Signature Bake: Mary Berry’s Tiramisu Cake

Transcendental Baking

I came to The Great British Bake Off to eat cakes with my eyes, but I stayed for the life lessons. No joke, I have spun a personal zen-ish life philosophy from meditating continuously on the four seasons of #GBBO. What has #GBBO taught me? That even though you can practice and prepare, study your methods, and be the best baker you can be, any week can be your week to say goodbye, so you might as well enjoy your time in the tent. Baking is the perfect balance of art and impartiality. You want to present something flavorful, inventive and beautiful, but a lot of the quality of your bake comes down to the indisputable. Is your bread properly risen? Is your pastry flakey? Are the cherries in your cake properly distributed? And so on. There is a certain amount you can control for your bread’s risen-ness or your pastry’s flakiness through proper technique, but there is chaos in the universe, and that chaos can choose to express itself in your bake. There can be disappointment, but there can be no hard feelings. You just have to let it go and move on to the next bake. Scones have literally become the “chop wood, carry water” of my mini-baking enlightenment.

It’s this enlightenment that has inspired me to make all of the Technical Bakes of The Great British Bake Off, starting with Series 5 (American Season 1) and I have just reached Series 5, Episode 4. This is the episode that contains one of the great parables in my Tao of Dough, my Zen and the Art of Mascarpone Maintenance – the one that starts with Martha’s cookie crumbling and Iain presenting a bin to the judges.

Martha started the weekend with signature self-saucing pudds that had no structural integrity. Despite having practiced at home, her chocolate fondants were cracked and oozing their peanut butter carnage all over their plates. Judge Hollywood exclaimed “Oh, dear!” at the sight of them. Judge Berry, being a classy dame, focused on the lightness sponge, but Hollywood, pouring self-sauce in her wound, pointed out that the dryness of the peanut butter was welding his mouth shut.

In the post-pudd interview, Martha still managed a smile. “I try and be a tough cookie. Sometimes it’s a bit hard and the cookie has to crumble, but I’ve done my best.” Martha was able to bounce back in the second round and get first place in the Technical Round, producing a Tiramisu Cake that and sharp edges, even layers, nicely soaked sponge – “and the flavors were perfect,” Judge Berry proclaimed. Martha just beamed.

Iain had a bit of a stumble in the Tiramisu Technical Bake. He had a snafu with his sponge not rising and we got a got a glimpse of the bubbling rage seething just below his russet beard. He had to start again from scratch and hustle through the rest of the 2 1/2 hour challenge. He was able to place a finished cake on the Gingham Alter, and he even gets a nice compliment on the rise of his sponge, but the rush job resulted in a sloppy finish and not enough coffee in the sponge. He ends up placing sixth out of nine, just beating out Nancy who’s cake was literally pissing coffee and Norman who had hardly any coffee at all.

There is always pressure in the tent, and I think in some ways Iain felt it more than most. His performance up to that had been middling to poor, especially when it came to technicals, and he did have something special up his sleeve with this baked Alaska showstopper. He had come up with an extraordinarily inventive and potentially delicious recipe – black sesame seed ice cream on a cocoa sponge with a layer of caramel. Iain even got a “Niiiiiice” from Paul Hollywood when he laid out his ice cream scheme, “it could be fascinating.”

But the hottest day of the British summer, his ice cream dream slipped, or rather melted, out of his grasp. Diana, looking for some valuable freezer real estate, mistakenly left his lovingly churned sesame ice cream out of the icebox. The scene is heart-wrenching – you just hear the panicked voice of Iain ask “Wh-where’s my ice cream?” and Diana answers, “It’s here, sorry Iain…” Iain lets out a guttural “Aaaaaarrrrggggg!” The 40 seconds the frozen core of his showstopper was out of the freezer were enough to reduce it to a grey soup. “Why? Why would you take ice cream out of the freezer?” In a fit of frustration, and despite angelic host Sue’s protestations, Iain chucks his entire creation, sponge and all, in the bin and storms his skinny jeans off into the English countryside like a hipster yeti.

At presentation time, Iain presents Judges Hollywood and Berry the silver garbage can that held his aborted delectable. He does the noble thing. He doesn’t point fingers or protest. He simply presented the facts in his gorgeous Belfastian brogue, “Had some issues with the ice cream and I let the frustration of that get the better of me.” Paul inquired after the sponge and the meringue, but alas it was all binned. Mary sympathized, “We all make mistakes and we would’ve liked to see that sponge.” With nothing to adjudicate, the judges had no choice but to send Iain home, saving boring Norman’s hide for one more week.

The lesson? In the grand tent of life, always bring something to the table – even if it is a meringue-d sponge and a bowl of toasted sesame soup. Small injustices happen, like a dotty grandmother leaving your ice cream out of the freezer, but it’s how you handle it that really counts.

There is a whole other morality tale about how all of the United Kingdom turned like monsters against poor Diane calling the situation #bingate and declaring #justiceforiain, and damaging her so irrevocably via social media that she disappeared from the show claiming it was for “health reasons” but that is a story for another blog. Keep your swan neck held high, Diana! I have tiramisu to make.

The Brief – Mary Berry’s Tiramisu Cake

This is Mary Berry’s Tiramisu Cake from the Judges Tent (S5:E4) and therefore the platonic ideal.

Series 5 (American Season 1): Episode 4. Sue announces that the bakers have 2 1/2 hours to make Mary Berry’s Tiramisu Cake – a twist on a classic Italian dessert whose name means, “pick me up!” (Thanks, Wikipedia!) And what depth of ennui could not be cured by ladyfingers soaked in coffee and booze hiding strata of sweetened mascarpone cheese and shaved chocolate? Frankly, any one of those components applied directly to my sads would give me enough reason to carry on.

Mary’s version uses a fatless sponge rather than ladyfingers that have been layered in a square mold, the chilled and released with tempered chocolate on top to decorate. The word of the day is “precision.” Everything must look neat and square. “What I am looking for,” Mary explains to Paul in the judge’s tent, “is for every layer to soaked evenly in the coffee and brandy, and even layers of the creamy mixture.”

Rather than the sparse recipe given to the contestants by Judge Berry, I pulled the full recipe from The Great British Baking Show: Masterclass, Season 1: Episode 4 and cross-referenced it with the recipe posted on pbs.org.

The Shopping List 

• 13 cm by 25 cm Swiss Roll Tin. Let’s do it, everyone! Let’s take the plunge and come up with universal units of measure. Sure, science says that the metric system is preferable, but we all agree that measuring people against stones is batty, so let’s just agree on something. It can be the Esperanto of measuring. 13 centimeters is 5.11811 inches and 25 centimeters is 9.84252 inches, so that means I should just quit, right? No, I did not quit. I got up and carried on. Yes, I am brave. I got this 13” by 9” swiss roll tin. That is significantly bigger, which may affect the thickness of my sponge, and a thin sponge is what caused Iain to lose his temper and commit food waste, but I’ll just have to risk it.
• Square, Loose Bottom Cake Tin. Mary Berry does not give dimensions for her square tin on the masterclass episode, that saucy minx, but logically it’s got to be smaller than half the length of your swiss roll tin because you have to cut two squares out of it so I got this 6” by 6” cheesecake pan. If there is a sudden scarcity of anodized aluminum, we know why.
• Self-Raising Flour. Easy one, Lisa! Self-raising flour is just self-rising flour. Any dumb-dumb knows that! Um, hold your judgey horses, people! Because I have something to say to them and that is “Nay!” Nay, they are not the same!
• According to Nigella, American self-rising flour contains a bit of salt where British self-raising flour does not because of course, we put salt in our flour. It’s the high blood pressure that gives us our patriotic sense of urgency! Turns out self-raising flour is just flour with baking powder in it, and Nigella suggests just adding 2 tsp of baking powder to every 150 g of all-purpose flour. This recipe calls for 100 g of self-raising flour, so I made 150 g of self-rising flour and through the rest away. I know, I’m a monster but I don’t own a 1/3-teaspoon.
• If only I did the amount of deep research I did on self-raising flour on brandy because what I got from my local ABC store was this.

• 

• She’s a fine girl. What a good wife she would be.

•  I didn’t realize that cognac and Armagnac were also “brandy.” I just grabbed a bottle that said “brandy” on it, and it happens to be apple brandy. The results will be… inventive. There has to be a reason why there aren’t a lot of apple lattes going around.

On Your Marks, Get Set… Bake!

