CHURROS

Week 4=batter week.

I've made pancakes countless times before, and as it wasn't a Sunday I didn't see the point in making Yorkshire Puds, so I decided to try the signature bake of the week, Churros.

I have never attempted anything like this before so this was an exciting time to be alive.
I was babysitting and thought it would be a fun activity for me and Hannah to do that evening. We ended up making churros for hourssss and didn't go to bed until so late!
This was such a fun bake and we are definitely going to make this again and again. It was so easy, even if it did take a ridiculous amount of time.

First step was to make the batter. This is done in a saucepan and it is the first time I've made a choux pastry. All you do is put the sugar, butter, salt and water into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Then tip in the flour and mix until combined. It needs to cool down before you add the eggs so they don't cook in the mixture.
Not as difficult as I thought it would be!

We used this recipe from the Bake Off, but the churros really don't need a filling or a sauce. They are sweet enough just rolled in sugar and don't need the added extras. 

We set up the fryer and piped the churros mix straight into the oil.

We fried them for two minutes on each side, although they could have done with maybe 30 seconds longer. The more batter you add to the oil, the more the temperature decreases, so that has to be taken into consideration when thinking about the cooking times.

Once they had cooked, they were taken out of the oil and put onto a piece of kitchen roll to soak up the excess oil. Then we rolled them in sugar and ate them pretty much straight away.

We took over the entire work surface, we had quite the production line going on.

We ended up making so many and it took such a long time because you could only fry a maximum of three at a time.

This was the amount left over at the end of frying them, even with four of us eating them as we went!

They weren't exactly the neatest things in the world and I understand why the bakers on GBBO piped the churros onto baking paper before frying them, but we went for the authentic method of piping them straight into the oil and having a bit of fun with it.

We sustained two burns during the process so please be careful if you try this! Worth it though, look at those churros.

They are 100% better when they are freshly made, the next day they weren't quite the same as the sugar had gone a but funny and they were warm. Still good, but better fresh.

Definitely one to make when there is a large group of you, otherwise there are just too many to eat!

I was worried about this bake to begin with but it was so much fun and so delicious. Just don't think about how bad for you all the oil is and it's great!

Becca xo

Do I Bakewell?

Damn it, yes I do!

The Bakewell Tart was the technical challenge of pastry week and I don't know what all the fuss was about. I aced it.

It was a bake of firsts for me; the first time I've made jam, the first time I've made pastry, the first time I've really baked for a group of people who aren't my family.

Mum had a group of her friends round and they were my guinea pigs for the evening. They can come again because they said lovely things about my Bakewell Tart.

I say that I don't know why they got so stressed on GBBO, but I didn't do it on a time limit. I took 4 days.

I decided to do it all in stages after work every night.

Night 1: Jam

I've never made jam before, so I was quite excited about the whole thing. I bought a thermometer and everything, I felt very professional. However, I must have kept the first batch on the heat for too long because it ended up being really solid once it had cooled and was not spreadable in the slightest. It was really tasty, but not really okay for this bake. So I tried again and this time was much more successful.

Night 2: Jam attempt 2

I am a jam expert now.

Although next time I will sieve the jam to get rid of seeds and lumps etc.

Night 3: Pastry

I have never made pastry before. Like jam, it's something people don't need to make as it's so much easier to get the pre-made stuff from the shops. But I'm dedicated to this blog and made it from scratch. It wasn't as daunting as I thought and it gave me an opportunity to use my personalised rolling pin (don't ask...).

I had a few issues trying to get the rolled out pastry off of the worktop and into the tin, but I did it and patched up any holes with the excess pastry. 

I had to buy baking beans and everything for this bake. They worked a treat and I think my pastry case was good enough to rival any shop bought case.

Night 4: Filling

The filling was made of butter, sugar, ground almonds, an egg and almond extract. Mixed it all together and popped it in the pastry case I made the night before. Cooked on gas mark 4 until golden then I had to wait for it to cool! 

It seemed to take F O R E V E R to cool down. I ended up putting it in the fridge because I was getting so impatient.

The only thing left to do now was to ice the tart.

