Another thing that I've never heard of before. Apparently once upon a time it was a pie with eggs inside, and the eggs were cut so that there was yolks and whites in every piece - a tube of eggs in the middle.
Now-a-days it's more like a picture pie, or secret pie - the pies are filled with layered and arranged fillings.
I bake my Danish all rye bread once a month. :-D It takes several days... A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry about the different cereals, and I find it fascinating. Spelt is pretty obvious, it behaves almost like wheat. Then one can add flavor with oats. I could make my oat bread from season 1, and just replace the wheat with spelt. It wouldn't be much different.
Showstopper: Dairy-Free Novelty Cake with Vegetables
Think beyond the obvious... so no carrot or gourgette :-D
Beetroot chocolate? No, I want to make my carrot cake, with almonds. It's not your ordinary carrot cake.
7 eggs, separated 300 g sugar 50 g flour pinch of salt 1 1/2 tl baking powder 2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp ginger 300 g grated carrots 1 tsp lemon juice 300 g ground almonds
Cream the yolks and 3/4 of the sugar (225 g) mix the dry ingredients and add to the yolk mix with carrots and lemonjuice. Whip the egg whites with the rest of the sugar into a hard foam. Fold into batter with the almonds.
Bake in 200C for about 15 minutes. Lower the heat to 180 and bake about 40 minutes more, until the cake is done. Let sit for a short while and turn the cake out on a cooling rack. When cool, cut into three layers and fill.
I usually make a banana cream cheese filling for this cake, and cream cheese frosting, but this is a dairy free week. I think I'll use this Swiss carrot cake as guide and use sugar glaze.
And then use marzipan to decorate it.
Vegetable garden is the obvious idea.
But it's so obvious several of the competitors made it, so, no :-D Maybe a fox, then.
biscuit joconde, buttercream, ganache... it's very sweet, so I understand the classical flavor of dark chocolate and coffee. But I don't like the bitterness. So... what to use to fight the sweetness of the buttercream, joconde, white ganache? Lemon? Lemon and blueberries? Make a white Opera cake with blueberries. Like the Finnish flag :-D
Suet pudding... again, I don't know enough of English traditions to be able to be much innovative with this. So I suppose I'd make apple hat or a savoury pudding... I wonder what I would use to fill it. Chili? Maybe Bacon Badger, just because it has a fun name :-D
Palmiers carre is a Korean thing - at least I haven't seen them anywhere else. The puff pastry is simply layered up to 6 times, cut into slices, baked and dipped in chocolate. There is no sugar or spices in it, it's just puff pastry. The Koreans love it.
I didn't have the slightest idea what a tea loaf is. Apparently it's fruit packed brioche.
I don't like fruit packed bread.
So... what is my favorite dried fruit? I like apples, actually. I like the color of apricots, even though I don't like the flavor of them. And I read that almonds and Chinese five spice go well with apples, so let's do that :-D Although... I have read somewhere that some spices stop the dough from developing well, so maybe take cardamom in stead. Finnish traditions, and all that :-D And cranberries. More color.
I also found a Paul Hollywood recipe while researching, and it has apricots and marzipan. Yum. I LOVE marzipan.
"European buns, you have 40 minutes to start your bake tonight, four hours tomorrow"
What?
"You chill the dough for 12 hours"
Oh, dear. I never knew I have done it all wrong for 40 years! No-one ever told me, everyone I know does it the same way I do!
And looking up bun recipes all over the Europe; classic brioche in France, Schnecken in Germany, the Scandinavian buns in Finland, Sweden, Norway... all done within 4 hours.
I do prove my Challah for at least 12 hours, and it's a brioche dough, but this? WTF?
Brita pie is a variant of the Brita cake (called Pinocchio cake in Sweden, and The World's Best in Norway. Beloved cake has many names :-D It's surprisingly unutilized in the rest of the world.)