You must whip it. The recipe starts by making what Ms. Berry calls a “simple fatless sponge.” (‘Ooh, fatless! That means it’s healthy!’ she said while eating full-fat mascarpone cheese with a spoon.) It’s made from whisking your sugar and eggs together, then folding in your flour so that the height of the cake comes primarily from the foaminess of your eggs. I’d never made a cake from this method, and I was a bit intimidated. The sponge was the stumbling block for many in the tent, including our russet Hulk, Iain, and our baking builder, Richard.

“Fast speed and keep an eye on it.” I follow Ms. Berry’s masterclass directions and slam my mixer up to full speed and watched it intently, and I mean intently. I didn’t check twitter or nothing! Those churning eggs were the center of my universe. Not whisked enough, and my sponge will be a flaccid, yellow flap. Too stiff, and it will be tough to incorporate the flour. Ms. Berry recommends whisking until you can make a zigzag drizzle from your whisk back into your mixture and it just slowly sinks back in.

Folding time! I sift my flour into the bowl gently and try to replicate Ms. Berry’s expert method of going right ‘round the bowl and then cutting through the center until I can see no more flour and not a second longer. The last thing I want to do is knock the air out. You can see in the episode, that when Iain pours his first, infuriating sponge that his mixture is looking a little thin like perhaps it’s over-folded. Norman, on the other hand, pours his mixture and it clearly has huge pockets of flour in it. “A few spots of flour here and there, but you always get that…” Yeah, keep telling yourself that, Norman.

You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them.

I pour my mixture into my swiss roll tin (“Not from a great height!” Thanks, Ms. Berry!), which I have meticulously prepped with butter and parchment paper. I then tipped the tin to get the mixture in the corners. I lovingly slipped it into my 345° F oven and set a timer for 25 minutes.

What’s that smell? This fatless sponge, whilst it was baking, did not fill my home with the smell I’m used to getting while baking a cake – the floury sweet scent. It smelled eggsy to me, which I found a little off-putting, but considering this cake is about half egg, I had to assume that scent was appropriate.

When all was said and done, my sponge was done after 26 or so minutes. I could tell it was finished when it was slightly springy to the touch. I was pretty stoked to see that my cake was well risen, and not like the sad yoga mat that Richard literally folded up and tossed in the trash. I like my cakes like I like my Cameron Crowe movies – DEEP (Like Vanilla Sky.)! My thicc sponge went straight from the oven to the fridge to cool and got on with my chocolate.

I just want to gently lay my cheek on that sponge.

Now do the other things!! With the scariest part of my bake chillin’ like a villain in the fridge, I got on with all of the other elements. I tempered and piped my chocolate decor, I mixed the boozy coffee cocktail (and, like Norman, took a wee nip. It was kinda’ gross!), and used my hand mixer to get my sweetened mascarpone cream to a spreadable consistency. Phew! Getting a tiramisu together is like a Jane Fonda workout! So many steps!

Time to cut the cake. In the masterclass, Paul asks the question, “Could you have baked the layers separately, Mary?” “You could do them separately, but this was really setting them a bit of a task!” Jeez, Mary! Some judges just want to watch their baking-contestants burn! The bakers sweated bullets as they hacked at their cakes. Nancy and Kate ended up cobbling some of their layers together with cake remnants, for gosh sakes. Remnants!

I used Ms. Berry’s method of using a serrated a serrated knife, cutting the square, and then splitting the squares into layers rather than cutting the whole cake across and I did an okay job. One regret is that I left the baked edge on my cake, which in retrospect was a silly thing to do, but oh well.

What do a cake and I have in common? Layers. Time to make like we’re getting ready for an English summer day and layer it up! No Luis’s diagrams of cakes needed here! I tucked my first sponge layer in the bottom of my buttered and lined square tin and got to soaking. Many a fine baker faltered in the imbuing of sponge with coffee. Norman used a rather abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack method of splashing the boozy coffee, which proved to be folly, and Diana tried to force the liquid into an under-risen sponge, which was a catastrophe. The proper method is to use a pastry brush and paint on the boozy coffee evenly.

I then piped on the mascarpone trying to emulate Richard’s bubble piping on the edges and then filling in the center, sprinkled that layer with the grated chocolate, and repeat. For the final layer, Ms. Berry recommends a thin layer of mascarpone, and skip the grated chocolate. With my tin all filled with Tiramisu goodness, all that is left to do is put the cake in the fridge to set, and lick the mascarpone bowl clean.

Let loose! It took tremendous restraint to leave my cake alone in the refrigerator for about an hour. I suffered acute separation anxiety, but finally, the time came to unsheathe my masterpiece and add my finishing touches. I got a lot of satisfaction from pushing my cake out of its mold and seeing its fine finished edges and well defined (ish) layers.

I sprinkled on the cocoa with a sieve. Many of my chocolate shapes broke while I was trying to get them off of the parchment because they were way too thin, but I got enough irregularly sized shapes to adorn the top of my tiramisu.

Sometimes the cookie has to crumble. I called Brad over to see my finished product and give me my well-deserved round of applause. We were snapping pics and high-fiving when I noticed the edge of parchment peaking out the bottom of my cake. Oh no! My cake was still sitting on the loose bottom of the cake tin. That’s not right.

Brad was like, “That’s fine” but I have never met a well enough that I have successfully left alone, so I strong-armed brad into helping me get the square of aluminum out from under my cake. In the masterclass, Mary and Paul use two large, metal spatulas to do this particular task. I don’t own two large, metal spatulas. I own one large, metal spatula and one teeny-weeny metal spatula.

This is the part of the story where everyone gets to feel like Nosferatu. Yes, the bottom of my cake fell out. I was devastated. I ended up serving my busted tiramisu cake to my book club in a 9″x 8″ metal cake pan and a heavy fog of regret. They were all still super nice about it.

I took this picture right before weeping.

Did I make time? Absolutely not. Not even close. My 2 1/2 hour timer went off while I was somewhere in the layering stage. This bake took forever. Brad was able to watch all of Schindler’s List and make some significant progress in the Netflix true crime documentary series Evil Genious in the time I was able to complete this bake. Cheery watching, I know. The fact that in the tent all of the bakers finished their cakes in time, especially with restarting sponges and what not, is astounding.

The Gingham Altar

Would it make the cut? Um… before my Mary Berry Tiramisu Cake lost its butt? Maybe. My chocolate shapes are irregular, my bubble piping did not really turn out, and my layers are wibbley-wobbly, but my sponge turned out perfectly and I used a pastry brush to brush on the boozy-coffee evenly. Even having used apple brandy, the flavor of the tiramisu was very good, and the bakers in the tent would not have used apple brandy by accident, because their ingredients are provided. My cake was not weeping liquid onto the gingham like Diana, or dry as a Mormon wedding like Norman’s. I would probably have been somewhere between Kate (7th) who had a messy finish, and Norman’s temperance tiramisu (8th).

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Tiramisu.

After the disaster, I surely would have been in the last place, but I still would have been safe for the week because of Iain’s misfortune. Mwa ha ha ha.

Recipe: Mary Berry’s Tiramisu Cake

Tiramisu Cake, June 16th 2018-June 16th 2018.

Sponge

• softened butter to grease pan
• 4 large eggs
• 100 g caster sugar
• 100 g self-raising flour (all purpose+1 1/3 tsp of baking powder)

Decoration

• 100 g of 70% cocoa dark chocolate
• Cocoa Powder for Dusting

Filling

• 750 g of full fat mascarpone cheese.
• 3 tbs of icing sugar
• 30 mL of whipping cream
• 75g of 48% cocoa dark chocolate

Boozy Coffee Mixture

• 150 mL boiling water
• 1 tbs instant coffee
• 100 mL brandy

Bake your sponge.

1. Get prepped. Preheat your oven to 160° C Fan (320° F Fan/345° F) and grease your 35×25 cm (13×9 in) swiss roll tin with the butter, then line with parchment paper.
2. Beat it. Using a whisk attachment, beat the egg and sugar together until the eggs have gone pale and fluffy, and when you let the eggs drizzle from whisk, it sinks back into you mixture.
3. Fold it. Sift your flour into your egg mixture, then gently fold until the flour is incorporated.
4. Fill it. Pour your batter into your prepared tin, then tip the tin to fill the corners.
5. Bake it. Bake for 25-28 minutes, until the sponge is risen, golden brown, and springy to the touch. Allow the sponge to cool completely in the pan.

