GBBO! Technical! Challenges! The! Home! Edition!
We are back! Sorry about taking season 16 off but health things made it not great to have a huge pile of desserts in the house but I've found a group of hungry eaters willing to eat my hopefully non-mistakes.
This season features a new judge and she leads off the season, but true to form for a British dessert this thing is swimming in sugar, 2.1 pounds of sugar for a cake!
The main british-isms in this on is "caster sugar" which is ultrafine sugar here, and they talk about single cream, which is 18% milk product which you can get by diluting some heavy cream. But I went the milk option as the 1.5 pounds of butter seemed like enough fat already.
I'm overall pleased with my results here. Decorations look ok but not stellar and seemed to wow the eating crowd. I need to get better piping equipment before the next challenge. I still can't make icing appear flat... I really need to go study some videos.
The main problem is that the cake was over baked. I did the minimum time, but due to having a slightly larger pan then called for (they wanted 20cm, mine is 22.5, which results in a 30% increase in top and bottom surface area) I should have tested at 25 minutes.
Ingredients assemble!
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| Note that large bowl to the left of the bake pans, that is all sugar. And that is just the sugar for the icing. |
Some action shots from the making process.
If I make this again, I'd be very interested in toasting the walnuts that are pressed into the sides seems like a real missed opportunity. And a bit of salt on them could make for a nice touch.
The hungry eaters gave it a thumbs up and are eagerly awaiting the next bake.
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