The idea is to bake a golden cake with yolks and top it with meringue made with the whites. It is seriously worth the name "world's best".
whip the whites to hard peak, with 1 1/2 dl sugar. Foam softened butter and 1 1/2 dl sugar. Add the egg yolks one at a time. Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and add to the butter mixture little by little with the milk. Mix thoroughly, but don't overmix. Spread the batter on oven tray. Sprinkle the berries on the batter. Spread the meringue over the berries. Sprinkle with almond flakes. Bake in 175°C/350°F oven for about 20 minutes. The cake should be done, the meringue slightly browned and crispy on top. Decorate with fresh berries, eat with whipped cream.
Now, there's a question... krokan, kransekage, or some architectural adventures?
Krokan is practically almond paste that has been softened with egg whites to be spritzable, and then one spritzes curlicues that are then assembled into a tower. Sort of croquembouche.
Kransekage is a classic Danish feast pastry built of different size rings (kranse), so that you get a cone shaped tower. That, too, is almond based dough. (You don't need the discs Glenn had, the Danes use different sized ring shaped pasty cutters.
To me these things are so tightly woven to Scandinavian wedding traditions, that I have difficulties in even seeing them as cookie towers :-D It took Glenn's Helter-Skelter to remind me of that that's exactly what these are. So had I been competing in the actual event, I would not have thought of either, but gone with the architectural thing. Tower of Babel might have been an interesting idea... or Semiramis' hanging gardens. Or Mississauga Absolute Towers. That would have been easy, because it's basically just oval discs stacked on top of each other :-D Or the Uspenski Cathedral...
And there's also like 12 different types of biscuits/cookies/"small cakes" - there's cut cookies, drop cookies, ice box cookies, molded cookies, spritzed cookies, no bake cookies, bar cookies, meringues, twice baked, rolled, wagers, deep fried, waffle cookies... it would be wonderful to make the Uspenski Cathedral with different types of cookies, using the toughest at the bottom, and the most delicate ones as roof and so...
One of my favorite pies is cherry pie, but if I'm going to make cherry strudel for Showstopper, I can't make cherry pie as the other challenge :-D Though, of course I could.
The thing is that this is very British. We don't have the same pie traditions.
We used to make blueberry pies. Finnish blueberries, I suppose they are called bilberries in English. Sometimes rhubarb, or apple. I like lemon pie... I wonder how that would work in a double crusted British form. :-D
This bilberry pie looks absolutely delectable! Just add decorative crust.
I could also make "queen" mix. In Finland, a jam made with blueberries and raspberries is called the Queen jam.
I would make a Hungarian cream cheese cherry strudel, but HOW to make it a showstopper? It's just a strudel! Tanghulu cherries and almonds, marzipan fruit?
I immediately thought of the Finnish dessert "pappilan hätävara", "the emergency dessert of the vicarage" (yes, it literally means that :-D You see, the vicarage could be visited at any moment, and they had to have something to serve, and even though they did bake a lot at a vicarage, there were times when the cakes and whatnots were a bit stale, not too pristine and fresh, so the kitchen whipped up this dessert to be served to the unexpected guests. It is trifle, made with crumbs of all kinds, softened with some juice or cordial or sugar water, layered with jams, jellies, conserves and fresh fruit and whipped cream, and behaves like layer cake :-)
Now, as most priests back in the 18th and 19th century were either trained in Sweden, by people who were trained in Sweden, or from Swedish families (like my ancestors), this recipe originally came from Hansa. It's called "angel food" in Sweden, and "veiled farmer girl" in Norway, Denmark, and Germany. (I almost translated it to "veiled bond girl", because I couldn't remember what "bonde" was in English :-D I think I like that :-D) (The veil is like the bride's veil, and not like something to hide behind.)
In Denmark this "farmer girl with veil" is also known as aeblekage, apple cake. One is supposed to make apple sauce and roast Danish rye bread with sugar to make the "cake layers", but now-a-days people use sweeter breads for the "cake layers". I find the apple sauce too soft and mushy to really enjoy this dessert, but my husband loves it. On the other hand, he likes mushy foods (and is Danish ;-))
I think this Danish version might work well for this challenge, though I would make apple compote.
And I think I'd replace the traditional rye bread crumbs with rye cookies. Maybe soften them a little with whisky. Rye whisky. :-D That should work beautifully with the flavors.
