Jessica's Bake Off Challenge

This apple cranberry pie is a double-crusted fruit pie, and thus satisfies the signature bake from The Great British Bake Off  Series 4, Episode 4. I made two of these pies for friends for Pi Day. Both seemed to enjoy the pie. It is not a particularly difficult pie to make, but can be slightly time-consuming between the preparation and the bake time. The first step is to prepare the crust. This is a slight variation to my standard shortcrust pastry- I add a tiny bit of sugar. The addition of vodka or rum helps the crust come out nicely flakey, since it adds liquid to help the dough roll nicely without activating gluten (which can make the crust leathery).  It is important to make sure the dough is cold before baking. Most recipes call for completely chilling the dough before rolling it out, but I personally find that it's extremely difficult to roll if it's too cold. I chill for about 15 minutes, roll it out, and then chill a further 20-30 minutes once in the pie dish. This pi...

Today I am going to share with you three of the random-ish bakes I did over the summer. All three were meant to fulfill Bake Off challenges... Except I didn't write down the recipes. Regardless, one was nearly a complete failure, and only one came out amazingly well. Therefore, it is no loss that I shall have to try to recreate them, and in one case, very much improve on it. I will try not to distress you too much, dear readers, so I will start with the bake in the middle of the pack... a white peach and raspberry pie. This bake was meant to fulfill the double-crusted fruit pie signature challenge from Series 4, Episode 4. I was very excited about this pie because I love white peaches. They are only available during summer months, so I went a little crazy with them for a while. For the double-crusted white peach raspberry pie, the fruit is mixed with white and brown sugar, a little lemon juice, some spices, and a little cornstarch as a thickening agent. The slits are cu...

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...