Last week's episode was all about pastry. For the Signature Bake the contestants made savory parcels. My favourites were definitely Martha's Mini Beef Wellingtons and Chetna's Crispy Lentil Kachoris. Next up was the Technical Challenge in which the contestants were asked to make Kouign Amann. For the first time in the history of Bake Off, none of the bakers had even heard of the Technical Bake. Keep reading to find out about my hilarious attempt at recreating these delicate little pastries! Last up was the Showstopper Challenge where the bakers were asked to produce some delicious eclairs. Luis's Stars and Stripes Eclairs were incredible! After the questionable Kouign Amann debacle, part of me now wishes I had attempted his recipe, but I'll come back to that later! First check out my Bake Off Innuendo of The Week:
As I've mentioned before, and indicated in the the title of this post, I decided to tackle the Technical Challenge and bake Kouign Amman. Now this week's bake actually guest stars one of my best friends and 'bad bitch', Fionnuala. I was staying in her flat in Swansea over the weekend and she very kindly suggested we baked together while I was there. Fin is an amazing baker and bakes a lot, so this was perfect. Neither of us wanted to bake a savoury pastry so the Signature Bake was a no no. Initially we were thinking of creating our own Showstopper eclairs, but then we realised we didn't have a piping bag so that quickly went out the window! Instead we settled on Paul Hollywood's Great British Bake Off Kouign Amman recipe. The only catch? Fin avoids gluten so they had to be gluten free. In hindsight, this definitely influenced the success of the bake! I'd like to refer to this as complication number one/alarm bell number one!
After buying all the ingredients, and assembling all of our equipment, we quickly realised we were missing an essential tool for the recipe; a mixer with a dough hook. This initiated complication number two! Nevertheless we persevered and vowed to carry on regardless of this new alarm bell!
After the initial resting of the dough we attempted to incorporate the butter. You can see from the photos that the constancy of our dough was questionable to say the least! This was alarm bell number three. Lesser bakers would have abandoned ship at this point, but nooooooooooooooo we decided it was best to battle through even though the bake was literally the crumbling around us!
When we eventually arrived at the final turn of the pastry where the sugar is added, I have a feeling we didn't roll our pastry thin enough before sprinkling the sugar on. That was complication number three! At this point Fionnuala and I were pretty much ready to throw the towel in, but as the finish line was in sight we decided there no harm in attempting to bake this strange concoction. In the meantime however, Fin decided to bake some avocado gluten free chocolate brownies so at least we got our fix of a delicious successful bake!
In the end we didn't quite achieve the delicate layered pastries Paul's recipe was supposed to produce! The Kouign Amann were quite dense and had slightly charred edges! They tasted good but were incredibly rich due to the obscene amount of butter in the recipe. This was definitely the least impressive of my Baking The Bake Off bakes however, I definitely had the most fun baking it! Fionnuala and I couldn't stop cracking up at the state of our dough!
I hope you enjoyed my latest adventure in Baking The Bake Off! Leave me a comment below with your thoughts on the episode, or with any baking disasters you've experienced!
I like the perserverance! When I'm at university and baking for my housemates, I have to taken gluten-free into consideration, so I know exactly how difficult it is to adapt normal recipes, and it does make for some interesting final products. You've done well though I think to produce actual things, and they might not quite be Paul Hollywood level, so long as they were edible, that's all that matters!
ReplyDeleteI didn't bake this week and instead dedicated a whole post to my baking mishaps if you want to see them all!
Jennifer x