David in the kitchen.

Thursday morning kitchen therapy

I baked some bread today. In itself not unusual and any regular readers are probably already rolling their eyes and thinking ‘tell us something different’. Today was a bit different though. It wasn’t just that we needed bread, it was also that I needed the therapeutic buzz that a couple of hours baking gives me.

Last week I was followed on Instagram by a television company looking to create a new chocolate related baking show. I was quite chuffed, and then even more so when they contacted me directly asking if I’d like to apply to be on the show. I dithered for all of five minutes before responding with a yes and would they please send me an application form. I returned said form yesterday and to be honest thought that would probably be the end of it. I couldn’t have been more wrong, in little more than an hour someone was on the phone thanking me for my application and asking if it was convenient to have a chat for further information about myself and my baking. We talked for quite some time and it was left that if they wanted to progress things further there would be a Skype call later in the day and then I’d have to make a video of myself doing a baking challenge that they would send me. This all had to happen super quick as they were looking to film the show in the first two weeks of November.

The very fact that I’m writing this has pretty much given the game away as to what happened next. I spent the rest of the day not really doing anything other than wondering if the phone was going to ring. Torn between thinking ‘this is madness and I don’t want them to’ and ‘ how exciting will it be if they do’..and of course it didn’t ring.

I was left flattered that they’d called in the first place, frustrated that they didn’t call back and at the end of the day a bit deflated.

So that’s why I was back in the kitchen this morning. Cheering myself up with some bread baking and wondering how long it is until they start taking applications for the next series of Bake Off.

Great British Bake Off Week Six

Bake Off week six and I’m still on a bit of a sugar high. This was dessert week and it inevitably involved a great deal of meringue. My Mum would have loved this week. I always remember that if we went out for a meal she would choose her dessert first and then pick the preceding courses accordingly to ensure that she still had room for what was clearly going to be the highlight of the evening.

Having a dedicated dessert week in a baking themed show always feels a little odd. Lets face it, with the possible exception of bread week, aren’t they all desserts in some way shape or form. I suppose the rationale must be that these are bakes that require a certain amount of oven time but aren’t strictly speaking cakes or pies.

This weeks challenges were a multi layered meringue cake as the signature bake. Mango, coconut and raspberry verrines for the technical bake and a bombe cake for the show stopper.

The meringue cake is fairly self explanatory but the other two challenges may need a little explanation.

Verrines are small layered desserts served in a glass. The one that they did on the show had layers of mango compote, coconut panna cotta and raspberry jelly that were topped with crumbled streusel cake and a sable biscuit. They looked beautiful and when I’ve got a bit more time and a bit more patience I will have a go at making them.

Bombes cakes are easiest described as large domed cakes that contain a different and often surprising centre when you cut into them. My favourite is a Baked Alaska. Hot golden meringue on the outside that encases cold ice-cream in the centre. My mother used to make them and I remember a few childhood birthdays when I requested one rather than a birthday cake. I did think about making one this week but there’s always that concern about getting the timings wrong and the oven being awash with melted ice-cream.

In the end I opted for the signature challenge and an opportunity to make a Jens Jorgen Thorsen Meringe

Ever since I bought Trine Hahnemann’s wonderful Scandinavian Baking book this has been one of my favourite desserts. To be honest I don’t get to make it too often as the rest of the house complain about the amounts of sugar and cream involved, but yesterday I pointed out that I’d have nothing to write about if I didn’t, so common sense, or an impending sugar rush, won the day. Jens Jorgen Thorsen was a Danish painter and apparently Trine’s meringue carries his name due to the abstract way that the melted chocolate is scattered and splashed over the meringue and figs. The recipe is for two large meringues that are sandwiched together with caramel cream. In light of the Bake Off meringues having been multi layered I used the same amounts but made smaller meringues so that I could go to three layers. I also added black currents to the cream between each layer. I’m not going to lie to you, this a ridiculously sweet and rich dessert but on a damp October Sunday evening it was a gorgeous treat. An added bonus is that there’s still a couple of slices left for tonight. The full recipe for the meringue plus a few others from Trine’s book is in the link at the foot of this post.

As is always the case after making meringues I was left with a bowlful of egg yolks, six to be precise, and I asked on Twitter this morning if anyone had suggestions for using them up. So far I’ve had Lemon & Thyme Semifreddo, Brown Bread Ice-cream, Daffodil Cake and Spatzle. At this rate I can see more meringues being made just so that i can then make the wonderful egg yolk dishes that people are suggesting.