Showstopper: 24 Petit Fours: 12 Biscuit-based, 12 Sponge-based
Biscuit based? Sponge based? I was thinking of making Alexander pastry, and cut it into tiny cubes, but... I don't think that's either biscuit or sponge based. I suppose it is sort of a shortcrust pastry, so it's "biscuit based", and I think they'd like some of the traditional mini cake cubes. I think maple syrup flavored cake with buttercream, and brown sugar fondant cover with a bit of caramelized bacon on top. :-D
I really like the variation, and the idea of using bagel toppings on grissini :-D
Everything Bagel seasoning: Just mix poppy seeds, white and black sesame seeds, very finely crushed onion and garlic flakes, and sea salt or finger salt. Everything one uses traditionally to top bagels. :-D
I would also like to make tricolori grissini - divide the dough into three parts, and knead in spinach powder in one part, and tomato powder in another part, and then twist these three colors together, sort of like candy cane pattern :-D (And I had forgotten Ruby had the same idea. Maybe it was in the back of my head all the time ;-) Uh, doesn't matter ;-))
There's a lot of ways to decorate a bread. I'm thinking about the Korovai, but I'm not that fond of the "dead dough". I'm fascinated by the stenciled and scored breads.
But what about the flavors? Maybe za'atar babka? :-D Maybe with a cream cheese swirl in the middle? This one sounds really delicious as well: Savory cheese babka. Ah, bacon...
I love it how everyone evolves during the seasons of this show. Paul was somewhat an a-hole during the first season, I remember the row he and Mary Berry had about what level they should be judging. Mary Berry saying these are HOME bakers, not professionals, Paul Hollywood almost expecting professional bakery level quality. I mean, of course everything should be as equal in quality, the flavors should be right, the techniques unquestionable, but perfection of decoration and precision? No. Professional bakers must spend time to learn to do things like piping and chocolate work, home bakers focus on different things.
So... if I was a sandwich cake, what would I be? I'm Finnish, so to me "sandwich cake" means only one thing; savory one :-D
In this context it means two layer naked cake. I would like to make a Victoria Sandwich cake inspired by the Japanese fruit sandwiches. Now, one of the styles is to create all kinds of flowers or geometric patterns with fruit, but that isn't possible with a cake - I can't force people to cut the slices exactly the way it needs to be cut to create those patterns... but maybe one could. I could draw the cutting lines on the top of the cake the way they make these illustrated swiss roll skins. A simple geometric pattern divided into 10 (as that Victoria Sandwich recipe is meant to be cut into 10 pieces), and use that to create the flower patterns in the filling... and just so that the cake isn't too bland looking from outside, add a layer of something, like mango curd, on the cake between cream and cake... like this sandwich here. You see the thin yellow layer there.
I don't think the judges would have liked it :-D
Things that I notice:
- get the sugarwork, chocolate work, and piping game down. The judges are quite impressed with small touches like that. - I keep looking at all that hair being shaken above the bakes and wonder how much hair the judges eat. I'd make myself 10 40s inspired dresses from different baking related fabrics, and aprons to go with each one, have a 40s hair and makeup, and wear a scarf over my hair while I bake. :-D
- do a bit more. The judges appreciate effort, even when it fails.
Now, Death by Chocolate is two layers of chocolate brownies, with chocolate ganache, mocha meringue, and chocolate mousse in between layers, then topped with chocolate ganache and mocha mousse. They have changed the recipe a little after the restaurant was sold. It is now glazed.
I think I want to experiment with mirror glaze / acrylic pour techniques... I want to know how much one can combine the two, and how it would look on a cake :-D
I suppose some chocolate work needs to be done as well. I love David's Black Forest Floor cake from season 1.
But that's too much on a mirror glaze cake, so maybe just one flower :-D Or maybe make bones from white chocolate, as it's "Death by Chocolate" :-D
Now... to me this is very difficult, because I don't consider that a Sachertorte. Firstly, the chocolate is too light. 39% baking chocolate isn't even chocolate. There shouldn't be any ground almonds in Sacher. The chocolate and apricot keep it moist. Her cake didn't much raise. It looks the same height it was when it went into the tin. You should be able to cut the cake in two. It is not glazed with ganache. The original Sacher torte you buy has only sugar, apricot jam, eggs, chocolate, wheat flour, butter and water.
