Angel Food Cake

Along with most of the country, I've been very excited by the arrival of the Great British Bake Off 2013 back on our screens. I've decided to try my hand at the technical challenges so each week I'll be searching out the recipes and giving them ago if at all practical. Week 1 we saw the cake week, this series the technical bake was Mary Berry's Angel Food Cake. One of my friends helpfully emailed me the recipe for this while I was waiting for it to go online. Thank you. You can now find the recipe here. 

This cake is different because it has no fat. Most of the structure comes from egg whites which have been well whisked and hold all of the air. I used my mixer for this, it's the first time I've used the balloon whisk attachments as I've never had enough mixture. This recipe called for 10 egg whites so I was delighted that this was certainly enough. The mixer worked really well and I got lovely peaks very quickly.

Whisked Egg Whites

The recipe calls for a slight whisking and then adding lemon, cream of tartar and some salt. I've never used cream of tartar but on reading the packet I could see why it was used. It helps the whites hold their structure and increases volume. The caster sugar is then added spoon by spoon. The final step is to fold in the flour, carefully, maintaining all the air in the egg whites. 

Flour Folded in

I didn't have the correct tin this time so I used a standard 8" tin. I carefully spooned all the mixture into this. It reached the rim of the tin so I hoped it wouldn't rise too much!! The cake rose the perfect amount just about holding inside the tin. 

Just about fits in the tin!!

Once cooked I turned my tin upside down and left it on a cooling rack. Since I wasn't using the right tin I didn't have the proper feet and my cake was right over the rim but it seemed to be ok, I think. 

Upside Down Cake

The recipe also calls for making lemon curd, with all the left over egg yolks. So I quickly whipped up a batch of this. It's very easy and just requires placing all the ingredients over a low heat and stirring until it's thickened. 

Making the Lemon Curd

Once cool I covered the cake in whipped up cream and drizzled some lemon curd onto it which had some passionfruit seeds stirred in. 

Ready to Eat

The verdict: I really enjoyed this cake, it was lovely and light and the lemon was so refreshing and cut through perfectly. I'm not sure what the passionfruit added and next time I'd omit these. This is a cake that I'd happily eat more slices of and probably will before it heads off to Gary's work tomorrow. Certainly a cake I'd love to make again and would try other fruity flavours. I would also like to try it in the proper tin. I didn't feel there was anything wrong with the bake this time but I'd like to compare and do it properly. Difficult to know what it should look like but I think it compared to those on GBBO, possibly a little squashed due to using the wrong tin upside down. I'd give this 9/10, that extra mark could be gained by removing the passionfruit and trying with the proper tin. 

Mincemeat and Almond Tart

I decided to make this tart, from Mary Berry's complete cookbook, this week as Gary. It looked like a bakewell tart but with mincemeat instead of jam and I like mincemeat!! 

The first step for the tart involved making a simple short crust pastry. Usual process of mixing butter and flour together then adding egg, sugar and water. This was placed in the fridge to cool for at least 30minutes. 

Pastry made and ready to go in the fridge

Once the pastry had cooled it was rolled and placed in a flan dish and again cooled until ready. 

To make the filling I cream together butter and sugar and then added ground almonds and almond extract. This was all whisked together. 

Almond filling whisked together

The mincemeat was then placed on the bottom of the case and the almond mixture spread on top. This was baked in the oven for around 1 hour until the middle felt solid. This did result in the top getting too brown though so next time I would cover this up. 

Cooling tart

While the tart cooled I made some icing by mixing together icing sugar, lemon juice and water and spread this over the top. I then sprinkled almonds on top. 

The tart was sliced into 10 pieces and then mine was cut in half again which resulted in my slice having 340 calories. So an unhealthy tart then!! 

My slice BEFORE halving.

The verdict: I really enjoyed this tart but mainly because it had mincemeat in it. I was disappointed with the cake mixture as when raw it tasted strongly of almonds, however, once cooked the mincemeat flavour was overwhelming and I couldn't taste it anymore. I would recommend less mincemeat and next time I would just make a standard bakewell tart. I would give it 7/10 as I found the flavour combinations disappointing. I also didn't find the recipe particularly easy to follow and felt that my tart came out too dark and my icing too runny. 

Chocolate Eclairs

I wanted to learn how to make choux pastry, which can be found here.  With this I decided to make chocolate eclairs. I found this recipe in the Mary Berry complete cookbook. 