Next time it’s festival week. I’m not sure if this means what you would eat at Glastonbury of if it’s an early chance to make Christmas cake or mince pies.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/28/scandinavian-baking-secrets-trine-hahnemann?page=with%3Aimg-4

Juliet, Mike and twenty four other words in a bar.

I know I said at the outset that this would be a food blog and I promise you that most of the writing will be. However today I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I share a piece that isn’t.

Starting a blog and writing regularly was something that I’d thought about for a very long time. It was always on my ‘to do’ list but somehow never happened. The catalyst that finally pushed me into it was taking a creative writing course. The course was based around memoirs and life experience and although I was tentative to begin with I quickly found that I was enjoying it and relishing the opportunity to share what I was writing with others. Even on a memoir course I managed to weave food into most of my writing and there was never really much doubt that was going to be the main theme of my blog. Since I started I’ve loved every minute of it and now find myself getting quite frustrated if I can’t find the time to write something.

As broad a category as food is though I don’t want it to be a limit that stops me from writing other things. A chance to write something different cropped up recently when my friend Alison Tyler put a writing challenge on her blog.

Alison’s challenge was to write a story that included every word from the ICAO alphabet:

Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zul

this is my story.

Juliet, Mike & twenty four other words in a bar

A late November Monday night, a bar.

A low kilo-watt sign that barely shows.

The sort of bar where the staff are uniformly not in uniform.

“It was a Pisco Sour”

“I’m sorry”

“It was a Pisco Sour. That Peruvian drink we both fell in love with at the hotel in Lima ”

“It may have been but all I remember about that night is whiskey”

Juliet is French, speaks with a Quebec accent.

Mike loves that accent, French with a yankee echo.

The jukebox playing, Joe Cocker’s Delta Lady, the Temptations Papa Was a Rolling Stone.

Some nights they dance, never a tango or foxtrot though.

Never to cries of “bravo” from their fellow drinkers.

Only been home for a few weeks, already planning the next trip.

Possibly India. possibly Sierra Leone.

Juliet thinks she’s found her Romeo.

Mike longs for Oscar though. The alpha barman with the x-ray eyes.

She’ll find out soon, but don’t worry.

There’s Victor at the next table and Charlie across the room.

They’ll both happily do the Zulu dance with her.

Both play around with her, and I don’t mean golf.

Great British Bake Off Week Five

Bake Off week five and we’re half way through the series. This time it was into unchartered territory with a theme of 1920’s baking. When they do this sort of thing I’m never quite sure if they come up with the theme first and then try matching recipes to it or if it’s the other way around. I have visions of people sat with cookbooks and post it notes desperately trying to link things together.

The challenges set for the bakers were custard tarts as the signature, Beignets Soufflé as the technical and a cocktail cake for the show stopper. I’m not sure if custard tarts were really a twenties food favourite or if they were picked because they were flung about in so many slapstick comedies from that era. The Beignets were a new bake to me, they are small fried balls of choux pastry with a little bit of jam in them, in this case they were served with a sabayon sauce that was flavoured with Marsala wine. The cocktail cakes were inspired by the US prohibition era when putting booze into cakes was one of many ways around the ban.

So far in this series I’ve managed to do the technical bake every week but that came to an end with the Beignets. To get the choux pastry crispy required a deep fat fryer and unfortunately that’s one piece of equipment that our kitchen doesn’t run to.

My initial plan was to go with the cake and I was looking at options for incorporating a Mojito into it. The thinking being that if you’re going to put a cocktail in a cake make it one that you like. Then at the eleventh hour, or at least on Saturday afternoon, all plans changed.

It had long been our intention to go to Aldeburgh food festival this weekend. We’ve been regular visitors for a few years and if you ever find yourself in Suffolk on the last weekend of September I thoroughly recommend it. Set in the grounds of Snape Maltings the festival attracts hundreds of food and drink producers. They range from small start ups to established providers and all have their wares ready to sample and buy. There are also cookery demonstrations and workshops going on across the site. Throw in dozens of street food stalls and bars and you have a great day out. We always come away with bags stuffed full of produce and this year one of them contained a large punnet of ripe damsons. Just how large a punnet we only realised when we got home and had the inevitable “now what do we do with them” conversation. I googled damson recipes and the first thing that came up was a damson custard tart, with that the Mojito cake was off the agenda and will have to wait for another day.

Damsons are quite a sharp fruit so you will find that you have to use a lot of sugar with them when cooking. The lady we bought ours from said that she only cooks with them and can’t eat them raw. I tried one and the taste is like a slightly sour plum, not unpleasant although I wouldn’t want too many.

If you can’t find damsons and want to try the recipe you could use plums, but I would suggest reducing the amount of sugar that you use.

