Cake and Bake Show 2013

Back in September, myself and my ladies spent a day at Earl's Court sampling cake, cocktails and stalking Great British Bake Off contestants. Here are a few photos from our day...

A Selection of Delectable Stalls

 Showstopping Cake Displays

 

 

Intricate Cakes inspired by Fashion through the Ages

Winner's Bake Off Live featuring John Whaite and Edd Kimber

Me meeting Edd Kimber - so exciting!  

Chocolate and Raspberry Choux Buns

After my experimental period over Christmas - I've decided that choux pastry is my new favourite. I've got very fond memories of Choux Buns. It's something my mum and I would buy as a treat at our weekly food shop - the caramel ones to be precise. They are the epitome of decadence, naughtiness and never fail to send me into a delectable sugar coma. Having make Profiteroles and a Gateux St Honore, I decided it was time to try my hand at Choux Buns.

Chocolate and Raspberry Choux Buns

You're going to need a batch of choux pastry to start with. I haven't had a chance to write up my personal method yet, but I would recommend you follow this recipe from Delia:

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/baking/how-to-make-choux-pastry.html

For the filling....

Take one box of raspberries (saving a few for decoration) and place into a saucepan with half a cup of sugar and a dash of water. Heat this slowly until the sugar caramelises and the raspberries break down to make a coulis. Add a squeeze of lemon juice to taste. 

Sieve the coulis into a bowl or jug and put to one side to cool. 

Next it's time for the Chantilly cream. In a mixing bowl, pour 300ml double cream, 1 tsp vanilla paste, 100g icing sugar. Whisk until the cream is nice and think. Put in the fridge to chill. 

Melt 1 large bar of dark or milk chocolate (up to your preference) in the microwave, or over a pan of simmering water. Dip the top of each choux bun into the chocolate for a nice coating and put aside to set. 

Once the chocolate has set, spoon a good amount of cream into the bottom case of the choux bun, add the raspberry coulis and sandwich the chocolate covered top onto your mountain of goodness.

Rhubarb and Raspberry Pie

Guess what?! I bought a pie dish. A gorgeous, kitschy pie dish. I bought it from Waitrose and it was ten pounds and I don't even care one tiny bit. Look at my excited face. LOOK AT IT!

Watch out Great British Bake Off, I'm coming for you next. If the show was for bakers who give it a good go but normally end up with flour in their hair and manage to mistake salt for sugar... Oh wait, that has happened this year. Perhaps I might be in with a chance.

The pie dish was christened with a classic fruit pie - rhubarb and raspberry. Rhubarb is such an undervalued fruit. It's quintessentially British, the tartness is to die for and it's also great in savory dishes (Rhubarb noodles anyone?). The combination of this with sweet, delicate raspberries and a classic sweet shortcrust pastry was going to be a winner. Shortcrust pastry might be the one area of baking that I can actually make a half-arsed go at. No soggy bottoms here please.

Rhubarb and Raspberry Pie

This is a nice simple recipe, no blind baking or making any sort of fruit compote for the middle. If you wanted to buy shop bought shortcrust pastry and forgo the lattice top, then it may be the easiest pie ever.

Ingredients

Pastry:

500g plain flour

100g icing sugar

250g butter - chilled to the point where you can grate it

2 eggs

A dash of double cream

Filling:

43g Plain Flour
2 sticks of Rhubarb, diced
2 punnets of raspberries
250g Golden Caster Sugar
Freshly squeezed juice of 1/2 Lemon
1 tablespoon cold unsalted Butter, cut into small pieces
1 large Egg, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons Double Cream
Sugar for sprinkling

I'm not sure Paul and Mary would approve of the slapdash lattice top.

Directions

Start with your pastry. Sieve together your flour and icing sugar into a bowl. Having chilled your butter to the point of extreme solidness, you can grate this into the bowl also. This will need to be done with speed as the butter warms quickly and will become unmanageable.

There are two keys to a good shortcrust pastry. The first is to try and keep the dough as cool as possible, so when you're not working it, get it straight in the fridge. The second is to work it as little as possible. Doughs that are kneeded or mixed a lot become stretchy and smooth in quailty - doing this will make your shortcrust rubbery in texture. To get a nice crumbly, buttery crust, try your very hardest not to over mix it.

Once you have grated the butter into the flour and icing sugar, make the mixture into breadcrumbs by using your fingertips to rub the flour and butter together. Keep going until all of the butter and flour have been combined into a breadcrumb like consistency.

In a small jug, whisk the eggs and cream together. Add this to your breadcrumb mixture. Use a wooden spoon to bring the mixture together. Once it has started to form a dough, use your fingers to finish the dough. Don't overwork it!

Put your dough in the fridge for at least 30 mins.

In another bowl, add your rhubarb, raspberries, sugar, flour and lemon juice. Delicately mix these ingredients together as you don't want to smush your raspberries. A little bit of smushing is okay, don't beat yourself up about it. Put the mixture to one side.

Grease your pie dish and preheat the oven to 180C or gas mark 4.

Once your dough has chilled, take 2/3 of it (put the other 1/3 straight back into the fridge) and roll it out into a round shape that's big enough to cover your pie dish. Use flour on the work surface and rolling pin to stop the dough from sticking. The best way to transfer your dough from the counter to the pie dish is by using the rolling pin to gently roll the dough up. You can then unroll it over the dish and press down to fill the corners. Use a sharp knife to trim the edges.

Fill the pie with the raspberry/rhubarb mixture and put into the fridge.

Rescue your remaining dough and use this to make your topping. I went for a lattice top because I like to show off and then instantly regret it because I can't do it like a pro. If you want to do that then I suggest giving this Bon Appetit video a quick gander: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTHTt49e58w.

