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...

Mint Chocolate Bagels Retry

Sorry for the long delay, everyone. I've been busy, and have not been focusing much on baking lately. To make up for it, I am posting three times over three days. I hope you enjoy! A couple of weeks ago, I bought some bread flour and remade the bagels from series 3, episode 2. I still need to tweak the goat cheese, sage, and browned butter bagels- the amount of goat cheese I tried in the last batch was not good for the bagels' structure- but the mint chocolate bagels turned out beautifully. Besides substituting bread flour in lieu of all purpose flour, I made a few further adjustments. I added chocolate chips into the bagels to add more chocolate flavor and a little more sweetness. I also made sure to add the fillings after the first prove, rather than before. Furthermore, I kneaded the dough for longer, and was more focused on getting it to the proper elasticity. The bagels certainly kept their shape and structure better with the changes. The only drawback is that the...

Jessica's Bake Off Challenge

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