The recipe has a a sweet shortcrust pastry case, a rich custard filling that’s drizzled with a thick damson sauce. What’s not to like about that.

Damson custard tartlets

Baking these tarts and writing about them has taken me back to memories of the egg custard tarts that my grandmother used to make. Something tells me it will have been a simpler recipe than this, but eaten warm with grated nutmeg on top they were gorgeous.

If you’re interested in Aldeburgh food festival I’ve put a link to their site below.. Maybe we’ll run into each other next year.

Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival Home

Next time it’s dessert week, I’m hoping for lemon meringue pie and/or baked Alaska. Dessert heaven.

Baking a bundt cake

It’s a wet, grey Tuesday afternoon and somehow all of those productive plans that I had for today have come to nothing. There’s a garage door needs painting, a lawn that needs mowing and a garden that could really do with an end of summer tidy up. But I’m staying where I am at this keyboard. I’ve got some rye bread proving prior to baking and an unexpected opportunity to write.

I couldn’t let Bake Off dairy week finish without mentioning that I had a second bake. In yesterday’s post I talked about the slightly torturous process of making Maids of Honour, the tarts that were the technical challenge this week. For my second bake I made a dairy based cake. This was the signature challenge where one key ingredient had to be a dairy product.

One of the things that i particularly like about cake making is how straight forward it is. Dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another, mix and into the tin. I know there can be more to it than that but after the multiple stages of the last bake this one felt so much easier.

The cake I made was a pear & walnut bundt that used almond milk. Bundt cakes are made in ring shape tins and while they might look impressive on the plate there is always a serious concern that they are going to break as you get them out. I find that greasing and flouring the tin before you put the mixture in helps.

I’ve got two bundt tins of differing sizes and in a moment of madness decided that this cake had to be in the larger one. When something the size of a flyer saucer came out of the oven I realised that I’d perhaps been a bit ambitious. Even with half having gone into the freezer there will still be cake for us all week.

The recipe for the cake is below. As I say be warned as this did produce a monster. The bundt tin that I used is 22cm

5 eggs

150g Muscovado Sugar

250ml veg oil

Half teaspoon of ground cardamom seeds

400g flour ( I used Spelt flour but any cake flour should work)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

150ml Almond Milk (ordinary milk will work)

2 pears peeled and chopped

50g chopped walniuts

Pre heat oven to 180c/gas 4

Beat the eggs and sugar in a bowl with an electric whisk for several minutes. Add the oil as you whisk. Combine all dry ingredients in a separate bowl except for the pears & walnuts. Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture in stages, alternating with the milk. Once all combined gently fold through the chopped pears and nuts. Bake for 45 minutes. The cake should be golden and a skewer or knife put in to test should come out clean.

I topped mine with some icing that had a little lemon juice in it and some edible flowers from our garden.

One of the unexpected bonuses of writing these pieces is how much I’m learning about the history of the things that I make. The link blow takes you to a fascinating Wiki page for bundt cakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundt_cake

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

What’s not to like

There’s an article in todays Guardian where a number of chefs and foodies talk about their least favourite ingredient to cook with. This got me to thinking about what mine would be, then to the very quick conclusion that I may be about to write the shortest blog post ever. Clearly many of these people have been cooking far longer than me and will have tried many more dishes than I have, but I really couldn’t think of anything.

If you were to ask me what I don’t like to eat it would be an equally difficult exercise. The only thing I can come up with is raw tomatoes. In their case I think it must be something to do with the texture and feel of them in the mouth as I’ll happily eat cooked tomatoes and I cook with them all the time. Having such a short list of food dislikes can lead to a certain recklessness in restaurants. If nothing is jumping out at me from a menu there is always the temptation to go for something that I haven’t heard of and to then sit there with fingers crossed until the dish arrives at the table. This normally works but I do remember a tripe dish in France and an eel dish in Belgium where it definitely didn’t.

If you were to broaden the question out and ask me if there are any foods that I do eat but am unimpressed by then there are a few that I can come up with.

Lobster. I just don’t see what people get so excited about. On the few occasions that I’ve had it there always feels like an awful lot of effort for not too much taste. I’d far rather eat crab. Less effort and more taste.

Turkey. I know that no holiday table is supposed to be complete without it but to my mind it’s always an underwhelming flavour. A well cooked chicken will always be my preference.

Avocado. This is the one that always gets most reaction from people. I have to point out that I’m not saying that I don’t like them, just that I’m always left feeling ‘what is all the fuss about’

Halloumi. I used to work with someone who swore by this dish and would always seek it out on a menu. Personally I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten anything so lacking in flavour.

