Bake Off Blues

And no I'm not about to moan and whimper about how the BBC has lost the rights to show The Great British Bake-Off. There are several reasons for this.

 

1 - The program, judging by the current series, has totally lost the plot, and I'm not sure that I would have bothered watching another year, whoever broadcast it.

2 - Unlike what seems to be half the viewing public of Britain I do not worship Mary Berry as a god, Paul Hollywood I can take or leave and  I am not a fan of the presenting style of Mel'n'Sue. I especially dislike their constant use of the seaside humour pun, which almost everyone else in the world seems to think is central to the success of the program. All I can say to that claim is Not for Me.

3 - The BBC have moaned and whimpered and whinged enough about this on their own behalf.

 

4-- There are more important things  to worry about. Really people! with the world as it is should this actually be a front page story in newspapers who claim to be serious?

No, the bake off blues under consideration here are my own personal ones. Regular readers may recall that I was planning to take a recipe from each week's program and try it out myself. In theory this is a great idea, but how has it worked out in practice?

 

Not well, has to be the answer. First off was Lee's St Clement's drizzle which, again as regular readers will recall,  was not a success.  Next up I made these from biscuit week

These are Benjamina's Iced Chocolate and Orange Zest biscuits. They don't look like hers, because she made hers in the shape of a bunch of flowers and iced them appropriately, but I don't have a cutter shaped like a bunch of flowers and it did say in the recipe that a 6cm round cutter would do just as well.

 

I can't call these a total failure because texture wise they were, rather surprisingly , spot on. They had that 'snap' that Paul and Mary look for in a biscuit and they were nice and crumbly when you bit into them. But gentles  there's the rub, as Shakespeare didn't quite say, because the fact is they didn't taste very nice, due to having far too much cocoa in them and therefore being more than a little bitter. I hasten to add that they had in them the exact amount of cocoa as per the recipe, but for our taste that was just too much.

 

Well by this stage  I was starting to wonder if perhaps there was something wrong with our taste buds and perhaps this bake a Bake-Off thing a week wasn't such a good idea, a suspicion confirmed by the universe over the next few weeks of the program.

 

After biscuits it was bread week. The bakers started off having to produce a chocolate loaf, which was a non starter for me because I have long held the view that bread dough and chocolate do not go together and I have recently given up eating chocolate anyway for health reasons. The technical challenge was something previously unheard of, a sort of German steamed bun which looked anaemic and horrible and which I would never dream of cooking, and the showstopper task was to make a plaited loaf using three different sorts of dough. A non-starter of a week.

 

Next up was batter week. This was trailed as a Bake Off first which is hardly surprising because I know very few bakers who would think of batter as the stuff of baking (except for the use, in North America, of the term batter for a cake or muffin mix). I was amazed, while watching the first round to discover how difficult some people find it to make Yorkshire puddings. Again I contend Yorkshire pudding is not baking, but cooking, although it is one of the few bits of cooking I am deft at, having learned it at my other's knee. The technical challenge was lacy pancakes. Lacy pancakes? What is the point of a lacy pancake? What are you supposed to do with it? The point about pancakes is surely the filling; pray tell me, what sort of filling can you put on a lacy pancake? I say on since obviously to wrap it up and put a filling in would be to defeat the object of producing a heart shaped lacy pancake in the first place. Finally they got to make churros with a dipping sauce; again I say, that is not baking . That is cooking, in my mind. I might stretch to include the churro as a baked good of sorts: I would deny it on the  grounds that it is deep fried, but there again so are doughnuts... However sauces are not baking, sauces are cooking. So of the three things on offer for an amateur baker to give a go to, one I could do, one I thought was pointless and one I thought wasn't really baking. So again I didn't bother.

 

This week was pastry week. It included miniature Danish pastries, and as it happens Danish pastries are on my Project 60 list, but when I do them I'll be using a recipe from my tried and tested M & S Good Home Baking book, since it has never yet led me to bake anything I didn't like the taste of once it was in my mouth - unlike Bake Off which is currently running a 100% record in that direction.

 

Next week incidentally is being trailed as 'Botanical Week' whatever that is - like I said, they appear to have lost the plot.