Once the pastry was ready it was piped into long tubes. I don't have a large plain piping nozzle so mine have a little extra shaping! I also could do with a larger nozzle as these seem quite small. 

These were then cooked in the oven, starting at a higher temperature and then being reduced for the final few minutes. These were then left to cool on a rack. 

I then whipped up some double cream until it was thick. Sliced the eclairs in to and filled with the cream. 

Sliced and filled with cream

Warmed up some double cream until just under boiling point, I then added plain chocolate to this and stirred until melted. I left this to cool until it was thicker and then spooned on top of the eclairs. 

Eclairs smothered in chocolate

The eclairs were then left in the fridge overnight to set. 

My fridge is full!!

The verdict: I found this recipe fairly easy to follow but then there isn't much involved in the processes listed above. It was a very simple thing to make. I don't really like pastry or cream so I didn't really enjoy these. Apparently they are popular at Gary's work and people think they taste good. I wouldn't make these again but there is nothing wrong with the combinations itself. 

Outside view

A view inside, filled with cream. 

Choux Pastry

I've seen profiteroles and éclairs on various programs and decided it's about time I learnt how to make choux pastry. I found a recipe in Mary Berry's cookbook and followed that. 

Make sure the other ingredients are ready, here is the flour and the egg ready to add once it gets the right point. 

Flour and Egg

The first step is to add butter to water in a saucepan. 

Butter and Water

and heat it until the butter is melted. Bring this to the boil. 

Melted butter

Add the flour to the mix and beat until it forms a ball

Added flour and formed a ball

add the eggs little by little, beating between each amount. The mixture starts out like this:

Before the egg is beaten in

and when beaten it becomes a thick paste like this: 

A smooth paste after the egg is beaten in. 

This is then ready to use and is usually piped out into either balls or sticks. You'll have to wait and see what I made out of this pastry. 

Pink Almond Macaroons P. 175

As my final recipe for baking Monday I decided to make macaroons. I've never really got on with egg white based recipes, so this was a challenge for me. I used a recipe from Mary Berry's complete cookbook for pink almond macaroons. 

So the first step is to combine the icing sugar and almonds together in a bowl. Put this to one side. 

In a saucepan combine the sugar and the water, heat it slowly and then boil for a few minutes until it's a clear consistency. I found this point very hard to judge as mine didn't really go clear. I ended up adding some more water to the solution to try and achieve the consistency I thought it should be. 

Sugar and Water heating in a saucepan

Meanwhile beat up the egg whites until they are stiff. 

Egg whites whisked till stiff.

Slowly combine the sugar syrup and the egg whites. Add egg whites to the almonds and mix to a paste. Add red colouring to turn it pink (mine never really turned pink, they went brown!). Add some whisked egg whites to the almond paste and then combine the remainder. This is then piped into 3.5cm circles on lined baking trays. Leave this to dry for an hour, cooked for 25mins and then cooled in the oven for a futher hour. 

Macaroons cooked and cooled. 

Buttercream is then made combining butter and icing sugar. 

Buttercream ready to use

Use the butter cream with the jam to stick together the macaroons. 

Finished macaroons. 

The macaroons are ready to eat. 

My macaroon ready to eat

The verdict: I found this recipe quite hard to follow and work out what was required of me. The macaroons didn't come out pink, so I needed to add more food colouring. They were also too crunchy but this is because I forgot the first bunch and cooked it for too long. The second batch came out better, more chewy. The taste was really nice and I really enjoyed them. I would like to try these again to see whether I can improve my presentation and make them slightly less crunchy. I would mark these 8/10. 

Battenburg Cake p. 167

I wasn't able to do any baking last week due to a difficult week with M&M. She is having problems with her feed and it looks likely that she is allergic or intolerant to cows milk. She is much better now we've got some special milk for her but this will be discussed further in the coming week with the doctors. She's been much better over the weekend so I am now at the stage where I can start thinking about baking again. I've decided the best way to fit this in is to have a day each week where I make my creations. This is Mondays. 

So this week I've been through the books and decided to try out some new recipes. This week I'm making battenburg cake and almond macaroons. I found the recipe for battenburg cake in Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook P. 467. I have never attempted a battenburg cake before but it seems like a basic idea and something I should try. 

The first step is line the square tin with greaseproof paper. 

Cake lined with greaseproof paper.

