So it's the first week off the Great British Bake Off and I've crazily decided to bake everything that the contestants are faced with. I'm not baking along in time, because frankly I don't have the time, but I'm determined to tackle everything and I shall write about one of my bakes for each week of challenges.
First up is cake. As a totally novice baker, I'm glad they started with a simple madeira cake, as I managed this OK. It's got a nice crack (!) and it tasted pretty yummy too.
The technical challenge is walnut cake with a fancy boiled icing. The contestants all made edible versions of this, so I'm hoping it's not a disaster waiting to happen. Getting my ingredients ready I crack on with the sponge mix, adding the chopped walnuts to my dry ingredients. I'm lazy and don't sift the flour, which will probably haunt me when my cake is too dense. I'm still very much getting used to the necessity of precision in timing, quantity and technique to create a decent baked good. As a love of slapdash inventive cooking, I rarely care for specifics of recipes and tend to make it up as I go along. For a good fish pie, pasta dish or homemade curry this tends to work fine, and is something I've been doing for many years. The science of baking, however, is much newer to me, and the more I question where my bakes are going wrong, the more I appreciate the reasons for such controlled steps. Baking is science, guys, and science is cool.
I will get a fancy kitchen mixer soon. I think it's time to admit that I'm becoming quite keen on baking, and whilst it's a good workout to always cream my butter / sugar mixes by hand, I'm coming to the point where I'm craving efficiency over traditional methods.
Despite the lack of superpowered mixing assistance, I'm still able to create a fairly light and fluffy mixture, to which I add 4 eggs for moisture and to bind the mixture together.
I tip in my dry ingredients and fold in with a metal spoon as per the instructions. I have a tendency to overmix my ingredients and remove all the air, so I try to restrain myself and leave one or two tiny pockets of flour in the hope that my cakes will rise beautifully and not resemble pancakes for once.
I split the mixture between 3 pans and bake for a little less time than instructed. I've learnt that the oven in my new house cooks faster than expected, so I'm finding myself reducing either the temperature or the cooking time for most things. I'm still discovering which is more effective, but the cakes this time look pretty good - they are golden and springy to touch and there's a lovely nutty aroma filling the kitchen.
The next step in the recipe is to make the caramelised walnuts, which quite a few of the contestants struggled with. It seems that there is very little water to dissolve the sugar, and in their keenness to avoid stirring the hot sugar syrup and crystalising the mixture, a few were left with hot sugar rather than any kind of caramel. With this in mind, I add the water to the sugar and stir it together to make a kind of sugar paste which I put on a low heat. As a fan of multitasking, I throw some butter and sugar in a bowl to move onto the next step, the buttercream filling.
Luckily, buttercream is something that's pretty tricky to get wrong, in my humble opinion. Mixed once again with a wooden spoon, it's ready in no time to sandwich the sponge layers together with creamy vanilla deliciousness.
Keeping an eye on my sugar, I wait until it is bubbling and browned before carefully adding the 10 walnuts and swirling around to coat in the hot mixture, before tipping onto greaseproof paper to cool. The recipe calls for a silicone sheet which I don't have. Later, as I am carefully peeling / washing off the slightly torn baking parchment from my beautiful caramel walnuts, I realise why silicone would have been a better idea. A lesson for next time and another baking related item added to my shopping list.
Last up is the boiled icing, which we discovered on the show tends to go grainy if the sugar is not first dissolved in water before mixing with the egg whites. I'm heating that sugar for what seems like forever over a pan of water before I give up and start whisking. I've got quite a creamy, white and glossy mixture that's only a tiny bit grainy so I soldier on and hope for the best. Now, the recipe states that the mixture should be whisked over a pan of hot water, and that one needs to work quickly to decorate the cake before the icing sets. Hindsight being a wonderful thing, I would do basically the opposite were I ever to attempt a boiled icing again. By whisking the mixture over hot water, this means it's still very warm when I come to add it to my cake, and the whole thing starts sliding off and dripping onto the counter. The small amount of icing I leave in the bowl seems to be less runny after a few minutes before it has cooled fully, and probably would have coated the cake better. I can tell that it's still going to be grainy, and I don't get to add any swirls as the recipe instructs because it's still so warm! Maybe it needed more mixing, maybe if I had more patience and had actually waited for the sugar to dissolve properly I would have had more success, who knows. All I know is that boiled icing is added to my list of baking dislikes, and isn't going to become my signature any time soon.
I add the caramelised walnuts and even a little sugarwork I sort of twisted into something resembling a decoration. Forgetting to leave the cake to cool means that the caramel started to melt a little, discolouring the icing overnight. This is why this cake is a technical challenge. There are technical elements, that I haven't quite mastered yet.
There are definite "lairs" in my cake, the walnuts are pretty well distributed, I've managed to decorate with the walnuts and the taste is fine. The sponge is a little dry and there's that infamous graininess to the icing, but overall I hope I wouldn't have come last for my first technical. I did have the full recipe and the experiences of the bakers to go by though, so perhaps a significant advantage.
Next up, I baked a black forest gateaux. With less silly technical elements, this one went pretty well. Here's a picture below.
Week 2 is biscuits, and it's only going to get tougher from here on in!
Walnut cake recipe here.
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