Jessica's Bake Off Challenge

 A couple of weeks ago, I got it into my head to try entremets, the showstopper challenge from Series 5, Episode 9 of The Great British Bake Off . The challenge was to make 24 total entremets, 12 each of two different types. A visiting friend and I were going to make one type, and my friend Caitlin, two time zones away, was going to develop her own recipe for another type. We coordinated enough to make sure we wouldn’t have too-similar entremets, but each developed our own recipes.  The results were amusingly disastrous for all of us. Caitlin’s camping-inspired s’mores entremets, which she assures me were delicious, frankly looked like bulging piles of brown stuff.  My own orange, mango, and lychee entremets were thoroughly unappetizing and visually unappealing. The whipped cream broke in my mango mousse, and it ended up looking like mango-infused spit-up (I know; I have a mango-loving baby). Outside of the visuals ruining the experience, the mango overpowered the orange. I have since

Welcome back! This post and the next two posts will reflect challenges that I completed for Pi Day a month ago. Of course, Pi Day is my absolute favorite holiday of the year... And Vincent's and my anniversary. Yes, we did have wedding pie instead of cake. We usually have a Pi Day party every year. It didn't happen this year due to the pandemic. However, I did still manage to bake pies for a few local friends and neighbors. Today, I am sharing my experience baking Mary Berry's tarte au citron, the technical challenge from Series 2, Episode 2 of Great British Bake Off . Tarte au citron is just French for lemon tart. I absolutely love a good lemon tart, so I made this as one of the two pies for Vincent and me to keep. When I go back to a bake from one of the early series of GBBO , it is immediately evident that the show creators did not yet know how obscure or technically-difficult they could push the contestants. By my standards, this tarte au citron was incredibly simple. T

 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