I like this Epicurious' recipe with Dieter Schorner. There's 4 parts to this, so go to YouTube to see all of them.
Showstopper: British Summer Petits Fours; meringue, sweet pastry, and sponge based.
Uh. I hate thinking about this! I'll make mini pavlovas filled with berries, bébés, and Neapolitan fondant fancies. One layer chocolate cake, one vanilla and one strawberry, with chocolate ganache between chocolate and vanilla, and strawberry jam between vanilla and strawberry. Apparently it's more important they are all the same size, than that they are small and dainty.
My favorite Danishes are the maple pecan Danishes. Then I like the glazed apple and cinnamon Danishes. And then to try something new, Xuixos. Now, that cannot obviously be the real thing, because one has to use the same dough for all three variants, but inspired by it; a closed Danish with Catalan cream filling.
The world's best cheesecake is Junior's cheesecake, they say. Now, I don't think there's time to actually bake a cake for the base... and there seriously isn't time to let the cheesecake set after baking, which I think is really badly done by the program. They should have made it as showstopper and done it day before so that it could have rested the night, but... alas.
I would put in canned peaches in the cheesecake, I love peach cheesecake like that. The German Pfirsichkuchen with quark. :-) That's a Finnish Easter tradition, btw. A peach pie with quark.
Here's how Paul Hollywood makes a chocolate roulade.
Showstopper croquembouche
This is a miniature croquembouche, but aren't those roses just lovely! And the pink icing! Martha Stewart made a pink croquembouche by using pink craquelin topping on her profiteroles. :-) Really cute.
Signature family pie with flaky topping (rough puff, flaky pastry...)
Apparently rough puff and flaky are the same thing - a quicker way of making puff pastry. The butter is in bits instead of a slab.
Puff pastry and Viennoiserie dough are different in that Viennoiserie is made with yeasted dough. So you don't really make Danishes with puff pastry, and not with just yeasted dough, but yeasted AND laminated dough. That makes them so flaky and buttery and substantial. Puff pastry is basically just filo dough :-D
I would make cabbage pie with rye puff pastry top. Also, try shaving or grating the butter into the flour.
Cabbage filling: you need to fry the crap out of the cabbage, to get it as buttery and melting in your mouth as I want it to be.
Chop cabbage - as much as you need or want. I make this dish with one cabbage head, and then we eat it for as long as there is stew to be eaten :-D It just gets better as one reheats it. Brown it in butter. Lots of butter. I use about 100 grams of butter for each head of cabbage. Put the browned cabbage in a dutch oven, with a little bit of butter on the bottom. Pour over bullion, molasses and whole all spice berries. I use about 20 berries for one head of cabbage, 2 bullion cubes (1 per 1/2 liter), about half a cup of water, and 2 tablespoons of molasses. This is a family recipe so everything is approximated and measured in handfuls and squeezes :-D Fry about 300 grams of minced meat, I use half pork and half beef, and pour over the cabbage. Let stew a couple of hours, until the mixture is practically brown mush. :-D Now, for this challenge, I wouldn't be able to let it stew enough, because there's only 2 1/2 hours, and the puff pastry needs to be done, and the pie baked, so I would start with chopping the cabbage and making the puff pastry as the cabbage fries.
I think I'd make a lingonberry meringue pie, using lingonberry cordial instead of lemons, but make it like lemon meringue pie. Or maybe use this cranberry meringue pie recipe.
Cream butter and sugar. Add egg whisking it in. Mix the dry ingredients and mix in the batter. Roll the dough into a log and cut into 30 pieces. Roll into bolls, put on a baking paper on the oven sheet, and push down with a floured fork. Bake in 200C about 10 minutes.
Though I think those are way too simple and... basic :-D
Maybe sandwich them together with something nice. It's a very neutral biscuit flavor, so it goes well with anything. I think I'll fill it with Nøtte (which I remember as a combination of caramel and hazelnut butter, but apparently there isn't any caramel in it, it's just sweetened hazelnut butter made with roasted hazelnuts. But mine would be caramel (or kinuski, to be honest) and hazelnut butter. About 50% of both.)
