Public Service Announcement

This is just a public service announcement to remind all my subscribers that tomorrow (March 14) is Pi Day! Please remember to eat some pie and do some fun math!

Jessica

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Passion Fruit and Mango Opera Cake

Good afternoon! I had a lot of fun with this bake. It looks difficult to get right on the show (because it is), but the results can be fantastic. This past weekend, I baked/created/sculpted the French opera cake. Traditionally, an opera cake is made with thin layers of coffee syrup-soaked jaconde sponge, coffee buttercream, and chocolate ganache. A la Great British Bake Off , I mixed it up a bit. I had a lot of fun going for mango syrup to soak my sponges with, passion fruit buttercream, and white chocolate ganache... and I added two layers of mango jelly into the cake. Creating the cake and all its elements was not tricky; the assembly and sculpting was the difficult part. For the ease of assembly, I tried to make all possible elements in the same 8" x 8" brownie pan. This made for a slightly smaller cake than those seen on the show, but it enabled me to have ample control over the end result (without too much cutting). When I tried to bake the sponge in a standard j...

Mary Berry's Frosted Walnut Layer Cake Technical Challenge

A few weeks ago, I made Mary Berry's walnut cake. This cake was the technical challenge from Series 6, Episode 1 of The Great British Bake Off. The cake itself isn't tricky. It was my first time making caramel, but even that went surprisingly smoothly. The trickiest part was the boiled icing. I wasn't satisfied with my first attempt, so I ended up doing it twice. I also learned a little bit about food storage and sugarwork. The cake was positively simple. Of course it is important to start off by properly lining one's baking pans. I always line mine with carefully-cut parchment paper and rub the sides with butter. The batter was fairly straightforward. The wet ingredients and the dry ingredients need to be mixed separately, and then the dry ingredients must be folded into the wet carefully, so as not to lose volume. One of the aspects of the batter with which many of the show's contestants had difficulty was chopping the walnuts to the appropriate size. If the waln...

Lemon, Lime, and Chamomile Madeira Cake

I know I promised I would make an opera cake next, but grocery limitations prevented my plans. I am giving Vincent the benefit of the doubt... I am sure the store just didn't have any passionfruit (the alternative being that he just didn't see it). The opera cake will be forthcoming whenever I can find passionfruit. Instead, I made a Madeira cake yesterday! The Madeira cake was the signature bake for series 6, episode one. Madeira cake, named after Madeira wine rather than the island itself, is apparently a British classic. That said, I have never had it, nor have I seen it served while I was living in England. I suppose the Victoria sponge and lemon drizzle are just more classic. Therefore, I had to do some research before starting this bake, and had to hope I was doing things correctly. The Great British Bake Off described a traditional Madeira cake as being flavored with lemon, so I was expecting it to be a non-drizzly variation of a lemon drizzle cake. Surprisingly t...

Jessica's Bake Off Challenge

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