I made standard icing using icing sugar and water and a teaspoon of almond extract, but separated three tablespoons of the icing and used the red food colouring I had left over from my rainbow cake to make it pink. 

I put a layer of white icing all over the top, then piped the pink icing in straight lines. Then I used a cocktail stick to drag a line through the icing to create a feathered effect.

I hadn't let the tart cool completely and it was still a bit warm when I iced it, so the icing started to set before I had created the feathered effect. As you can see on the left side of the tart, the icing cracked as I dragged the cocktail stick through and it was a bit unsightly.

BUT OH WELL!

I was very proud of this bake, even if it didn't look very professional.

I'd made jam AND pastry, and they both turned out very well indeed.

LOOK AT THOSE LAYERS!!!

And no soggy bottom!

Looks just like the picture, right?!

Now I've bought baking beans and a new cake tin I reckon I need to make more tarts!

Becca xo

Recipe can be found here if you fancy a go

Bread Success!

Don't worry, bread is not going to be the end of my Bake Off dream (the move to Channel 4 might be though...)

Look at that loaf!!

As suspected, it was the yeast that was the problem. This dough didn't stop rising, it became too big for the bowl!

This photo was take only a few hours into the proving time, and it was already massive. 

I'm not sure why there are so many holes in there, but it looked like that in the book, so not to worry. 

This time it looks a little more like the photo!

This bread success has given me the confidence I needed to try making different kinds of bread, next to try is one of the chocolate ones that they made during bread week.

Wish me luck,

Becca xo

Honey Loaf

Cast your mind back to my bread failure post and you'll remember I spoke of a delicious cake that lifted my spirits after the mess I made of my bread.

It's not really a looker and isn't very easy on the eye, but it really does taste delicious, very warming and comforting. The perfect thing to eat at tea time and it was such an easy bake!

The book called it a 'melt and mix cake' and that's exactly what I did!

Melt 275g of clear honey, 225g of unsalted butter and 125g of light muscovado sugar together on a low heat until melted, let this cool and then mix it into 300g of self-raising flour, a pinch of salt and 2tsp of ground ginger, then add three beaten eggs and you're ready to bake!

I would suggest making sure that you have a loaf tin big enough. I assumed my tin had the required 900ml capacity, but it did not and the mixture filled the tin right to the top, almost overflowing! I decided to ignore this fact and forgot that the cake would rise. It overflowed and the mixture baked all down the side of the tin!

Next time I make this cake I will fill the loaf tin two thirds of the way and probably make cupcakes with the leftover mixture. More cake for me!

I cut off all the unsightly bits and flipped the cake so it looked like this:

The cake was then glazed. To make this, bring 3 tbsp of honey and 1 tbsp of water to the boil so it becomes syrupy, then stab the cake with a skewer and pour over the glaze. I guess this makes it a bit drizzle-y.

Icing the loaf came next. 50g cream cheese, 1 tbsp of honey, 165g icing sugar and a few drops of lemon juice were combined to make the most delicious icing. Dare I say it, I think I prefer this cream cheese icing to buttercream icing. It was sweet, but not sickly, and very light. It perfectly complimented the cake without overpowering the flavours. Divine.

Can you tell how in love with this cake I am?

And the best thing is it worked first time! Unlike my bread...

Not much to look at, I couldn't find a way to make this cake photograph well, but hopefully I've made it clear how god damn tasty this was. I want everyone to make this cake so they know where I'm coming from!

This is definitely going to be part of my repertoire now

Becca xo

Bread Failure

Looks like my Bake Off dreams have been dashed. I can't bake bread.

I knew I'd be rubbish at bread making, hence why I have put off making it for so long. But just how terrible, I didn't know. I had hoped that it would be a natural skill that I possessed, that I was the female Paul Hollywood and I didn't even know. 

Alas, I suck at bread making.

I thought I would start with a basic loaf before trying anything fancy or adding any other ingredients. Mum was bought the Bake Off recipe book for her Birthday, and in there was a basic boule recipe which looked easy enough.

