrup) but it was worth the trip because although it was a big faff to make, it was absolutely gorgeous. (We skipped the pastry base, which had no effect on the structural integrity.)

Definitely hoping to make this one again!

Pastries

I decided to make something I'd never heard of before and, looking through Wikipedia's list of pastries, bourekas both fit that bill and sounded tasty as well.

Emily was away again this week so I opted for a traditional moroccan meat filling. I didn't have a lot of time this week but fortunately we had puff pastry left over in the freezer from the tarte tatin, so I used that.

My main problem with doing something I'd never heard of was that I had no idea how big the parcels were supposed to be! I think I made them too big in the end, and my crimping was so bad that they came apart in the oven, but apart from that they turned out well! They tasted good, at least.

Emily and her mum totally outclassed me with the apple strudel they made this week. The pastry was stretched thin enough to take up the whole kitchen table, and she described the finished product as being a big as an aeroplane neck pillow. It sounded delicious! They also made samosas (filling recipe).

Advanced dough

Having pre-empted the programme with strudel last week (I will give it a some other time, probably when I actually have a kitchen table myself...) we decided to go a bit simpler and try choux pastry.

We turned it into profiteroles and éclairs, and I decided to try adding passion fruit to some of the éclairs' filling. In the end, I preferred the unadulterated chantilly cream variety. The profiteroles in chocolate sauce also tasted very good (although I ate too many of them and felt ill afterwards... oops)

Pâtisserie

Having been caked out over the last few weeks, Emily took the lead on this one and decided to do a take on opera cake - specifically a filbert gateau with dulche de leche buttercream and our own dark chocolate ganache.

It did the job of getting me back into cake. This one was also contender for best tasting cake.

We tried to make white chocolate butterflies by drizzling melted chocolate onto a folded sheet of greaseproof paper held in an open book. Mine didn't look so great but Emily's turned out really well.

A++++++ would make again.

Final

I decided I wanted to make the nice chocolate cake recipe that my mum always made for my birthday when I was young. She would always decorate it with fondant icing, but I had seen some different ideas in a Google Image Search and decided to try something completely different...

As I said on Twitter, "I think it's a chocolate cake. I'm a little scared of it."

Emily, at her mum's, made beetroot chocolate brownies, zebra cake, and chai snickerdoodles. She brought some of each home with her and my favourite was the beetroot chocolate brownies which were delicious, especially warmed up.

Extra-curricular baking

Following the bourekas I learned how to crimp properly by making calzone!