Make chocolate décor.

6. Prep for chocolate. Tape your stencil to a cutting board or flat surface then tape your parchment paper over your stencil. Have your piping bag at the ready.
7. Chop chocolate. Chop your 70% dark chocolate bar into small pieces and set aside 1/3.
8. Turn up the heat. Put 2/3 of your chocolate in a glass bowl and set it on a pot of simmering water. Stir as the chocolate melts, monitoring with a candy thermometer, until the chocolate reaches 55° C (131° F). Take the bowl of the pot.
9. Cool it down. Add your reserved chocolate a little bit at a time while stirring to gradually bring down the temperature to 28° C (82° F).
10. Warm to working temp. Put the melted chocolate back on the heat to bring the temp just up to 32° C (89° F). Transfer your chocolate to your piping bag.
11. Stencil. Snip the tip of your piping bag and trace your stencil onto the parchment paper. Stick the whole cutting board into the fridge to cool.

Make your fillings.

11. Make your boozy coffee. Boil over 75 mL of water. In a large cup or bowl, put your coffee granules. Pour 75 mL of boiling water over the coffee and then add your brandy. Stir. Put in the fridge to cool.
12. Make your filling. Whip your mascarpone, icing sugar, and cream together until they are a whipping consistency.
13. Grate your chocolate. Grate your 48% chocolate bar and set aside.

Assemble and serve.

14. Split your sponge. Turn out your sponge and peel off the paper. Cut two squares out of your cake to the to the dimensions of the bottom of your square, loose-bottom tin – 18 cm (6 in). Then split the height of the two squares so you now have four thin layers.
15. Prep your tin. Butter and line your square tin with parchment paper.
16. Layer up! Push a layer of sponge to the bottom or your tin. Use a pastry brush to brush your sponge with the boozy coffee. Then add a layer of the mascarpone mixture, and then top off with the grated chocolate. Repeat until the last layer so you end on a thin layer of the mascarpone. Put the cake in the fridge to set.
17. Finish up. Right before serving, lift the cake out of the tin. Dust with cocoa powder then arrange your chocolate on top.

Technical Bake: Paul Hollywood’s Ciabatta

The Brief – “Be Patient”

Gingham makes all bakes look glam. Paul Hollywood’s Ciabatta from the Masterclass episode.

Series 5 (American Season 1), Episode 3. Before the sacred and ceremonial dismissing of the judges, Mel calls upon Mr. Hollywood as the “voice of bread” to give the humble bakers some words of advice and encouragement before their bread week Technical Bake. He gets an uncharacteristically blank expression and in a flat voice says, “Be patient.” Seems innocuous enough, but these words would come to plague the bakers, inducing paranoia and bouts of madness, as they rend their aprons and cry to the heavens, “How patient?”

After dropping that ticking time bomb, Paul “Watch the Bread Burn” Hollywood and his accomplice, Mary “Yeast Side Tilly” Berry, leave the tent so Sue can deliver the brief. The bakers have three hours to make four ciabatta loaves, with crisp, floury surfaces, and large, visible air holes on the inside. I’m going to give myself three hours and nine minutes to compensate for my conventional, non-fan oven. (For details, read the “WTFan??!!” section of my Merry Berry Cherry Cake article.)

This is my first Paul Hollywood bake, but I’m not going to let him intimidate me. I know Paul Hollywood, “The Mahogany Tiger” as Sue calls him, is known for taking bakers out at the knees upon hearing their paltry bake plans, and during bread week he is at his peak pomposity. In this very episode during the Signature Bake, he emasculates Richard entirely for uttering the words “American pumpernickel.” “There is only one pumpernickel and that comes from Germany” – a swipe of his claws and Richard is half as tall, blood and treacle everywhere. I have nothing to be afraid of, however, because he laid all of his methods for an impeccable ciabatta out in the Great British Baking Show: Master Class, S1:E2, from which I pulled this recipe and Paul Hollywood lives in the TV where his cutting comments can’t deflate my fragile ego.

The Shopping List

• A stand mixer. Yes, I knew I was going to end up getting a KitchenAid stand mixer for this project, but I had no idea it would be so soon. Frankly, I’m thrilled. I’ve always wanted one, but being only an occasional home-baker with limited counter space, it seemed like a tremendous luxury. But I’ve been baking more regularly and I have made a sacred vow to the blogesphere to complete all of the #GBBO techinical bakes, and ciabatta is practically impossible to make without one. And, plus, it comes in so many pretty colors! I got this beauty, a KitchenAid Artisan Series, from Amazon and then just sat by the door like an eager puppy until she arrived.
• And arrive she did in gleaming Aqua Sky! I’ve decided to name her Kimberley after my series Series 4 (Season 2) fave. She has clearly been socialized to be a bubbly, happy person, but a few bakes in it was plain to see she had the cool, calculating heart of a serious competitor. She introduced into my vocabulary the Japanese philosophy of ‘kaizen,’ which is the idea that one should always be striving to be better, and that idea of endless dissatisfaction really resonated with me. I’m smiling through the tears, too, Kimberley. Perfectionists unite!

My stand mixer has Kimberley Wilson’s blessing! Love you too, Kimberley!!

• A 3 Litre plastic box. To prove ciabatta and to have the dough dump out in the proper shape, you need a 3-liter plastic box, preferably with a lid. A litre is slightly less than a quart, so I ended up getting this 3-quart container but I wish I had gone with something more like that. The squarer the better, it turns out. Boo! Why did you not show me that the first time, internet!!
• A dough scraper. Now that I have this, I’m like, why aren’t all knives shaped like this?
• Strong Flour. I was able to find this at the grocery store, once I realized that it is just “bread flour.” Bread flour differs from all-purpose because of a higher protein content, which means there is more gluten so things get stretchier, and the more stretchier the more breadier, and the more goodier. That’s science.

On Your Marks, Get Set… Bake!

Timing is everything. Back in the judge’s tent, Paul unwraps the mystery behind his enigmatic advice for Mary Berry. The crux of a successful ciabatta is the prove. “Take this dough too early, and the air-holes will be very small, take it too late and they’ll go flat as a pancake.” When Paul Hollywood cuts the bread, he points out the different sized air pockets in the bread saying that the “irregular structure” is a sign of a descent ciabatta.

I knew with my three-hour-and-nine-minute bake time and a lot to prove (Har har!), I would want to maximize the time I had to prove the dough to foster those irregularly sized bubbles, so I did something a bit out of character – I planned ahead. Before starting my timer, I made myself a timetable factoring the rest time and bake time so I would have the longest prove possible. What I came up with was this:

TIMETABLE (189 minutes)

25 Minutes for Assembling Dough

149 Minutes for proving

10 Minutes for cutting

20 Minutes for resting

35 Minutes for Baking

That would give me just 2 hours and 29 minutes for proving. I just prayed to the gods of bread – Sara Lee, Wonder Man, and the knight on the Roman Meal bag – that it would be enough.

Don’t offend the yeast. If I’ve learned anything from watching GBBO, it’s that yeast is a temperamental diva. If you don’t serve her needs or upstage her in any way, she will not show up and do her job. Sweeteners, fillings, temperature, a sidelong glance, all can cause her to flip out and sabotage your bake and you end up with flat, unspectacular bread. That is why, in the Masterclass episode, Master Hollywood recommends keeping the yeast and salt on opposite sides of your mixer bowl. Salt can retard your yeast, so you want to keep them separate for as long as possible so that yeast can feel like the star that she is. I measured my flour into my mixing bowl and put the yeast on one side and the salt on the other, and clicked that bowl into the hot-seat, and I’m ready to get Kimberley’s motor running! That sounds dirty. Lock and load!

Mortal enemies.

In the splash zone. “I know it’s supposed to be quite a wet dough, beyond that I am all at sea.” You and I both, Richard, you and I both. I add three-quarters of the water all at once as Paul Hollywood instructed, though while he eyeballed it, I measured out 330 mL of water because I am a literalist. He also specified not to use warm water, because warm water would speed up the rise too much and result in flavorless bread. He didn’t mention anything about cold water, but I’m sure it gives your yeast ennui or something, so I set out my water earlier that morning so I could get exactly room temperature water.

I turned the mixer up to a medium-low speed and the dough hook immediately started forming the flour and water mixture into a dough ball. I then turned up the mixer to medium and added the last quarter (110 mL) of water, which turned out to be the exact opposite of what I was supposed to because Kimberley immediately splashed floury water back in my face. Gotcha, Kimberley, water first, then turn up to medium.