I mixed together 450g strong white bread flour and 5g of dried yeast with 7g of sea salt and 350ml of cold water. It was a big sticky mess and would not wash off of my hands, but I went with it, hoping that after spending the night in the fridge it would become easier to handle and look more like dough.

WRONG. 

It was still sticky and gross and had hardly risen at all. The recipe then instructed me to knead the dough, but only for a very short period of time, which was a relief. Then I had to leave the dough covered again, this time just on the worktop, to rise again.

I got back to the dough two hours later and it still looked the same size. Frustrated, I put the dough in the airing cupboard, hoping the warmness would help it to rise. Two hours later and it still looked tiny, but I was bored of it so baked in anyway in an oven at gas mark 8 for 30-35 mins.

It looked disgusting.

The bottom looked a bit better, but not much. 

I let it cool and when I cut it open IT WAS RAW INSIDE.

Fuming.

I'd spent all this time waiting for the dough to be ready and I couldn't even eat the bread I'd made. Waaaaahhhh.

Can you tell which is my loaf and which is the picture in the book?

I think what had happened was that the yeast was out of date so didn't provide the rise I was after. The yeast I used said it went out of date in 2017, but when I asked my parents they said they had opened it last autumn, and the yeast only had a life of 4 months after being opened. So I blame the dodgy yeast for this failure. Dad got home and insisted I try again, this time with yeast that will actually work.

So now I need to let this dough rise overnight and I will come back tomorrow with the results! 

After this bread catastrophe I was feeling annoyed because I didn't have anything to eat. So I decided to return to cakes (I know I can bake these) and made the most delicious honey cake! You will see it in a post later this week, it doesn't look like much but its so yummy!

Think I might just make my life easier and buy a breadmaker...

Becca xo

Rainbow

I got halfway through writing this and it deleted itself aaaaagggghhhh.

I've already let this slide, I am rubbish haha but the cake I made last week was pretty incredible, if I do say so myself. 

I MADE A RAINBOW CAKE!

It took such a long time and used so many ingredients, but I reckon it was worth it.

Pretty damn good, am I right? 

This cake has 6 layers, buttercream in 4 colours and white chocolate and sprinkles on top. And it was delicious. 

It used a sickening amount of ingredients though. 750g of caster sugar, self-raising flour and butter went into this, along with 9 eggs. That's not including the extra butter I had to use for the icing...

First thing was to measure out 9 tbsp of milk and add 1.5 tsp of vanilla extract to this. Divide the milk into 6 bowls (1.5 tbsp for those wondering, and yes, I did have to use a calculator). Then add the colours to each bowl. I used colour gels but I had to use the entire tube to get a colour strong enough. In future I will use colour paste but I'd already bought these and wasn't prepared to make a trip to HobbyCraft to buy the pastes. 

To make the mixture, cream together 750g of butter and 750g of caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat together 9 eggs in a separate bowl and add them to the mixture a bit at a time. Then sift in 750g of self-raising flour and mix until combined. YOU NEED A MASSIVE BOWL. There is so much mixture that it almost overflowed and I used the biggest bowl we had.

Next you need to weigh the mixture and divide it into 6 bowls (as if anyone has 6 mixing bowls haha I just used any big bowls I could find). After separating you add the milk and put the mixtures into 6 cake tins.

This picture makes it look like I have 6 cake tins. I don't, I don't think anyone has that many. I just baked two at a time for 25-30 mins at 180/gas mark 4.

I then had to make a mountain of buttercream. 400g of butter mixed together with 900g of icing sugar, 6 tbsp of whole milk and a dash of vanilla extract. I feel a bit sick just writing that.

Make sure you let the cakes cool before icing, otherwise the buttercream will melt off of the cake and leave a big, gloopy mess. 

Once they had cooled down, the cakes needed to be trimmed so they were all the same size and all level.

Pop the cakes on top of one another with a layer of buttercream in between. 

Then you want to crumb coat the entire cake so that no crumbs end up in the icing of the finished cake.

At this point it was quite late at night so I went to bed. But I didn't have a tin big enough to house this colossal cake so I put a bag over it hoping that this would keep it nice hahah. 