I think it's hilarious that they have ginger snaps as technical challenge, because oat snaps were about the first things Finnish and Swedish kids bake, because it's so dang easy! And even though they are often let to dry flat, they are as often let to dry curved or "cigarred". Yeah, you have to move fast.
mahogany (caramel au beurre salé, noix de coco et compote de mangue) So... perhaps replace 1/3 of the almonds with coconut, pulse it a bit finer than shredded coconut, but not to coconut flour Fill with salted caramel butter cream and some mango jam.
I am sorry but at the age of internet, you cannot excuse your failure with "I really have no idea what they are supposed to be like, what the mixture is supposed to be like, what the finished product is supposed to be like".
Tasty.co has a very informative video about macarons. They go through basically EVERYTHING. And you can see very clearly what the mixture is supposed to be like, what the finished product is supposed to be like.
Clean the rose petals by cutting off the white part, and then cut the petals into small pieces, or shreds.
Place them in a bowl and cover with cold water. Let rest in the fridge for an hour.
Drain the petals and pat dry with a kitchen towel.
In a small saucepan, combine equal amount of sugar and water. Add some lemon juice and cook until the sugar has dissolved.
Add rose petals, stir, and let simmer for 15 minutes.
Remove from the heat and add some rose water. Not more than a tablespoon, it's very potent stuff.
To make the pastry:
mix the flour, butter and sugar along with a pinch of salt in a food processor until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the egg yolk and a little cold water, and pulse until it comes together to form a dough. Bring it together with your hands and roll flat with a rolling pin into a disc shape. Chill in the fridge for 1 hour.
Heat the oven to 180C/350F.
Roll out the pastry to the thickness of a £1 coin, and cut into discs to fit the bun tin moulds. Carefully shape to fit neatly, then prick the bottoms lightly with a fork. Line each with a small piece of foil and fill with baking beans. Blind bake for 20 minutes.
To make the filling:
Grind the pistachio nuts in a blender until ground but not completely fine. Place both the butter and sugar into a large bowl and cream with an electric hand whisk until light and pale. Add the eggs one at a time and mix well. Fold in the flour and the pistachios.
To compose the tarts:
Remove the pastry cases from the oven, take out the beans and set aside to cool. Add a small amount of the jam to the pastry cases and top with the pistachio filling - don't overfill. Sprinkle over pistachios and bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until lightly golden.
When I have watched this episode earlier, I thought they should have kicked Rob out and kept Simon, but Simon overbaked his lemon tart, so there is absolutely no excuse for him burning his tarts the last day. He should have been extra vigilant about that.
Chocolate work, again... Now, which chocolate cake? I do love devil's food cake. And as the only celebration I'd make a chocolate cake for is my own birthday, that's what I'll do. I love salmiakki. In Finland we have this amazing chocolate bar, made with milk chocolate and filled with salmiakki filling, and it's one of the best things ever.
So I'm cordially going to ignore the fact that British taste isn't that into salmiakki, and would probably find the combination abominable. It's my cake. :-D And for a fair warning, I'm going to decorate it as some sort of Goth wedding cake from hell, with sugar flames and dripping blood.
- actually, it's not cupcakes. It's "small, exquisite cakes" for formal afternoon tea, of bakery quality. Not entremets, but cakelets.
I don't like the American style cupcakes. I like the small European cakes, like Mazarins, Runeberg's tarts, congress tarts... but I suppose Mazarins and congresses are, well, tarts, and not cakes. Runeberg is a miniature cake, though. But I suppose it's too simple for Paul's taste. He expected something one would see on the shelves of a French or Japanese patisserie. I like the idea of single portion upside down cakes.
Final showstopper: 24 miniature tarts, 24 scones, 24 choux buns, and 24 finger sandwiches on self baked bread
I like things simple. My favorite tea sandwich is the cucumber sandwich (cucumber and butter, not cream cheese), my favorite scone is plain. I love tarts. And I think I would make choux swans, because of how they reacted on David's swans. What about black swans of chocolate choux pastry? I personally don't like chocolate choux pastry, I like the canvas of plain choux, but it might be interesting enough for the finale.
