Fire & Sonic

This is quite late because I was hella sick!

Onward to Week 3 – The Cob Loaf.

(Series Rundown)

This is plain, simple, white bread, shaped into a round loaf.

 

Once again, I read through the complete recipe, watched the episode that included the Cob, and watched a walk through video. If you’ve never watched Paul Hollywood knead dough, you’re missing out on life. It’s, well, it’s amazing (He always does it with one hand. So intense).

Step 1 – Wash the dishes. I like a clean kitchen to cook in, I also like a happy husbeast, so I always keep it clean.

 

I love the process of kneading dough. It feels like old magic. Well before we had the science of baking down, a long lineage of people applied trial and error to figure out what did and didn’t work. They didn’t know they were developing gluten, they just knew if you beat the crap out of it, it got better. When I do this, I feel like I’m reaching for the Crone. It’s a connection, an awareness of history.

 

 

I didn’t expect herself to be that good at kneading but she was a natural! We gave it a good working over and got it nice and smooth, with a capital smooooo……

 

 

The most interesting thing I learned during this bake was how to shape a loaf. Unlike quick breads, it’s important to shape yeasted breads so they rise in a particular direction.

 

 

For this loaf I folded it inwards, in a circle, to make sure it rose up and didn’t flatten out as it bakes. The shaping aligns the gluten and thus the structure of the loaf. It’s more important for a “free form” loaf than one in a tin.

 

 

After the second rise (another hour to mess around/clean the kitchen) the loaf is coated in flour and then cut on top. Then it’s baking time.

 

 

While the outside looked great, the inside was not done.  I was baking and cooking dinner, so I had pulled my loaf and thrown in porkchops.  The moral of the story is that time pressures don’t go well with baking, especially when it’s your first time with a recipe.

 

 

So it didn’t go well.  I baked it a bit more, and it was fine as toast. But I knew that I had not met this technical challenge.

So I baked it again the next day. The whole thing, the kneading, the rising, the flouring, the cutting, the folding. All of it. I baked it ten minutes longer and I got…

 

 

 

The moral of this week’s baking? It’s gonna suck sometimes. I’m gonna screw up. Then I’m gonna learn and go right back after it.

The bread was delicious, by the way.

-FH

Next time on the Great Bake On – Cornish Pasties!

Great British Bake Off Series 1, Episode Two

Technical Challenge – Paul Hollywood’s Scones

All right! After last week’s good to eat but definitely totally wrong Victoria Sponge, it’s on to Scones. In the spirit of getting better at this, I actually watched the instruction videos on how to make these _before_ I tried the recipe! A huge problem with this project is  that for most of these bakes, I have never tasted a “proper” one. I can judge if I think something is good, but I can’t really speak to whether it is up to Mary Berry’s standards. But I’m not letting that stop me.

British Scones are different than US Scones. The ones in the States tend to be triangular and very sweet. The British ones are round, having been rolled and cut, and are not as sweet.

 

I got the ball rolling (ha!), greased and papered a pan. I could have used silicone but I went with parchment. I don’t think it makes a difference. Sonic and the Outlaw came over to play Berry and Hollywood for the day.

I knew that the handling was key. You don’t knead this dough, as you want it to stay very soft and fluffy. You “chaff” the dough, which is a gentle folding that incorporates the rest of the flour and smooths the dough without developing too much gluten.  Hollywood has you use bread flour (strong flour for the Brits) (if you follow this path you will need to research both terms and unit conversions, teaspoons are NOT the same in the US and the UK). This _could_ develop a lot of gluten, so you need to be on guard! It is not kneading.

His other super pro move is to keep back 50 grams of the flour from the mix for the chaffing, to dust hands, board and dough.  This ensures that you don’t screw up your ratios by adding flour during the chaffing, you have just enough.

Once the dough is chaffed and smooth, it is gently rolled out to about 1″ thick (the width of my thumb) by the enthusiastic three year old you keep in your kitchen.

(Don’t worry, to cute keeps coming next week as well). Then it is cut with a biscuit cutter. You can roll the dough a second time to cut more out without too much worry but the third roll is a bad situation. The three scones in the middle of the pan were from the third rolling of the dough. They tasted fine but they lacked height.

Martha Stewart advises (and I agree, so that’s weird) that you should just cut them out of the dough to avoid any wastage if you aren’t worried about looks.  I’ll do that next time. They were very pretty, but I’d rather have more sconces than pretty scones.

I then put the egg wash over the top, taking care to keep it off the sides, as it can arrest the rise.  I think when I do these again I might wait until after the rest to add the egg wash. It’s not a biggie, but I think the shape of the tops was a bit small and wonder if waiting on the egg wash would allow the tops to expand in line with the bodies.

After the rest, during which they puffed up a bit, into the oven. And…

How do they taste? They are what we in the US would call a baking powder biscuit with a hint of sweetness.  They make an excellent vehicle for butter and jam and the fun sorts of cream that one can get in the UK.

This week was a victory. I feel very good about scones. We demolished most of the batch over a couple of pots of tea. A+ would bake again.

Next week, the Cob!

-fh

Great British Bake Off Series 1, Episode One

Technical Challenge – Mary Berry’s Perfect Victoria Sandwich

So, Victoria Sponge or Victoria Sandwich, a quintessentially British cake, closely tied to High Tea. Not a cake many US people would have made or eaten. It looks simple, and tasty!!

Pretty easy to set up, small ingredient list. Self rising flour? Weird. It’s just all purpose flour with salt and baking powder added. I looked up a recipe and knocked it up really quick.

I knew from the get go I had a problem.  My butter was not room temperature and it needed to be creamed with the butter. Bonus – I go to the gym on Saturday mornings and my arms were wrecked.

(Sonic – You had T Rex arms! You can’t cream butter with T Rex arms!)

I should have just used my mixer but the recipe was an all in one (throw everything together) rather than a cream then add flour recipe.  I would have been better served to diverge from the recipe to fix what I knew would be a big problem than to stick to a recipe that would be problematic.

My mix was not good. I was so worried about over mixing, that I didn’t get it anywhere near smooth enough.

I did remember to deploy my oven thermometer and actually get my oven fully preheated and to the correct temperature.

I got the sponges into the oven. My tins are 9 inches across and the recipe calls for 8 inch tins.  I didn’t adjust my baking time. I was also cautious about opening the oven early as cakes _will_ fall if they get a cold draft too soon during baking.

They were golden! But unevenly so. The outside edges of each sponge were darker. I need to spin and adjust bakes to keep them browning evenly (look how much I’ve learned already). I let them cool and then applied jam. It seemed like a lot but next time I would use more.

I didn’t have caster sugar. Sometimes this is ok and granulated will work.  This is not the case for decorating the top of this cake. It was grainy and weird. When we cut into the cake it was crunchy. Eeek. It should be soft! The crumb was large and very irregular.

Now, it tasted fine but it was really not correct. I guess I’ll have to make it again!

-fh