I can trace a lot of my broad tastes in food back to my childhood. Holidays in Italy are a strong memory, the joys of being introduced to mussels and other shell fish at beach side restaurants, my mother worrying that perhaps we were over indulging. Eating pizza for the first time at camp site restaurants.

I’ve writing before about growing up in Malta and I’m sure that being exposed to a different food culture at such a young age was a major influence. It wasn’t just that though. My mother was always an adventurous home cook and keen too try new things. To this day I know that my dad still has the notes and recipes that she took from a cordon bleu cookery course in London back in the very early sixties. I keep meaning to borrow them and try some of the recipes myself.

When I write about food I’m aware that many people have allergies and conditions that can prevents them from eating different foodstuffs and I’m obviously very appreciative of the fact that I haven’t.

What I will say though is that whatever the range of food you know you can eat, if there’s something new that you haven’t tried before, give it a go. You might find yourself a new food favourite.

A Second Bake for GBBO Bread Week

Although this blog is only couple of months old I’ve already written on a few occasions about how much I enjoy making bread. Based on that you won’t be surprised to hear that Bake Off bread week was too much of a temptation to only bake the once.

Bread always feels like particularly guilt free baking to me. With cakes and pies there is a certain feel of luxury and treats, whereas with bread I think of it more as a necessity. At least that’s the excuse that I use with myself for getting into the kitchen so often.

In my last post I talked about how I got on with the floury baps that were the technical challenge this week. That meant that if I wanted to try another of the bakes it was either a filled tear and share loaf or some scored and decorative bread. I’ve had some previous attempts at scored bread but somehow a certain tentativeness with the blade has always defeated me. I know if I cut too deep the loaf is going to open up like a burst football during the baking process and I know that if I don’t cut deep enough there won’t be much to show for my efforts. As a result I’m normally somewhere between the two with cuts and crosses on the bread that even I would struggle to claim as decorative. I will have to try again but this wasn’t the week for it. The other key consideration was that we were hungry and wanted some bread that we were really going to enjoy.

Tear and share breads are always a fun home bake because once you’ve found a basic recipe you can play around with it and try different ingredients. To add a bit more complication to the bakes in last weeks challenge they were filled bread but there’s no reason why a tear and share can’t be plain. Pulling pieces from a still warm loaf is always going to be fun, whether on not the bread is filled.

The bread that I opted to bake was a cinnamon & raisin. The recipe describes it as a jumble bread and really it’s piles of cinnamon swirls baked together to form a loaf. After the first prove the dough, which you’ve already added the raisins to, is rolled out to a large rectangle then brushed with milk, cinnamon and muscovado sugar. You then create one giant cinnamon roll, cut it into pieces, then pile the pieces into the baking tin. One final brush of milk and into the oven.The recipe tells you to use a standard loaf tin for the bake but I find that a small round cake tin works best. Not only does the round loaf look better but it also allows you to pile the cut cinnamon swirls higher. Once it’s out of the oven this means that there are more pieces of sweet and sticky bread waiting to be pulled from the loaf.

The sugar and cinnamon in the recipe might be undermining my arguments about bread being guilt free but it was the weekend and if you can’t have some luxury then when can you.

There’s link to the recipe that I used below.

Cinnamon and Raisin Jumble Loaf

Great British Bake Off Week Three

It’s already bake off week three and this time it’s bread.

When I first started to bake the thought of making bread was daunting and not something that I tried for quite some time. Eventually I plucked up the courage to have a go and now it’s probably second only to cake in the things that I make most often. If you haven’t baked some already I promise that it will only need one time of the wonderful scent that bread just out of the oven brings to your kitchen to convert you.

If you are feeling a bit tentative about bread baking I would suggest that you start with a Soda Bread. There is no yeast in these and no requirement to knead the dough. It really is just a case of mixing ingredients together, putting them into a tin and then into the oven. There’s a link below to a recipe that is a very good starting point.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-soda-bread

There always seems to be an extra frisson to the Bake Off tent on bread week. Paul Hollywood is a bread maker by trade and this is the episode where the contestants always look that little bit more cowered and nervous.

This weeks challenges were a filled tear and share bread for the signature bake, floury baps, otherwise known as burger buns, for the technical and a display of scored decorative bread for the show stopper.

To be honest I was a bit underwhelmed by the technical challenge but as I said at the start of the series that I was going to try and make them every week I didn’t want to fail at only the third hurdle.