The cake mixture is just a standard sponge cake, one half is flavoured with vanilla essence whilst the other is chocolate. These are added to the tin half and half.

Sponge in the tin ready to be baked.

This was then baked in the oven for around 30mins. Once cooked it was placed on a cooling rack and left to cool.

Cooked and cooling.

Once cooled the cake is cut into 4 equal strips, 2 in each colour. Heat the apricot jam to melt it and then use this as the glue to stick together the 4 pieces of sponge in a chequed pattern. Roll out the marzipan so it'll cover the cake and then, using the jam, wrap it around the cake. Cut off the ends to neaten it up. 

Finished cake. 

The cake is now ready to be sliced and eaten. 

The verdict: The cake tasted very nice and the recipe was straightforward and easy to follow. I'm pleased I managed to achieve this but it wasn't as neat as I would have hoped. The marzipan was very sticky and even time in the fridge didn't cure this and make it more solid. I'm not sure if this is a fault with the marzipan or me, maybe I should have rolled it on icing sugar to dry it up rather than in cling film. The only other thing was the recipe stated I should use ground rice but I didn't manage to find this in the supermarket so I used extra flour instead. The cake went down well with Gary's work collegues and apparently disappeared very quickly. Probably not a recipe I would make again but a decent cake. 7/10. 

Ginger Snaps P477

Whilst having a baking day, I attempted to make these ginger snaps from Mary Berry's complete cooking book. My husband is very good at making ginger biscuits so I was curious to see how this recipe compares to his famous ones. 

The recipe requires melting butter and golden syrup together and then add this to the dry ingredients. The final mix should be a dough that is "soft but not sticky", unfortunately mine couldn't even be described as a dough but a lovely smooth batter, like a cake mixture.

Cake like batter

I added several more spoonfuls of flour to try and make it more dough like. I didn't succeed in achieving a dough firm enough to handle but it was more a dough. I used a spoon to place spoonfuls on the tray, with plenty of space between them to spread out. 

These were baked in the oven for 15 minutes, the recipe didn't tell me what these should look like when you get them out of the oven so I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. I got them out and hoped they'd be ok. When they first came out these were very soft but cooling down they gradually harden up to create a lovely crunch on the biscuits. 

Ginger snaps ready to eat

The verdict, once cooled these had a lovely crunch. I added slightly more ginger than the recipe stated but I liked the extra kick this gave the biscuits. My mum tried these biscuits for me and she says that she can't think of any way of improving them and they were very good. The marks.. I gave the biscuits 8/10, I think having to alter the recipe as much as I did to make it a dough this means I have to knock some marks off, however the final product were very nice. My mum mark is 10/10.. this is the first recipe that has achieved full marks out of anyone!! 

Mincemeat Buns P.465

When my mum came to visit me today she had a lovely present for me, a jar of mincemeat. I love mincemeat so when I saw this recipe I thought it sounded delicious but we couldn't find any mincemeat in the shops. So was delighted by this surprise present. 

This is a very easy recipe, I didn't have any currants so these were omitted today. It's an all in one recipe, so combined in the bowl I placed mincemeat, eggs, sugar, margarine and self raising flour. This was all combined with the whisk and then placed in the cupcake cases. 

Cupcakes in the oven

These were then placed in the oven and cooked for around 30 minutes until the cakes were golden brown and springing back to the touch. These were left to cool and then we sampled them. 

Out of the oven and cooling

Inside of the cupcake, could do with a little more fruit. 

As my mum provided the key ingredient this time I have used her opinion for today's verdict. I thought this cake was delicious, the flavour of the mincemeat was strong enough to be tasted throughout the cake, and I didn't find these cakes too sweet. My mum says that the cupcakes are very nice but a crunchy topping of maybe some demerara sugar. My mum gave the score of 9/10 and I also agree with this mark of 9/10. I felt that the cake would have been even better if I'd followed the recipe and put in some currants for a bit of extra fruit. 

This recipe was so good that I'm going to attempt to make it again with these small changes, I will keep you posted on how this goes. 

Iced Lime Traybake

I fancied doing some baking today, ichy fingers!! so with my mum's help we managed to shop for the ingredients and I mustered the energy to make these for dessert today. Several recipes in Mary Berry's book caught my eye but I fancied something lime so the Iced Lime Traybake, p 464, hit the spot. 