Whiplash. Once you add the water, your dough starts slapping a mad beat on the side of the bowl. You go, daddy-dough! In the Masterclass, Paul Hollywood said the dough would go to the dough-ball, to the slap, and then back into a ball and the whole thing could take about 15 minutes. I set a 15-minute timer when I started the mixer, but the dough just kept slapping. I would stop it to check it with Martha’s “sticky trail” method, sticking the spatula in the dough and bringing it straight out to see if it falls in sheets, which kind of worked, but I was really looking for the dough to get ball-like again. After the 15 minutes was up, I did notice that the dough, which was still cookin’ a mad percussion solo, did stop leaving dough stuck to the metal bowl and was also picking up the glob of dough on the bottom of the bowl, so I assumed that was dough ball enough.

“Positively elastic!” exclaims Mary Berry, her eyes twinkling with delight. I love how, even as a glorious octogenarian, Ms. Barry can still be gob-smacked by bread. Adorable. When I stopped my dough hook, I was a pretty delighted myself. The dough was indeed stretchy just like the T.V. showed me, and it just made the whole process seem very promising.

Oh, man! Were you looking at the Arc of the Covenant again?

I then lubed up my three-quart box with olive oil, which is the most filthy thing I’ve ever said. Then it was a matter of getting the sticky, sproingy dough out of the metal bowl into the box. Mr. Hollywood suggests picking up the bread with your olive oily hands, which I did, but the dough insisted on clinging to the bottom of the bowl. Commence the Chaplain routine, but with way more audible swearing. I would lift the dough, and then the dough would lift the bowl. I would try to hold the bowl down with one hand, but then the dough would just stretch and still not let go of the bowl. I don’t know about you, but underneath my adorable, friendly exterior is just red-hot rage magma. I snapped at my poor husband to hold the infernal bowl so I could loosen the bastard dough before I chucked the whole thing out the window. My poor husband, when I am baking he has to be my Mel and my Sue – he’s my extra hands and my sense of perspective. Luckily, he doesn’t have to make the innuendo-laden baking puns, I’ve got that covered. Check out the beginning of the paragraph (So filthy. The BBC would never go for that.).

You think you can make ciabatta? Prove it. It blows my mind that some of the bakers put their boxes in the proving drawers of their oven, despite the sparse recipe specifying that they are to prove the dough at room temperature. The arrogance of it! The recipe was written and edited by Paul Hollywood himself, the B.B.C. took the time to laminate it, it is there to be followed, and yet Martha, Iain and Nancy all put their precious dough into the proving drawers. Sue’s ominous narration forebodes that their loaves will not hold their shape, and so it came to pass.

Granted, they’re in a tent in the middle of Welford Park in Berkshire where it goes from sunshine to full on raining from one moment to the next. They are less subject to room temperature than they are to a fluctuating and fickle tent temperature. Richard, who is a fairly reliable and skilled baker, buckles under the pressure and moves his dough to the proving drawer when the air starts to chill. Kate proves to be the stalwart, sticking to her guns and refusing put her bread-baby in the proving drawer corner.

The crux. I’m not one to watch sports, but I submit there is not a more thrilling minute of television than 10 British bakers waiting for bread to prove. Mel starts stirring the pot, asking Luis and Diane “Who is going to be the first to start doing something, though?” They’re all shuffling their feet and spying on each other when Kate’s hour timer goes off. They all start prepping their boards, flouring their surfaces and getting their baking sheets covered, as they sweat bullets, but it is Jordan, sweet Jordan, who finally cracks. He tips his dough out as Sue observes over his shoulder, “it’s like something out of a John Carpenter film!” Sadly for Jordan, bless his heart, this challenge ends about as happy as a John Carpenter film for him. But he’s not Kurt Russell.

I’m sure if I was trapped in a tent with just me and my swelling dough, I’d be tempted to poke at it a bit. Lucky for me, I’m in the comfort of my own home with my two loves – Brad and our endless Blu-ray collect. We spent the proving time watching Stephen Spielberg’s spin on a literary classic, Hook, about Peter Banning (Robin Williams) whose children are kidnapped by the infamous Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) fetches the bloated lawyer to fly him back to Neverland so she and the Lost Boys can unlock his memory so he realizes he is the real Peter Pan all grown up in time to save his kids. This movie is one of my childhood faves. I find the 90s of it all – the neon colors, the skateboarding, the fat shaming – to be all nostalgic and heartwarming. For me, Hook is fun and poignant reminder to hold onto the whimsy and wonder of childhood as we all slowly turn into middle-aged Robin Williamses. I get a tear every time I see Patches pull the sagging wrinkles of Peter Banning’s face until suddenly his eyes light up – “There you are, Peter!” (Sniff.) Brad says he loves that I love it.

It’s Kate, our “wood nymph with the body of Ryan Gosling,” who epitomizes Hollywood’s “be patient” mantra. It’s poetic that Sue is there for the first tip and the last tip, and as Kate’s voluminous dough lets go of its mold, Sue exclaims as if from the bottom of her very soul, “Ooh! That is bubblicious, girl!” which is something I wish I heard more often.

Get tipsy. At about 143 minutes of proving (isn’t it cute how I used “about” when I actually mean “exactly?”), my dough has grown clear to the lid of my container. Paul did mention that if the bread over-proved it would lose its integrity, so I figured it was time to tip out. I covered my counter with flour and polenta to contend with the stickiness. Chetna nearly had a dough-through-the-window moment when she was trying to handle her dough because she was using oil.

The Blob.

Mr. Hollywood recommends being extraordinarily gentle when you tip out your dough. In fact, handle your dough as little as possible, so as not to knock the air holes out. With this tidbit of knowledge, it is slightly heartbreaking watching our friend-bakers stretching and pawing the life out of their dough. Poor Diana is pressing her dough into little ovals, and you can see in her sweet grandma face that she knows something is amiss.

Shhhh! They’re resting!

In the Masterclass, Mr. Hollywood perfectly demonstrates how to cut dough to maintain peak bubbliciousness. When your dough is blobbed out onto your flour and semolina, and you have a tray with parchment and semolina waiting, you simply cut your bread straight down with the dough cutter, then with your fingers, tip your bread onto the cutter with the cut side up and then in one swift motion stretch and place your bread on the tray. You want to have the cut part on top to give the bread its signature two lines on the top. That’s it, no shaping or smooshing necessary. I then rested my raw loaves for the prescribed twenty minutes, then threw my tray into the 450° oven for 26 minutes, and when I checked it had browned and looked an awful lot like ciabatta bread. I have to admit, I was totally surprised by that. I gave it a little knock-knock to see if it sounded hollow, and it indeed did.

Hello, my beautiful babies!

Did I make time? Third time must be a charm because for the first time I actually made the bake in the time allotted. In fact, I had time to spare! What is the sound of one hand high fiving? (Whoosh?)

The Gingham Altar

It is not enough that the ciabatta loaves are cooked and look like bread, they must be the bread that crushes and humiliates other bread. The bread has to be the platonic ideal of bread. And while I don’t have Paul “Voice of Bread” Hollywood and Mary “Ogler of Bread” Berry, I do have myself and my husband to judge this ciabatta against the criterion laid out by the man himself. I solemnly swear to judge myself harshly. I have plenty of practice at that.

Would it make the cut? Paul Hollywood sliced like a bread knife when it came to his anonymous judging of the humble ciabatta laid before him. He starts with Chetna’s on the end, “We’re actually looking for a ciabatta rather than a pita.” Daaaayum! That is some serious bread shade! It is rather Sherlock Holmes-ian the way Paul Hollywood can pick up an anonymous bread and accurately diagnose at a glance all of the pitfalls the baker made – “This one was forced in heat,” “This one has been handled,” “yeah, it’s olive oil,” and so on.

Shot of Chetna’s pathetic pita.

Hollywood made it clear that he was looking for a tall round loaf, with a floury, tough surface, and an irregular crumb structure with multi-sized bubbles on the inside. In last place was poor Jordan, who not only was the first to tip but also covered his ciabatta in oil rather than flour. Tsk tsk. In 9^th and 8^th was Iain and Chetna had both served up “pitas.” Martha, who was slightly under proved, was third, Luis was second, and Kate “Wood Nymph Gosling” with her nerves of steel was first. Not letting a person have a perfect loaf of bread, Hollywood mentioned that it may have been over handled, but it was the closest to a perfect ciabatta.

