It’s week 9 of my GBBO Challenge, the semi-final! It was Pâtisserie week! I was originally planning to make macarons, a pâtisserie staple, but after seeing them make entremets on the show I knew I had to up my game and have a go at them, so I made blackberry and elderflower entremets!
These yummy jam donuts are week 8 of my GBBO challenge, the theme being advanced dough. It was also the quarter final and the week my favourite contestant left the tent!
I’m going to give you an insight into my brain – it was 1:30am and I couldn’t sleep and was feeling very antsy, so what do I do? Read a book? Watch some television? Nope! I got up and made some donut dough! It seemed to do the trick at least. Normally you would leave this dough to rise in a warm place for an hour or so, but since I wasn’t about to stay up all night making donuts (I may be crazy, but I’m not that crazy!) I left mine to do it’s first rise in the fridge overnight. Having it rise in the fridge slowed down the yeast so it didn’t over prove. The second rise, or actual proving, I did at room temperature and it left me with a perfect donut.
Wow, what a day today has been! It’s my day off so I had plans to be pretty lazy and also make some mini poptarts. The lazy part of the plan didn’t work out too well when the dishwasher decided to break and flood my kitchen! So I have spent most of the day trying to fix the dishwasher (and failing), cleaning up the the floods and hand washing everything that was in the dishwasher! I did make the mini poptarts too though and they’re adorable (don’t worry, I’ll be sharing those with you ASAP!). I’m going to spend the rest of the evening watching New Girl and eating pasta!
When a day doesn’t go to plan it can really throw you off, so I decided to cheer myself up by sharing something with you all that went better than planned – this amazing plum and ginger upside down cake! I got this idea from a client at work, she told me about a plum and ginger upside down cake that she makes and it just sounded divine to me, I had to make my own!
I’ve never made an upside down cake before, I’ve always associated them with pineapple and I’m allergic to pineapple so it’s never an idea that’s been at the front of my mind. I’m glad I started with this cake though. The combination of the buttermilk, sour cream, and syrupy goodness make this cake so moist it should be illegal! Yet it still holds its shape well, slides out of the pan with zero effort and isn’t mushy.
If you’re a baker, you’ll understand the importance of greasing your pans properly so your cakes and the like all release from the pan effortlessly, no fuss no muss! I’m sure we’ve all tried it all – butter, flour, oil, baking sprays, cake release, the list goes on. But if you haven’t tried goop before, I’m about to change your life!
Life changing is a big promise I know, but I’m not overstating things here! I think it’s important right off the bat to say I do not take a single ounce of credit for this wonderful invention – I don’t think anybody knows who was the first to come up with this wonderful stuff, I think it’s probably as old as baking itself! But despite the fact it’s an age old recipe, it’s ridiculously cheap and easy to make and it’s the most effective pan release out there – there’s still so many people who don’t use it or know about it!
It’s time for European Cakes week of my GBBO challenge! Yay! And I made this fig and orange kugelhopf! A kugelhopf, or gugelhupf, is a yeast leavened cake usually filled with soaked dried fruit such as raisins or dates. I think it is Austrian, but also native to Germany and Hungary and it’s what inspired the American favourite – the bundt cake! I know what you’re probably thinking – but Michelle, why is the Great British Bake Off doing a European Cakes week? Isn’t that a bit redundant considering Britain is in Europe? Well, maybe. But one thing you should probably know about us Brits is we don’t really consider ourselves real Europe (I think some Brits like to think of us as our own continent sometimes!). Taking a day trip to France? You’re not just going to a neighbouring country, you’re going to “the continent” – it’s like we’re a little village on the outside of a big city! So when you hear Brits talking about “Europe” we most likely mean any European country that isn’t part of our Islands!
This cake was a bit of a challenge for me! This is my first time using yeast to leaven a cake and let me tell you, it’s made me appreciate baking powder a lot more! But this is the way they used to make cakes rise before such wonderful things like baking powder were invented, and Europe sure does love it’s traditions! My first attempt was a big failure, my dough just didn’t rise at all – I baked it anyway though to test the flavours and I ended up with a very dense, malt loaf kind of texture. The flavours were great though so at least I knew I had that part sussed. My mum, however, loved it and she ate almost the whole thing! Which was a little weird, but at least it didn’t go to waste! For my second attempt I tackled it from a different, more cake like way as the first time I treated it like a bread dough and mixed the ingredients as such. And it came out great!
As you might imagine, this cake has more of a fruit bread texture than a cake texture, but it is very light. It’s great eaten warm, fresh from the oven and would be yummy with afternoon tea. It’s also wonderful toasted and eaten for breakfast, it would be amazing with my cinnamon honey butter generously spread on it. This kugelhopf is stuffed full of orange zest and dried figs, the dried figs were soaked in orange juice and spiced rum overnight. I then saved the liquid from that to make a honeyed syrup that I cooked fresh figs and orange segments in to decorate the top, and poured the syrup over the warm cake. There were so many warm, yummy flavours coming from this cake – it’s a definite winner. It’s a bit of long winded process to make this cake but I think it’s worth it, you can however speed up the process a little and I’ll explain how in the notes after the recipe.