It is a very straightforward recipe, a basic sponge recipe flavoured with lime zest topped with a lime icing. For the sponge recipe I used marg instead of butter, cutting costs, but everything else was as stated in the book. It's an all in one recipe so this involves putting marg, sugar, flour, baking powder, 3 eggs, milk and some lime zest into a bowl then whisking it all together. 

Everything in the bowl ready to be whisked

Once it was all mixed together I placed it in a prepared tin and baked it in the oven. I just used baking paper to line the tin roughly so I was expecting the edges to not be very good. 

Ready to go in the oven

The cake took around 45 minutes to cook in the oven, fairly close to the time stated in the recipe. It came out looking golden brown and the inserted knife came out clean. 

Fresh out the oven

The cake was left to cool and then it was ready to ice. The icing was a simple mix of lime juice and icing sugar. However, I didn't have enough juice to make icing so I had to add a little water to moisten the icing up so that it was spreadable. The icing was then poured onto the cake and smoothed roughly, again I didn't take any great care with the appearance as it was just for us. As I didn't have any zest left to decorate the top I used some newly purchased sprinkles to decorate the top. 

Cake iced and decorated

The bake was then ready to be eaten, Gary cut the cake into squares and we dived into out squares. 

My slice of cake

The cake was a really lovely texture, it was light and fluffy, beautifully risen but unfortunately it didn't taste of lime. The same could be said for the icing, it just wasn't strong enough tasting. If I had wanted a plain sponge this would have been perfect, but I didn't. 

My mark out of 10 is only 6 as it didn't fill the lime requirement and for once Gary has given it a higher score of 7, so that's a total of 13. Both of us agree that the sponge is very nice but could do with a much strong lime flavour. 

This is something I'd like to make again but next time use more limes for flavour. 

Farmhouse Loaf

My husband and I have recently started making bread in an attempt to save money. We have a bread machine so this isn't much effort and my husband is very good at setting it up to get a reasonable loaf. However, we've had a few problems with the loaf sinking so we achieve a flat top, in the instructions there is a trouble shooting page and we do need to go through that, but I decided it was time I made some by hand and see how that turns out. 

I looked in a couple of books and decided to go with Mary Berry's recipe from her complete cookbook. It looked like a basic loaf that just contained a few simple ingredients. It was for a 2lb loaf, which I believe is bigger than we normally make, so I'm hoping it'll also go a bit further. 

The recipe starts off with combining the butter and the flour to create breadcrumbs, very easy, and then add the salt and yeast. This is all stirred together and then lukewarm water is added to bring it together as a dough. Knead this on a little floured surface until it is a smooth dough, place in an oiled bowl and leave to rise for an hour or so. For convenience I left mine for 2 hours and it nicely rose to double the size. 

This rose very nicely to fill the bowl

I then turned the bread out onto a floured surface and punched out all the air, kneaded it for a few minutes and then placed in an oiled loaf tin. 

Just put in the tin for it's final rise

I left this to rise for the allocated 30 minutes and then it went in the oven. 

Ready to go in the oven

The bread itself is very easy to make and didn't require very much effort, the hardest part for me was the energy required to knead the dough. I enjoy making bread, it's quite therapeutic!! The recipe uses much more flour than our bread machine, 750g, this seems like a large amount and I need to look up whether this is usual. However, it doesn't use milk powder or sugar like the machine does. 

I cooked the bread for 30mins and it came out slightly brown, I took it out of the tin and tapped the bottom. I think it sounded hollow but when I sliced it I noticed that some areas of the bread weren't quite cooked yet so decided to cook it for a little longer. It certainly rose out of the tin though and produced a large loaf of bread!! 

After 10 more minutes I got the bread out for another look, once opened up it still didn't look fully cooked but I decided to leave it to cool this time. But first I cut myself a slice, fresh homemade bread is delicious!

Inside the loaf

Out of the tin and looking good

My verdict is that this bread is really tasty, if slightly under cooked. Next time I'll leave it in the oven a little longer and turn the heat down as the recipe required a quite high temperature of 230oC. The bread definately has a lovely crust to it, something we don't get in our bread machine, and I think it also tastes much nicer. Something I would definitely consider doing again as it's not much effort and produces such a lovely loaf which rose beautifully.

I would like to add a few additional notes to this blog. My husband really liked the bread and said if we were marking it would get a 8 or 9/10. After a night on the side cooling down the loaf is much better. This morning the bread looks fully cooked through and is very tasty. Lost its crunchy top but really tasty.