My ciabatta did have the signature roundness and when I cut into it I was relieved to see all of the beautiful bubbles that have been preserved in my bread. The flavor was delicious and the crust was chewy. I think the only downside is that maybe my ciabatta was a bit darker than golden. I might fall somewhere around Norman and Martha. They had very good bakes, but both of their breads were slightly under-proved. I dare say, my bread had the proper prove though it had a little extra color under that floury surface. I think I would put myself solidly in fourth.

Check out my sweet bubbs!

All-in-all, I think ciabatta is a pretty good beginner bread. It doesn’t take any special kneading skills or any fancy shaping. In fact, the number one thing to do with ciabatta bread is do nothing. And I love doing nothing. It’s one of my preferred things to do. Rufio! Rufio! RU-FI-OOOOOOO!

Ciabatta!

Recipe: Paul Hollywood’s Ciabatta

Ingredients

500 g of strong (bread) flour

10 g of fast action yeast

10 g of salt

440 ml of water

Olive Oil

Semolina flour

Directions

1. Measure dry ingredients. In your mixer bowl, measure off your flour, yeast, and salt. Put your yeast on one side of the bowl and salt on the other.
2. Add water. Add 3/4 of the water. Mix with the dough hook until a ball forms. Add a little more water at a time as you speed up the mixer until the dough starts slapping the bowl. The dough will be in the mixer for up to 15 minutes.
3. Oil your box. Oil your 3 Litre square tub with olive oil, then move the dough to the container with your oily hands. Clip the lid and prove to the top at room temperature for 1-2 hours until your dough is up to the lid.
4. Get everything set. Preheat the oven to 220° C Fan (420° F Fan/450° F conventional) and line your baking tray with parchment paper. Generously flour your bench with your bread flour and semolina.
5. Cut your dough. Gently tip out your dough. Put semolina on top of your dough and on the tray. With your dough cutter, cut a quarter of your dough off firmly in a downward motion then tip and lift onto your tray so the cut stays on top. Use this method to create four loaves.
6. Let it rest. Allow your dough to rest uncovered for 20 minutes.
7. Bake it. Bake for 20-25 minutes (26-34 minutes conventional) until a crispy golden brown.

Technical Bake: Mary Berry’s Florentines

Biscuits vs. Cookies – A Crispy Dilemma

Florentines made by Mary Berry herself in the Great British Baking Show: Masterclass S1:E1.

I’ve got one successful #GBBO technical bake under my belt, and I figure I’ve got number two in the bag, because Week 2 of Series 5 (American Season 1) is Biscuit Week. What is more unassuming than a biscuit? They are a snack, for goodness sake. They’re eaten in the afternoon dipped in tea, or they’re thrown in lunch-boxes, or displayed in a pile on a plate at a party. Why should I be intimidated by a thing that is served in a pile?

In the dark times, before I had ever watched The Great British Bake Off, I was under the false impression that the American term “cookie” and the British term “biscuit” were synonymous, but that is not exactly true. My favorite way to eat a cookie is molten. I like my cookies grossly oversized and so fresh out of the oven that the roof of my mouth is in peril. When you pierce the outside of the cookie, the buttery, hot dough should ooze out and the chocolate chips should just flow. It has to be served with a spoon and a scoop of vanilla ice cream otherwise you’d be a mess. The queen would not call that a biscuit. British people would call an Oreo a “biscuit,” and they would call a gooey chocolate chip cookie a “cookie,” and I have no idea what they would call the 400 degree monstrosity I’ve described above, but I’m sure it would sound vaguely sexual. Maybe ‘self-saucing pudd’ of ‘banging whiffle.’

The word ‘biscuit’ comes from the Latin ‘bis’ meaning ‘twice’ and ‘coctus’ meaning baked (Man, I sure can Google!). The British biscuit is generally to be dry, and, above all else, crisp. Crisp, crisp! I don’t think there is a word that Mary Berry loves more. I can hear her saying it even now in my head. She really bites into that word, getting all of the onomatopoetic goodness out of it. The word ‘cookie,’ if you’re curious, comes from the Dutch word ‘koekje’ meaning ‘little cake‘ and should be, above all else, in my belly.

The Brief

A picture of Florentines, or a used biore pore perfect strip? You decide! (From the GBBO ep.)

Once Mel and Sue kicked Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, in a smashing white motorcycle jacket (“See you later, Pussy!” – Mel), out of the tent, the bakers eagerly awaited the announcement of what delicious, crispy biscuit they’d be muddling through for their Technical Challenge. The announcement of “eighteen Florentines” to be made in 1 and 1/4 hours sent the challengees into a nervous titter. Sue didn’t go into describing what, exactly, a Florentine was, but the contestants seemed to know and were wary. Norman, our elder seaman, said he had never baked them because he hadn’t baked much “fancy stuff.” What? Fancy cookies… er, biscuits?

Mary Berry looking very much like a Bond Golden Girl from Great British Baking Show, S1:E2.

Mary Berry describes the pitfalls of the fancy Italian Florentine to Paul Hollywood in the privacy of their cozy judge’s tent. “They should have a sort of lacy appearance, be delicate.” They’re a caramel biscuit chock full of chopped nuts and fruit and the underside is smothered in tempered chocolate. “If they got the chocolate at the right temperature, it doesn’t leak through.”

I took down the recipe, along with plenty of notes, from the Great British Master Class, Series 1: Episode One, as Ms. Berry made this crispy confection from top to chocolaty, well-tempered bottom.

The Shopping List

While I already had most of the tools needed and many of the ingredients I either had on hand or could get from the neighborhood grocery story, there were a few items I had to hit up the World Wide Web for.

• A pastry brush. I have bought pastry brushes before, but after using them once or twice I tend to distrust their cleanliness (Neurotic much? Yes. All the time.). I found these silicon pastry brushes from Adept Chef on Amazon, and the fact that they have these fat, dishwasher safe “bristles” is very comforting.
• An instant read thermometer. This was probably my favorite purchase for this bake. I know, what could be more exciting the sanitary pastry brushes? I’ve never done sugar work or properly tempered chocolate. I’ve done the thing where you zap grated chocolate in the microwave in 30 second bursts so you don’t spoil a chocolate’s temper to coat things, but having an actual thermometer feels much more scientific and official. Hopefully I’ll end up with nice, shiny brown bottoms! Here’s the thermometer I purchased.
• Demerara Sugar. In the Masterclass, Queen Mary said she uses Demerara sugar because it “gives a little bit of crunch.” It smells caramel-y, molasses-y like brown sugar but it’s granulated with these large, tawny granules. I purchased India Tree brand Demerara sugar.
• Golden Syrup. Golden syrup, which can also go by the much less sexy name ‘light treacle,’ is a syrup made from cane sugar that originated in Plaistow, England. I purchased Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which I would love to say was because it was the original golden syrup, but it was literally the first hit.
• A Mixed Peel Mix Up. I had a mixed peel related snafu. I couldn’t find anything on Amazon that was specifically “mixed peel.” I looked on just the “regular internet” and I found this, which is on a site that delivers British products world wide, but I wouldn’t get it in time for my tight, self-imposed, and entirely arbitrary blog schedule. So I ordered diced peel in orange and lemon and they came in a tub with syrup, not unlike the glacé cherries from the Cherry Cake. The more I thought about it, though, they did not look like the product from the masterclass episode. Merry Berry didn’t mention rinsing syrup off of anything, and the actual pieces looked way to big for a thin, delicate biscuit. I finally broke down and googled the damn recipe, and what is actually called for is candied mixed peel, which is a different thing entirely. I ended up buying candied peel in orange and lemon. I’m relieved to have the correct ingredient, but now Brad and I are just swimming in superfluous peel. If you have suggestions for all of this extra peel we have lying around, syruped or candied, I am open.

On Your Mark, Get Set… Bake!

Going slightly nuts… and peel and cranberries. First things first, I’ve got to prep all of my ingredients. Jordan was slightly stressed by the whole ordeal as he chopped his nuts one at a time, “This is Mary Berry’s recipe, and we do not want to upset Ms. Mary Berry.” The brave bakers furrowed their brows over how finely to chop the fruit and nuts. I didn’t break a sweat, however, because not only do I know what the end product is supposed to look like, but I bought my walnuts pre-chopped. GASP! Shocking, I know. The whole integrity of this experiment of my making #GBBO technical bakes is dashed, but if it makes you feel any better, it did not give me that much of a time advantage at all. And I mean at all.