Either way, roll your remaining dough out and then either use the lattice method to top your pie or place the lid on top of your pie in the same way we transferred the base. If you have gone for a solid lid then make two little holes in the centre of the pie - this will let the steam escape and ensure that your lid doesn't puff up.

Use the beaten egg and cream mixture to glaze the top of your pie and sprinkle liberally with sugar.

Bake in the oven for 1 hour. Keep an eye on the top to ensure the pastry doesn't catch (blacken). If your lid is getting a bit browner than you'd like, make it a little foil hat and place it on top to protect the pastry.

Remove the pie from the oven and allow to cool before serving. Serve with lots of yummy cream!

Brilliant Breakfast

Today I want to tell the world how much I love breakfast. Don't worry, I'm not about to spurt out a load of cliched matriarchal advice about how breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it gets your metabolism going and ensures that you digest your food with as much pzazz as your body can manage - because we've all had enough of that in our lives. Plus, I've still got at least 8 years (I hope) before I'll have to start torturing my own kids with gems such as the importance of breakfast. 
Breakfast is seriously underrated, and I don't think that, until today, I've really appreciated just how good breakfast is.

Marc enjoys porridge.

At breakfast time, you can literally eat anything you want. It's the social norm to douse your body in greasy animal fat and to fry slices of stodgy white bread in said animal fat and stuff it down your gullet followed by an entire tin of sugary baked beans and a huge mug of whole milk, four sugar tea. Everyone loves a fry up, it's the king of breakfasts. Even when an "all day breakfast" is on the menu, part of you would still feel a bit guilty and dirty ordering one because of it's sheer volume of artery clogging goodness. But at breakfast time, there is absolutely no guilt. Because you need the energy... in fact you need as much energy as you can get - that's what your mother told you, right? A fry up is nearly impossible to turn down. Even if you just take the individual ingredients from fry ups - bacon, sausage, egg... people will still eat these for breakfast every day, almost because they feel they should. What's that you say BBC News? Eating bacon every day is going to give me cancer? I'm an adult I'll eat as much fucking bacon as I want, I'd inject maple smoked bacon straight into my veins if I could, I'd roll it up and smoke it if people weren't going to look at me like I was mentally deranged. Breakfast is the only time of day when you can eat juicy Gloucester old spot sausages and thick cut smoked bacon with the glistening juice running down your face and genuinely feel proud of yourself.

Alex enjoys a fry up.

 It's not just fry ups that make breakfast amazing. It's that you can say "I'm going to get a latte and a big sugary almond croissant on the way to work today" and it will constitute breakfast. Do you know how much butter goes into a croissant? To make the pastry, it's rolled out, slathered in an entire stick of butter, rolled out again and this process is continued until all the butter in the world has been used. Then for chocolate or almond croissants, it's stuffed with so much sugar that you are basically getting the same high as a class A drug. But that's the best part, at breakfast time it's totally normal to eat these things - because you tell yourself that's what the French must do. The same goes for danish pastries and muffins. If I want to feel even more smug about eating sugar treats for breakfast, I'll help myself to a 'skinny stem ginger muffin' from Starbucks, which is absolutely covered in icing but it says skinny so I'm basically going to lose weight while I eat it.

Breakfast is also a great excuse to be super pretentious. Sometimes I want to be one of those people who do yoga and eat greek yogurt with granola and fresh berries for breakfast and put linseed on everything but I don't think my bank account or my relationship could take the strain. Or at the weekend I might have toasted English muffins with steamed spinach, poached eggs and homemade hollandaise sauce. It's breakfasts like these that make me feel extremely smug, like I'm leading a life where I get to stay in my fluffy white bed on a Sunday morning in my light and airy loft apartment reading The Guardian and having my feet rubbed by Rob while I cuddle my pet daschund and eat crumpets ladened with so much butter I think I might die. 

For the normal everyday, clockwork breakfast eater, there's cereal. I'm not sold on cereal to be honest. Sometimes I love it and have to purchase 3 different boxes with my weekly shop but they always go stale so quickly - yes I know you can buy those airtight cereal dispenser things but who really thinks about buying those when they're at the shop. What I think cereal brings to the table is the "fun" aspect of breakfast. Cereals in crazy shapes, cereals that taste of chocolate, cereals that have toys inside (who can say they still wouldn't get excited about finding the toy in a cereal packet), cereals like Weetabix. Weetabix are great because it's impossible not to try and see how many you can eat before they absorb all the liquid in your body. They do also taste like hay, which is, you know, a bit of a downside. Cereals are also laden with sugar, and if you're eating the ones that aren't, then you're just wasting your life.

Rob enjoys peanut butter TOO much.

Did you know, that breakfast can also be incredibly romantic and cute? I didn't either until I discovered the grapefruit situation. Grapefruit is a funny one because it's a very acquired taste. My mum has been known to eat grapefruit in the past and put sugar on it. This I don't see the point of now because it just spoils the amazing taste of grapefruit... This is coming from a girl who will literally eat a whole lemon. But the best part about grapefruit for breakfast is that you cut it in half. I've noticed Rob's parents do this when staying at their house many times and it is, without a doubt, the most adorable ritual of food sharing I've ever seen. It got me thinking, what happens when one of them is away?! What happens to the other half of the grapefruit?! It made me want someone to share my grapefruit with. It made me want to force feed Rob half a grapefruit each day just so that we could be as cute and other couples would envy us and our harmonized daily grapefruit sharing. 


To sum up, breakfast is amazing. Breakfast is the best meal of the day because you can eat anything and by the end of the day you will have used the calories. This is the time of day when you should be eating the most and tastiest food possible. So you should listen to your mum, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Just as long as it's not porridge.