Jessica's Bake Off 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...

Hello everyone! I'm sorry for the long delay since my last post. I was digging in Israel over the summer, and then was focused on doing some baking for a friend's wedding last week. I did do some extraneous baking over the summer, but unfortunately was a bit too lackadaisical to write down the recipes I developed for most of the bakes. This post and the next three or four will be dedicated to the various bakes I accomplished during the summer (and other miscellaneous tidbits), and then I shall be celebrating the new series of The Great British Bake Off ! Once I am back in the baking swing of things, I will be devoting my time to challenges from this new Series 10 of GBBO . I just finished watching the first episode of the new series, and have determined that I must accomplish one bake from each episode- AND post about it- before moving on to watch the next episode. As of right now, I am already drying some fruit to make a fruitcake a la Series 10, Episode 1's signature ba...

I admittedly made this bake a few weeks ago, when I had some leftover coconut milk from a savory recipe and a lot of leftover mango. I was really determined to find a Bake Off challenge with which I could use up my leftovers before they went bad. I found that Series 8, Episode 1's signature challenge was to make a fruity cake! Coconut, mango, and lemon are all fruits, so this cake idea quickly formed. I had a few issues with the construction of the cake (due to my own impatience), so it ended up only being two layers instead of the three I had planned. The recipe is for a three-layered cake, so keep in mind that the final result will be a little taller than seen in these pictures. I had some homemade lemon curd in my refrigerator, but store-bought will do just as well. Likewise, store-bought mango jam will work just as well as my homemade jam. The cake went over a storm at Vincent's office. One of Vincent's coworkers specifically loves lemon curd, so she really app...

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...

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...

Welcome back. I'm glad all four or so of you (so far) have made it to the second post. Last night, I tackled the hidden design cake showstopper challenge from series 3, episode 1. I know it hardly sounds like a big challenge, but I'm not that great at decorating. I really had to think about how to do this. There were a few ways to try this- use a thick batter to keep sections separate (risky), make separate cakes and cut and assemble once all are baked, or put cut cooked cake pieces within cake batter before baking again. I went with the third option. I know it sounds strange. I knew there would be a danger that the pre-cooked cake pieces hidden in the center could overcook when re-baked. Knowing this, I chose to modify a sponge cake which is extremely difficult to overcook. I actually tried baking this for the first time on Tuesday evening, but it didn't turn out quite as I had hoped. It wasn't bad- Vincent's coworkers ate all of it- but I knew I could improve...