An unnecessarily detailed shot of my chopped fruit and nuts. I see why real food bloggers have nice bowls.

I weighed off all of my ingredients and then used the size of my pre-chopped walnuts (Gasp! Oh, stop.) as the basis of how finely I chopped everything else – the slivered almonds, candied peel, and cranberries. That is one of the many advantages of baking by weight, by the way. Whole or chopped, 50 g of dried cranberries is 50 g.

After that, I just added the 50 g of all-purpose flower to the bowl of chopped ingredients, because they were all going in at the same time anyway.

Buttery, caramel goodness. Being a devotee of Great British Bake Off, I’ve watched many batches of caramel go into the bin. Carmel making can seem like a temperamental endeavor, and the bakers take it very seriously. Nancy stirs her mixture of butter, sugar, and golden syrup on the stove constantly making sure it doesn’t go to a boil as the sugar dissolves. Turned out all she was accomplishing was burning some pre-cookie calories, because you’re not really making caramel at all. In the masterclass, M.B. recommends just melting the butter into the sugar and syrup over gentle heat just until the butter is melted and no more. I suppose this is to preserve some of the crunchiness of the Demerara sugar and the rest of the caramelization will happen in the oven. (Not that I speak ill of Nancy! She took 2^nd place in this challenge, crunchy sugar or nay.)

I am not a huge fan of doing things on the stove. It just doesn’t feel very precise to me. If the recipe says to pre-heat the oven to 375°, I turn the knob and bing-bang-boom – it’s 375°. A recipe says to turn the stove on to a gentle heat, what is that? I just turned my stovetop to “3,” whatever that means, and kept an eye on the situation. The butter relaxed slowly into the sugar and syrup, and when there was just the slightest, sunny little knob of butter left, I pulled the pan off the heat and let the residual heat do the rest, just like Mary Berry had done in the masterclass.

This is your brain on #GBBO.

Floren-eighteen biscuits? Once my butter was totally melted, I dumped all of my chopped ingredients and flour into the delicious, warm, buttery sugariness, and a few stirs in I was hit with the beautiful citrus fragrance of the candied peel. At that moment I knew, however my Florentines turned out, they would taste amazing. I tried a few small pieces of peel by themselves before I started baking, and they were mostly bitter and tasted of sugary pith (and no, I don’t have a lisp.). Not appetizing. But the heat and the caramel-y sugar unlocked their inner orangey potential.

Once all of the ingredients were together, it was time to split the mixture into 18, but looking at how much mixture you get, 18 sounds like a lot of biscuits from the batch. All the competitors’ instructions said was to spoon the mixture on to each of the trays, but the they knew that uniformity was one of their chief concerns. Richard tried to stay optimistic, “So, I am using a spoon, which is a good start, isn’t it?” In the masterclass, Mary Barry suggested more or less eyeballing it, but I decided to go the route of Nancy, Diana, and Chetna and bust out the scale again. I weighed all of my mixture add it was 310 g, and I divided by 18, which comes out to 17.2 g – that comes out to about 17 g per biscuit.

I carefully weighed off eighteen 17 gram caramel mounds of nutty goodness and spaced them evenly on three baking sheets.

Mis-bakes were made… Before I popped the first tray of my little Florentines-to-be into the 350° oven, I gave each of the six a little pat-pat to flatten them out, as I had seen M.B. do in her masterclass. I gave them the prescribed 8 to 10 minutes until the edges were slightly browned but when I took the biscuits out they were – I hate to say it – dinky. They were petit, small, bijou, infinitesimal. This would not do! Mary Barry was quite the size queen when it came to her Florentines. In judging, she pointed out – before God and the other bakers – that Iain had small Florentines and he was stoic about it but I’m sure he was devastated. They weren’t lacy either.

My pathetic first batch. 😦

For the next batch, I gave each round a solid smoosh, so they were a quarter of an inch thick before sticking them in the oven. They came out slightly flatter and slightly lacier, but they still didn’t look like ones my hero, Mary Berry, made.

So for the third batch, I really gave those biscuit balls a pressing. I flattened those balls like they cheated on me with my sister. The third batch did turn out to be the best batch, but I was really baffled at why my Florentines were not as delicate and lacy as Mary Berry’s. It wasn’t until much later that it hit me. I forgot to factor that I was using a conventional oven, and not a Fan oven, so my oven was 25° too cold. (For clarification see the What the Fan??!! section of my Cherry Cake Post.) So the butter and sugar wasn’t getting hot enough to really bubble out and get really thin and lacy before it got brown and solid.

Merry Berry’s Lace from the Masterclass.

Hold it to the light – no lace!

Watch your temper. With my minuscule, lace-less cookies cooling on racks, it was time to bust out my brand new thermometer and temper my chocolate. The recipe calls for 200 g of dark chocolate, and the two Ghirardelli 60% chocolate bars were each 113 g each. Some quick math will tell you that I ate about 26 g of dark chocolate, which made me feel a bit better in general. I chopped up the remaining chocolate and created a bain-marie, which is when you place a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water. This is the kind of professional technique you too can learn from watching way too much food television. Ms. B., in her masterclass, had some bon mots for the temperature at which to melt your chocolate: “Remember chocolate melts in a child’s pocket, so you don’t need intense heat underneath.” 100 g of the chopped chocolate went into the glass bowl, I turned the dial to “child’s pocket” and monitored closely with my hand-dandy thermometer. Richard said that he tempers his chocolate to 53°, Mary said that around 50° would do, so I split the difference and heated my chocolate to 51°.

I pulled the glass bowl off the simmering water and then slowly added the other 100 g of chocolate. Kate said that the slower you bring the temperature down, the shinier your chocolate, and with as small my pathetic Florentines were, I would need to see my face in it.

The classic zigzag. Well, the zigzag couldn’t have been all that classic, because our intrepid bakers were stumped. Nobody is better at being bewildered by a recipe than poor Jordan: “I’m racking my brain, what the hell does that look like?” Iain put his chocolate in a piping bag and did kind of a swizzle zigzag over the top, which looked cute BUT IT’S WRONG! Chetna, who generally has impeccable instincts, piped her zigzags on to the chocolate, which looked nice BUT IT’S WRONG! Martha, sweet, Martha was one of the lucky few who knew the forking secret.

Mary Berry recommended painting on the chocolate with a pastry brush to keep the chocolate from oozing through the lace. Because of my poor bake, that wasn’t really going to be an issue for me, but I had invested in those swanky silicone brushes. After applying the chocolate and letting it set for a few seconds, I dragged a fork through the chocolate in a tight zigzag. The pattern didn’t really show up right away, but when the chocolate hardened there it was – classic!

Rrrrruffles have rrrrridges!

Did I make time? Hell no! Total whiff on that front. I was putting chocolate on my fourth biscuit when my one hour fifteen minute timer went off. Crushing. I’m sure if I were to have a second go at it, I could do it under that time – if I can add the 33% extra baking time for my stupid conventional oven.

The Gingham Altar

On a plate in a pile.

I don’t have Paul “Lazar Eyes” Hollywood and Mary “Tough Biscuits” Berry shaking down my Florentines. I just have the members of my Graphic Novel Book Club (The Ultimate Justice League of Extraordinary Graphic Novel Book Club) to try my wares.

Would it make the cut? Let’s start with the positives, shall we? They tasted really good. The brown-sugar sweetness paired with the bitterness of the chocolate, all wrapped in a citrusy bow was delightful. The nuts added crunch and the cranberries added tartness. They were definitely not burned, so if you closed your eyes it was a fancy biscuit. Also, my classic zigzags turned out pretty great on about two thirds of my batch.

Now for the negatives. Florentines are on their face, not an attractive biscuit, but mine are even less so. They look like the kind of thing your elderly cat would leave on the carpet. Not. Pretty. Mine are also wildly irregular in size from first batch to third. None of my biscuits are thin enough, so they’re would not get a crunchy “crisp!” from Mary Berry. But at least I didn’t take a cutter to them like Enwezor, right?

Yikes!