I think Mari Bermain's Florentine tarts looks nice, though maybe one might want to make something fruity, as the rest of the options are pretty bready. (I like bready, but this is about impressing the judges... and I think the Brits are proud of their summer berries. And I am really good at making Crème Pâtissière ;-)) (Also, Mary Berry was missing fruits. They do give color to the tea tower.)
I wonder if I would have been eliminated for making calla lily sandwiches in stead of finger sandwiches? :-D
I made these, and it was hard to get the to stuck shut. If I'd do them again, I'd use clothespins to keep the lily together at the stem. I would also give the cream cheese more flavor. They are really pretty. I suppose one could remove the darker green skin and seeds from cucumbers, salt and dry it, and chop finely, and mix with cream cheese to make these cucumber sandwiches... sort of like tzatziki, perhaps?
Also, serve clotted cream and maybe some unusual jam flavor for the scones? I like the black currant flavor. Not too sweet, but not too bitter either, like red currants can be, and not so bland like strawberries can be. And they do have a lot of flavor, almost spicy flavor.
I'd make the Finnish cabbage pie. It's really delicious and has this wonderful pie crust with sourcream. It's a slightly flaky dough, and a bit sour, because of the soured dairy, but goes very well with the cabbage filling.
You'll need 150 g of butter 5 dl flour 2 tsp baking powder 200 g sourcream, natural yoghurt, creme fraiche or something else like that, unflavored soured dairy.
Mix flour and baking powder. Mix the butter in so that you get this rough sandy texture. It's good if you have bigger bits of butter. Mix into a dough with sourcream. Add half first and then more as needed. You might not need all 200 grams. The dough doesn't need to be smooth and well mixed, it's good not to mix it much.
Form the dough into a rectangle, and put in the fridge to set, well covered.
Filling:
1 kg of cabbage 2 onions 2 tbls butter 2 cloves of garlic 200 g cream cheese (actually it should be processed cheese spread) 2 eggs 1/2 dl molasses 1/2 tbls marjoram 1/2 tbls tarragon 1/2 tsp black pepper 1-2 tsp salt
Shred the cabbage and chop the onions. Fry it in butter, first let the onion soften a little, then add the cabbage and fry until the cabbage softens. Add the cheese. You can also add grated carrots, or conserved mushrooms (In Finland, especially Eastern Finland, we pickle wild mushrooms, and this is used in cooking. You rinse them first, let the water run off, and then chop them. I don't like mushrooms, so there won't be any mushrooms in my cabbage.)
Let the fry cool down, then add the eggs, and flavoring. Taste the filling and adjust the seasoning. Pie filling should taste MORE than what you want it to taste, because it will be closed in a rather bland pastry shell that cuts the flavor a little.
In Finland you build the pie on a baking sheet. You roll the dough into two pieces of about the same size and shape. Lift one of them (slightly bigger) on the sheet, top the filling on, like a pizza, leaving a little edge (about 2 cm or half an inch) empty. Egg wash the edges, lift the other dough sheet on it and crimp the edges. You can use extra dough to decorate the pie. You can use a pie dish if you want to.
Do the egg wash and dock with a fork. Bake in 200°C/400°F for about half an hour.
I would love to use Finnish ingredients. Cloudberries, maybe rowan berries, lingonberries...
Maybe one could make sort of cheesecake tart with cloudberry glaze, or something like that.
Kinuski with lingonberries. Have a layer of the tart lingonberries on the bottom of the shortbread tart cases, and then put a layer of caramel over it... or maybe fill the case with red berries, lingonberries, red currants, raspberries, wild strawberries, and pour over warm caramel... decorate with a cream rosette.
Maybe I could use the rowan berries in the savory canapés. :-)
I think I'd like to make palmiers. Maybe something with reindeer. Mini choux buns with reindeer filling? And then something with Finnish fish... or chanterelles. Or I could fill shortcrust pastry shells with leipäjuusto, let it melt, and top with some cloudberry jam. Though would it be too sweet?