Next morning I got the buttercream out of the fridge and separated it into 4 and coloured it blue, green, yellow and red.

Now for the ombre magic. I messily put the icing on in stripes like this:

Then using a scraper and my turntable I smoothed the icing until it looked like this:

Tadahhhh! 

Then I put it into the fridge to set (it was a really hot day when I made this so the icing was melting a bit!).

After about half an hour, I melted a bar of white chocolate (which was way too much) and poured it over the top of the cake and made it drip down the sides. I put sprinkles all over the top and it was ready!

We sung Happy Birthday to Mum and then we could finally eat it!

It looked soooo cool inside, the colours worked really well!

Although the back was a bit of a fail, too much chocolate ran down the back!

Overall I think this was a great success and went down well with everyone. 

This is definitely the most impressive cake I've ever made, but it was so much fun to make!

Becca xo

Lime and Coconut Drizzle Cake

WEEK 1

The first bake of the new series of the Great British Bake Off was a drizzle cake. This made me very excited; a lemon drizzle cake is one of my specialities and is one that I am always baking.

BUT, this project is all about trying new things and being more adventurous with my baking so I steered away from my brilliant lemon drizzle and decided upon a recipe I found by YouTuber Cupcake Jemma. I found this recipe months ago and have been wanting to try it out for a while. There will probably be a lot of bakes on here inspired by Jemma, she makes the most amazing cakes! I followed this video and made a Lime and Coconut Drizzle Cake.

It looks pretty good, right?! But it didn't exactly go as planned...

I bought all the ingredients, but realised I'd bought golden caster sugar instead of normal caster sugar, but thankfully this didn't make too much of a difference. Still, it annoyed me to no end haha.

This recipe used so many limes. SO MANY. You need the rind of four, but only the juice of one, so you'll have three limes left over without any rind. I think I need to find a recipe that just needs the juice of three limes...

I followed the recipe and put it in the oven to bake. It said it needed to be baked at gas mark 3 for 30-35 minutes. 

LIES!

After 35 minutes the cake was still wobbly and uncooked in the middle. I put it back in the oven for a further 15 mins and when it was still not completely cooked, I whacked the heat up to gas mark 5 for another 5 minutes. When I went back to check, it was looking a bit brown on top so I took it out, a skewer came out clean so I thought it was done.

WRONG!

When I came back after letting it cool for a bit I saw THIS:

How gross does this look? Mary and Paul would not be impressed, and I reckon at this point in the Bake Off tent I would have a full blown melt down.

Thankfully I was only in my kitchen and there was no camera crew, so after a few angry words at the cake, I calmed down and decided this would become the bottom.

Ta-dahh!

Good thinking Becca.

Then came the drizzling to turn the cake into a drizzle cake. I was slightly worried when the recipe called for coconut milk to be used, but it worked out very well and the syrup had a bit of a creamy taste to it which was lovely.

After a sprinkling of toasted coconut as decoration, my first bake was complete! 

  

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1190g self-raising flour
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 35g desiccated coconut
• Zest of 3 limes
• 200g unsalted butter
• 190g caster sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1.5 tbsp lime juice
• 50g caster sugar
• 90ml coconut milk
• Zest of 1 lime
• Toasted coconut flakes

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 170°C/gas mark 3 and grease a loaf tin, lining the bottom with greaseproof paper.
• Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl
• Add the desiccated coconut and lime zest, then set to one side.
• Cream together the butter and sugar until light and pale.
• Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each addition.
• Add the dry ingredients and fold in.
• Add the lime juice.
• Bake in the oven for 30-35 mins, or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
• To make the syrup, place the caster sugar, coconut milk and lime zest into a saucepan. Bring to the boil, then let simmer for 4-5 minutes until it reaches a syrupy consistency. Let it cool.
• Stab the cake with a skewer and pour the syrup on top. 
• Finish with coconut flakes as decoration.

I'm rather proud of my creation, considering it did have a big ugly hole in the bottom. It tasted really good as well which was a bonus!

Now to think about the next bake!

Becca xo

Would just like to reiterate, NOT MY RECIPE! All credit to Cupcake Jemma, got check her out, she's fab.