Richard took top prize on this technical bake, and Mary was practically beaming as she praised his near perfect Florentines, “Well done, Richard! They are the proper size, they were lacy, crisp, and that’s how they should be.” I would not have Ms. Berry singing odes to my biscuits. I would probably be down with the other Florentine failures, like Iain who’s biscuits were minute, over-baked and had no zigzags on the bottom and Norman who had chocolate bleeding all the way through. I’m going to tentatively put myself between Norman, number 10, and Iain, number 11, because, while my biscuits were all different sizes, they were not over-baked and I did have the proper decoration on the bottom.

So, not a good round. I would probably be on the chopping block for my sub-par Florentines, but lucky for me, this is all hypothetical! So, hypothetically I’d really pull it out in the Showstopper and live to see another bake. I would beat out Richard’s pirate scene made entirely out of gingerbread, complete with entwined sea monster, by making Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, demons and all, entirely out of tuiles. Paul Hollywood would just drop to his knees and just openly weep at the sight of it and Mary Berry would kiss me square on the mouth… with tongue.

My humble Florentines were a huge hit at book club, by the way. There were no leftovers and they only had good things to say about my humble cookies, served on a plate in a pile. Isn’t having friends the best?

I included the temperature and times for conventional ovens so you can avoid my pitfalls and you can hypothetically win this Technical Challenge.

The Recipe: Mary Berry’s Florentines

50 g of Butter

50 g of Demerara Sugar

50 g of Golden Syrup

50 g of Plain Flour

50 g of Candied Mixed Peel (25 g of Lemon Peel and 25 g of Orange Peel)

25 g of Finely Chopped Almonds

25 g of Chopped Walnuts

25 g of Finely Chopped Dried Cranberries

200 g of Dark Chocolate

1. Preheat your oven and prep your trays. Preheat your oven to 160° C Fan (350° F Fan, or 375° in a conventional oven) Cover three baking sheets in parchment paper.
2. Make the caramel sauce. In a saucepan, put your butter, Demerara sugar, and golden syrup. Heat gently, stirring constantly, until the butter is just melted.
3. Add your fruit and nuts. Add your flour, peel, almonds, walnuts, and cranberries to your caramel sauce and then stir until the fruit and nuts are coated and everything is a uniform caramel color.
4. Divide into eighteen and flatten. Divide the mixture into 18 scoops, well spaced on three trays with 6 cookies per tray. Flatten the scoops so they are like caramel coins.
5. Bake and cool. Bake in the oven for 8-10 (10-14 conventional oven) minutes until the have spread thin and gotten lightly brown around the edges. Cool on the pan until the cookies have hardened enough to transfer to a cooling rack.
6. Temper your chocolate. While your cookies cool, finely chop your chocolate. Melt half of the chocolate in a bain-marie until it reaches a temperature of around 50°. Remove your chocolate from the heat, then gradually stir in the other half of your chocolate.
7. Coat and decorate. Coat the underside of your cookie with chocolate using a pastry brush, then use a fork to draw the classic zigzag pattern. Give the cookies 5 minutes to set.

Technical Bake: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

It’s Time to Get Technical!

I can sure take a screen cap, can’t I? From the Masterclass Episode.

I used to consider myself a fairly proficient home baker. My favorite part of getting a party invitation has always been considering what kind of delectable baked treat I can make to impress my friends and distract them from how socially awkward I am. But I’ve always relegated myself to drop cookies or cupcakes, putting more thought into marginally inventive flavor combinations rather than fiddly decorations. I also have generally stuck to recipes that use all-purpose flour, because I feared having barely used sacks of aging flour just hanging out getting stale and taking up cupboard space. I’ve never done pastry, I’ve never done a yeasted bread, and I was content with that. And then I watched The Great British Bake Off.

Since the The Great British Bake Off bubbled up on my Netflix homescreen, under the American title of The Great British Baking Show, I’ve watched and re-watched the four available seasons much to the frustration of the Netflix algorithm, I’m sure. (“Again, Lisa? But I make such brilliant suggestions!”) Watching these “home bakers” produce an insane variety of impressive bakes under such tremendous pressure blew my mind. I was suddenly motivated to whack something in the oven, slap some gluten into dough, and hold a meringue over my head!

But one doesn’t simply knock out a brilliant showstopper like Christine’s shortbread Bavarian Clock Tower or Nadiya’s chocolate peacock after making only drop cookies and cupcakes. I need to diversify my baking skills and work myself up to Star Baker of my own kitchen. That’s how I got the idea of working my way through the GBBO Technical Bakes one by one, starting with Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake.

Why this cake to pop my technical bake cherry? (Ooh! Sue would be chuffed with that one!) Because it is the first technical bake for Nancy, Richard, Martha, Chetna and the other bakers in Episode 1 of Series 5, which for those of us across the pond is Season 1. My parameters on myself will be very different than those competitors, in that I’m giving myself literally every advantage. First and foremost, I’m going to have the complete recipe. I’m aspiring to making something worthy of the Gingham Altar of The Great British Bake Off, not Netflix’s American baking competition show Nailed It! (As much as I love comedian/host Nicole Byer, I’m morally opposed to that show on so many levels.) I’m also going to aspire to keep to the time and I’ll report honestly if I made the bake in time or not, but I’m going to keep baking the damn thing until it’s edible. I’m not in this to create food waste, though I know I’ll probably end up rage-binning a fail or two. (Like Iain’s Baked Alaska! Heartbreak!) I’m also going to re-watch the eps and take copious notes so hopefully I can avoid the pitfalls stumbled upon by the contestants who did these challenges in earnest.

The Brief: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

Sexy topographical cake shot from the Masterclass episode.

Our queen, Mary Berry, chose this particular cake over all other for the kick-off of season five, “It’s a great British classic, but it’s quite tricky to get right.” It all comes down to the jewels of that baked golden crown, the cherries. They have to be perfectly suspended in the cake and not all gathered at the bottom or off in one spot. Then there is is the lemon icing that needs to be the correct consistency so that it can create gentle drizzles down the side of the light golden brown cake. The bakers have 2 hours. I’ll give myself 2 hours and 11 minutes to make up for my slow, conventional oven, which I’ll get into later.

I pulled the recipe from the Great British Bake Off: Masterclass Series 1: Episode 1 in which Ms. Berry herself walked her humble viewers through this recipe.

Shopping List

Most of the tools and ingredients I either had or could get from my regular grocery store. There were a few items, however, that I had to order online or, in the case of ground almonds, improvise at the last moment.

• The Food Scale. British recipes call for their dry ingredients to be weighed rather than using graduated cups and spoons. I poked through amazon reviews before landing on this one – the Etekcity Digital Touch Kitchen Scale.
• The Ring Mold. Mary called for a 23 cm ring mold. I did not want to settle for a bundt pan because I liked the aesthetic of the smooth ring of cake. I ended up getting a 9.75” savarin mold.
• The Glacé Cherries. I wasn’t sure if a grocery store would carry these on the regular, so I just bought these from amazon.
• Caster sugar. American grocery stores carry hardly anything beside granulated and powdered white sugar. Caster sugar is a finer sugar without going full powder. I bought this on amazon, though my British friend told me later that she often buys super fine Domino’s sugar for her British baking, which is kept by the coffee and tea.
• Ground Almonds. For some reason, I thought I would be able to find ground almonds in a sack in the baking aisle of the grocery store. Silly me! I went to three different grocery stores, and while I found almond flour and almonds in all forms, but no ground almonds. I ended up buying blanched silvered almonds and then grinding them in my magic bullet. I ran them through a medium sieve to get the big almond chunks out.

My beautifully ground almonds! Like a sandy beach of yummy ingredientness.

On Your Mark, Get Set… Bake!

WTFan??!! Watching the show, they would declare oven temp using the term “fan.” And I’m all like, what the F is fan? Some quick googling around revealed that “Fan” refers to turning the fan on in your fancy-pants convection oven. Well, my pants are quite ordinary and the air in my oven is still as a tomb, so what’s an amateur baker to do? The answer is math. Let me get my pencil from behind my ear… oh wait, I’m not Richard!

It turns out that a Fan-assisted, or convection, oven lowers your oven temperature by 25° and decreases your cooking time by a third. There are LOTS of sites that help you convert recipes for a conventional oven into a recipe for a convection oven but us standard oven plebes are on our own. Mary Berry called for “160 Fan” for her Cherry Cake. I converted it from Celsius to Fahrenheit by asking Siri which comes to 320°. I then added the 25° to make up for my lack of Fan. So my bake temp was going to be 345° F. Mary said the bake time was to be around 35 minutes, so I increased the bake time by 33% and got 46 minutes. Boom. Simple! It didn’t take an aerospace engineer after all.

