This challenge was for a sweet yeasted bread, traditionally served at teatime, often flavored with fruits and spices. My loaf is a cherry and chocolate chip bread. I used glacé cherries to try and recreate the flavors of one of my mom's favorite confections, chocolate-covered cherries, in a tea bread.
The challenge for this episode was to produce a traybake with layers of complementary flavors and good textures, each element made from scratch, and cut into identically sized squares or rectangles. I chose a pastry-based recipe, a rhubarb frangipane tart.
Ideally, I would have waited until the pie was completely cooled to cut into it, but what tastes better than a piece of warm, freshly baked pie? Cutting into it too soon meant that the piece fell apart and the juices ran all over the bottom of the pie plate when I took it out, but I didn’t care! The flavors of the peaches and the warmth of the spices (especially the ginger) made for a great-tasting pie.
Despite its humble beginnings, the trifle has become quite an elaborate affair. Nothing to be trifled with, really. It is a feast for the eyes as well as the palate — with layers of sponge or biscuits, fruit and custard, and either jam or fruit-flavored gelatin, all topped with whipped cream or meringue and decorated with fruit or nuts or crumbled biscuits.
The popularity of grissini spread throughout Italy and even as far away as France, where Napoleon, in the early 1800s, established a stagecoach courier service between Turin and Paris to provide him with a regular supply of what he dubbed “les petits bâtons de Turin” (the small sticks of Turin). For my grissini, I chose a basic recipe, adding my own touch by using a homemade “everything bagel” seasoning mix to flavor the breadsticks.
Orange and cranberry is a classic combination, and the spices make the whole cake smell and taste very Christmasy. Having just discovered cranberry curd this holiday season, I wanted one more excuse to incorporate it into my baking repertoire.
For this signature challenge, Paul and Mary specified a pithivier with a savory filling. It being the end of summer, I had plenty of tomatoes, a few sweet peppers and a freshly made batch of pesto on hand. I love how roasting vegetables brings out the sweetness by caramelizing their naturally occurring sugars. It does the same to garlic, mellowing its flavor.
The challenge—to create three different kinds of petits fours (like the canapés of desserts) using different baking techniques—seemed like a test of all that the bakers on The Great British Baking Show had learned so far. For my petits fours, I made chocolate macarons with mocha ganache filling; lime, mint & white chocolate mousse tartlets; and raspberry–chocolate mousse in chocolate cups.
For my crackers, I dug back into the recipe file where I keep most of my mom’s old recipes. I remembered a cracker she used to make—a wafer-thin pastry seasoned with cheese and dotted through with sesame seeds.
Because I love cinnamon rolls, and I grew up with my mom’s recipe for cinnamon rolls, I wanted to use her recipe. But I wanted to put my own spin on it. A couple spins really. I know it's not a revolutionary combination, by any means, but a maple-bacon cinnamon-cardamom roll sounded like a little bit of heaven to me, so I set out to create it!