One of the joys of bread making is that unless it’s a particularly exotic loaf the ingredients are always likely to be found in a well stocked kitchen. Of course that might not be the case for the fillings of some of the tear and share breads made this week. The one ingredient required in floury baps that did throw me was shortening. Not necessarily because we hadn’t got any, more a case that I wasn’t sure what it was. A quick google told me it was a solid fat and that butter, lard or margarine would do.

The main thing that you have to consider when planning bread baking is how long it takes.The actual hands on time is not a great deal, but once you have factored in the proving and oven times bread making can becomes quite an undertaking. The trick is to set a timer to remind yourself and then walk away and get on with something else during the dough proving stages. If you reach the point of making sourdough bread this gets even more important as you have to do some work the night beforehand to get the sourdough starter under way.

For these floury baps the proving times were not too bad, an hour after the dough had first been made and then another forty five minutes once the dough had been split into the eight balls required.

Once you’ve left the dough for that final prove the recipe tells you to flatten the dough balls with a rolling pin before you put them in the oven to bake. I was a bit worried that I might have over done this as they looked like discuss on the baking tray.

There wasn’t long to wait though as the bake time is only ten minutes and what came out of the oven were eight raised, slightly golden soft bread roll.

An additional part of the technical challenge on the show was for the contestants to make veggie burgers to go into the rolls. I didn’t do that bit, however we did did stick to the vegetarian theme and had ours with some quorn sausages.

Lessons learned from Bake Off week three

I now know what shortening is.
Even an underwhelming recipe can produce quite a satisfying bake in the end

If anyone fancies having a go at making these the link to the recipe I used is below.

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/recipes/all/paul-hollywoods-floury-baps-veggie-burgers/

Next time it’s dairy week and I’m really not quite sure what to expect with that.

Great British Bake Off Week Two

Bake off week two and it’s time for biscuits. Biscuits are never my favourite bake, not to say that I don’t enjoy them, just that they are something that I don’t bake very often.

This weeks challenges were chocolate biscuits bars for the signature bake, fig rolls for the technical and a 3D biscuit structure for the show stopper. Unless you are actively in a competition I can’t see the point of a biscuit structure, so the choice to be made for my bake was chocolate or figs.

Ordinarily chocolate would have won hands down. I know it’s not good for me and I’m sure I eat to much, but put chocolate in or on a bake and I’m yours. In the end the reason that I didn’t go this route was that fig rolls presented an unusual bake, in that I wasn’t sure if I actually liked them. I’m so used to baking things that are as much for me as for anyone else that the challenge of baking something that wasn’t necessarily to my taste was too good to resist.

Fig rolls are something that I’d only ever had before as a shop bought biscuit. A buttery, slightly crumbly outer encasing the fig paste centre. I remember them from childhood as the sort of biscuit that your grandparents were likely to have, the sort that you would always leave if there were any others to choose from.

Fig rolls are actually slightly contentious as some people claim they are a cake rather than a biscuit. The Wikipedia page for fig rolls ( yes there really is one ) seems to go with this view and refers to them in the opening line as a cake. In this country though you’ll always find them in the biscuit aisle so I’ll stick with that.

It was a fairly limited list of ingredients for this week and other than needing to get some dried figs everything else was already in the pantry.

The figs meant a trip to the wonderful dried fruit and spice stall on our local market and also a chance to share this video with you. Gareth’s stall is on virtually every shopping expedition that I make into Norwich and you can safely say that if Gareth hasn’t got it no one has.

http://www.norwich-market.org.uk/stalls/YouTube/No42_butcher.shtm

The bake itself turned out to be much easier than last weeks Angel Cake. Far fewer stages and definitely much less washing up to deal with afterwards. The only potential problem I found was in the creating of the fig paste for the filling. The recipe talks about creating a thick paste that can be rolled into a sausage. This is laid on the dough which is then rolled around the paste to create the biscuits. My paste wouldn’t thicken and in the end I just had to spoon it onto the dough. My concern was that with a soft paste the rolls might collapse in the oven. Thankfully this didn’t happen and the finished items kept their shape.

If the success of the bake was a pleasant surprise the taste of the bake was an even bigger one. I don’t know if the shop bought rolls contain stem ginger and cinnamon but the addition of these spices gives the home made version a very different flavour. A rich spiciness that is offset by the buttery biscuit around it. After all these years I’ve become a fig roll fan.

Lessons learned from Bake Off week two

Just because you don’t think that something is to your taste, don’t be afraid to bake it. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Even if something doesn’t look to be working (the fig paste in this case) don’t panic.

If anyone fancies having a go the link to the recipe I used is below. For any American readers I think that you know Fig Rolls as Fig Newtons

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/recipes/all/paul-hollywoods-fig-rolls/

Next time it’s bread week.