Prepare the Cherries. Our fine bakers in the tent were a bit baffled by how, exactly, to prepare the cherries, which was the crux of the entire bake. “Does she mean wash or does she mean cut? Well, I’m going for cut,” Jordan decided. Well, cut he did, chopping those poor cherries into oblivion so that they seemed to dissolve into his cake. Poor Claire and Richard left their cherries far too large so they all sunk to the bottom of the tin.

In the Masterclass episode Mary, revealed the secret of her suspended cherries, which is fourfold – cut, wash, dry, and coat. Paul Hollywood was aghast when Mary instructed him to quarter the 200 grams of sticky cherries, but I rather enjoyed the task. I would just line my little cherries up three like soldiers, then cut them in half, then line up the six halves and cut them again. Only after cutting them did I wash the syrup off, because Mary was very clear that if I washed before I cut the syrup released from the center of the fruit during cutting would be my undoing. After I rinsed them and dried them with a kitchen towel, I borrowed a tablespoon from my 225 g of self-rising flour to coat the cherries.

These cherries are as prepared as they’ll ever be!

All-In-One Method. It doesn’t get much easier than dumping all of the ingredients into a bowl and mixing them together. Mary used a stand mixer in her masterclass, but I don’t have a stand mixer. The fancy Kitchenaid stand mixers are prohibitively expensive and take up valuable kitchen space, but deep down in my little bake-loving heart, I desperately want one. I’m sure I’ll find an excuse in later bakes to take the plunge, but for this bake Norman and Nancy both mixed by hand. Norman’s cake was a little dry, but Nancy’s cake was the winner (Surprise, surprise!) so I figured that how the ingredients came together wasn’t all that important. I just used my hand mixer until the ingredients just came together and then folded in the cherries.

In the lap of the Gods! Once I had all of the batter in the mold and leveled, I whacked my cake in the oven to bake. I tried to clean up my baking mess while I waited, but I couldn’t help but look through the window of my oven every few minutes to see how my little, sweet cherry baby was doing. About ten minutes into the bake, I saw that my cake had risen about an inch above the tin. Catastrophe! My savarin mold wasn’t quite as deep as the molds the bakers in the tent were using, and the self-rising flour was doing its thing. I couldn’t very well fix that cake while it was in the oven, so all I could do was watch it bake and worry.

I ended up taking out the cake at about 43 minutes, after checking for doneness with a wooden skewer. The bottom may have taken on a bit more color than it would have otherwise, but when I leaned into the take a sniff, Sue’s “very sexy sauna” style, I smelled some sweet, lemony goodness.

I’m baffled by my jaunty angle on this pic as well.

Flipping out. After letting the cake hang out on the counter for 10 minutes, and checking that the warm cake had pulled away from the side of the tin, I flipped my cake out. I could see a few of the cherries had sunk, and were revealing themselves like little embedded rubies, but I could also see some cherries peaking through the side of my cake, so I hoped that my cherries were well-distributed. I threw the cake in the fridge and got on with my toppings.

Jewels of cherry goodness or pox of sunken doom?

Ice, Ice, Baby! While my cake was in the fridge, I toasted my nuts, keeping my eye on them (Unlike Kate, who had to bin a pan of blackened nuts). I then got on making my icing. I’ve had some experience making a thick icing using citrus and icing sugar, and I’ve made the gamut from thin and runny to thick and gloopy. I’ve found the trick is to adding the liquid slowly and whisking so that the icing makes a thick ball of icing sugar that clings to the whisk. Continue whisking and adding liquid a half tablespoon at a time until there is enough liquid that the icing just lets go of the whisk. I don’t dare add another drop of juice after that. I find that that makes an icing that is pipe-able and not so thin that it gets lost in your cake.

When I had about ten minutes left, I took my cake out of the fridge. It was still barely warm, but I figured with the thickness of my icing, it was cool enough to decorate. Besides, I was racing the clock. I paused for but a moment, asking myself to pipe or not to pipe? Nancy piped her icing in a perfect zig-zag over her cake, which impressed the judges. Mary complimented that her impeccable ice-job “proves that she can do things with precision.” My piping skills would probably prove that I don’t practice my piping enough but I thought that if I cut my piping bag an inch or so in like Chetna did, I could control my icing more than if I spooned it on the cake like Mary did in the masterclass. Ultimately, I went with the spoon. 175 g of icing sugar didn’t look like a lot of icing to me, and I didn’t want to loose any of that white, tarty goodness in the piping bag.

Am I pleased with my icing job? Eh, no, but it was time to place the cherries. Some of the bakers halved their cherries while others left them whole a top their cake. Jordan, who failed to read the instructions and did not reserve the 5 cherries for the top of the cake, was out of luck.In the masterclass, Mary had Paul cut the five remaining cherries into eighths, much to his chagrin, and then place those on the cake. I decided to stay true to her method and stick the shiny, red crescents onto my cake. I then, Martha style, picked the most perfectly toasted and shaped almonds to adorn my cake.

Did I make time?? Um, technically no, but if I had Mel and Sue breathing down my neck giving my 5 minute warnings, I totally would have. My 2 hour 11 minute timer went off while I was placing my almonds.

The Gingham Altar

I, of course, don’t have Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood scrutinizing my bakes, but I presented Mary Berry Cherry Cake to my parents’ for dessert after Easter Dinner. Dinner was delicious, but all I could think was “are my cherries suspended, or aren’t they?”

My cake in a place of honor next to the other carbs! Bonus points if you can spot where Brad nicked an almond, the bastard.

Does it make the cut? The moment of truth! Time to slice the cake! How do you like them cherries? Little red gems perfectly suspended in yellow cake. Relief! Admittedly, not all of the slices were as perfect as that one. Perhaps in the scooping and leveling phase, I could have been more cognizant that I had even cherries in each scoop, but every slice had cherries, so I’m going to call that a success.

The actual cake was lemony and yummy. The icing is super tart, which is to my liking. The bake maaaaaay have been a bit dry, though I couldn’t get my parents and husband to admit it, but I think my simple little cherry cake would not have put me on the chopping block that week. I think I’d be somewhere in the middle with Kate around number 6. She also had a fine distribution of cherries but was also had a cake that was a bit dry. She did a neater icing job than me, but her almonds were a bit caught, so I could be somewhere between Kate and Diana.

I would have been nowhere near Nancy with her “perfect nuts” (“Wow! To be commended on your nuts by Mary Berry!” Gotta love Sue!) , I’m pretty pleased with my theoretical standing in my first technical bake. I was relieved at the finish. Like Luis, I wanted to exclaim “Come on, Diana! High five me!”

The Recipe: Mary Berry’s Cherry Cake

Tools

Food Scale

23 cm Ring Mold (9.75” Savarin Mold)

Cake Ingredients

200 g of Glace Cherries (Plus 5 for decorating)

225 g of Self-Rising Flour

175 g of Softened Butter

175 g of Caster Sugar

50 g of Ground Almonds

Zest of a Lemon

3 whole large eggs

Icing Ingredients

175 g of icing sugar

Juice of 1 Lemon, strained

Flaked/Sliced Almonds

1. Prep your oven and pan. Pre-heat your oven to 160 C fan (320 F fan, 345 degrees F in a conventional oven) and grease your tin with butter.
2. Prepare the Cherries. Quarter, rinse, and dry the cherries with a kitchen towel. Borrow a tablespoon of flour to coat the cherries.
3. All-In-One Method. Add softened butter, caster sugar, ground almonds, lemon zest, 3 large whole eggs. Combine ingredients until well combined into a stiff mixture.
4. Cherry time! Fold in cherries.
5. Put in tin. Scoop in mixture and level.
6. Bake! For about 35 (46 in conventional oven) minutes until it is well risen and a pale golden brown.
7. Cool, flip out, and cool. Let the cake cool in the tin for 10 minutes until the cake is shrinking from the sides, turn out the cake, and then let it cool completely.
8. Make icing. Slowly whisk juice into the icing sugar a little at a time until it is still thick but will drip down the side of the cake.
9. Toast almonds. On the stove in a dry pan on medium heat, stirring constantly until they are slightly brown and fragrant.
10. Decorate! Once the cake is entirely cooled, cut the remaining cherries into 8ths. Ice the cake thickly, encouraging it to drizzle down the side. Sprinkle on toasted almonds and cherry eighths.