Great British Bake Off Week Four

After the relatively straight forward themes of cake, biscuits and bread, Bake Off week four was the first where I didn’t really know what to expect. It was dairy week and while it’s easy enough to come up with a list of the key dairy products and ingredients, knowing what would be baked with them wasn’t so straight forward. The reason why I wasn’t too sure is that there aren’t many bakes where some dairy product isn’t used, a little butter here, a little milk or cream there.The difference this week was that dairy was going to be the central key ingredient to the bakes.

The challenges set for the bakers were a dairy based cake as the signature, Maids of Honour as the technical and baked Indian milk sweets for the show stopper.

The second challenge definitely need some explanation. Maids of Honour are small puff pastry tarts with lemon curd in the base, topped with curd cheese mixed with lemon zest, sugar, butter and egg. Just to add to the complexity the judges also asked that they be topped with icing sugar in a rose pattern. I’d never heard of them before but they are a bake with a fascinating history. By all accounts a favourite of Henry VIII, he is reputed to have tried one after seeing the Queens maids eating them and forever more they were Maids of Honour. There is a tearoom in Surrey called the Original Maids of Honour that has been serving them since the 18th century.

These sounded like a serious challenge as soon as they were described and it has to be said that the bakers all struggled. Some to the point of barely producing anything for the judges to try. Based on that and taking into account that I had never made puff pastry, lemon curd or curd cheese, it was with a certain trepidation that I decided to spend Friday morning in the kitchen.

The first step was to make the curd cheese. To do this I had to boil some milk with salt in it, then add white wine vinegar, before leaving it to drain through a sieve for 30 minutes. The vinegar splits the milk and after the draining you are left with the curd in the sieve. The puff pastry required both chilled and frozen butter. You use the chilled as part of a standard pastry recipe to produce the initial dough. Once the dough has been chilled you roll it out and grate over half the frozen butter. The dough is then folded similar to as if you were folding paper to go into an envelope, then the remaining frozen butter is grated and the dough folded again. The rolling and folding needs to happen twice more with the dough back in the fridge to rest between each occasion. This process is to produce the lamination that gives the layers in puff pastry. After that making lemon curd seemed quite straight forward. Gently melting butter, sugar, lemon zest and juice in a bowl over simmering water, then adding beaten egg and whisking for ten minutes. After that it was make the curd mixture and assemble the tarts.

The recipe provided by Bake Off was for twelve tarts,I halved everything with the intention of making six. In doing so I think I might have discovered why the bakers on the show struggled so much, the recipe just doesn’t have enough ingredients for the number of tarts required. As much as I tried I couldn’t stretch what I’d produced to making more than four tarts. Even then I had to boil more milk to make more curd.

I was quite pleased with the look and taste of the final bake, but at nearly three hours from first milk boil to final piece of washing up it did feel like a mighty long time with not a great deal to show for it at the end.

If I haven’t put you off too much from having a go there’s a full recipe for Maids of Honour below. If you try nothing else I would seriously recommend the lemon curd. Homemade is so much better than any shop bought variety that I’ve tried.

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/recipes/all/prue-leiths-maids-of-honour/

Next time it’s 1920’s week, another one where I have no idea what to expect