Bake Off: Natarajan vs Philipps - Week 1

So, to honour the new series of "The Great British Bake Off", and seeing a sabre has become just a little obsessed with it, I thought it might be a good idea to have our own week by week Bake Off.

The first show's theme was cakes (we're a little behind withe the TV series, but who cares??) 

Now, one thing to consider is that Bren hasn't a lot of experience in baking. In fact, he admitted he's never actually baked a cake before...

So of course, why not bake a cake each and invite our family and friends to taste them for us?!

We kept the identity of the bakers a secret for as long as possible, but here's how things turned out.

Nikki

I decided to make a white chocolate and raspberry loaf cake. I have made it once or twice before and it's always turned out well - and been very popular with the consumers! It's a fairly simple recipe:

125g butter

175g caster sugar

2 large eggs

175g self-raising flour

4 tablespoons milk

150g raspberries (plus extra to decorate)

Preheat the oven 180 deg C (160 fan) and line the tin with baking paper.

Beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until the mixture is light and fluffy. 

Add the eggs one at a time and beat after each addition. Add a tablespoon of flour with the final egg to prevent curdling. 

Sift in the remaining flour and gently fold in until thoroughly combined. 

Stir in the milk and then food in the raspberries, taking care not to squash them. 

All being well, you end up with something that looks like this:

Put in the oven at 180 C for 35-40 minutes and it should look a bit like this: 

While it was in the oven, I made the white chocolate icing: 

100g white chocolate

3 tablespoons double cream

110g butter

60ml semi-skimmed milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

500g icing sugar

Melt the chocolate by putting it over a bowl of hot water.

Beat the butter, milk, vanilla extract and half the icing sugar with an electric whisk until smooth. 

Gradually add the rest of the icing sugar and beat again until the icing is smooth and creamy.

Once the chocolate has cooled, add to the mixture. Add the double cream and beat well. 

When iced, it looks a bit like this, except this is when my normally foolproof recipe went wrong. For some reason, the cake collapsed! The outside of the cake seemed to crack from one of the raspberries in the outside edge, but then the whole left half of the cake sunk. We also think it might be possible that I didn't have the oven on a high enough temperature (book said 160 for a fan oven 35/40 min and skewer came out clean, so not sure why!) So, this is how my cake looked:

I captured it's best side!! Apparently, it tasted good!!!

Bren

Bren made a Chocolate Orange marble cake - rather complicated for his first attempt!

250g self-raising flour

225g caster sugar

4 large eggs

250g butter

Beat all of these ingredients together and then split into 2 halves. In one half, put 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 2 tablespoons of milk and beat.

Into the other half, put the zest from 1 large orange and the juice. Beat again. 

Put alternating spoons from each mixture into a baking tin, and when done run the handle of a wooden spoon through the mixture to create the marbling effect.

Bake in the oven at 160 C for 55 minutes.

Bren then made a chocolate ganache for the top of his cake.

250g Orange chocolate

225ml of double cream

Boil the double cream. Break the chocolate into small cubes. 

When the cream was boiling, pour over the chocolate pieces, leave for 2 minutes and then stir.

Spread on the top of the cake. Decorate with pieces of orange chocolate.

It looked good, it tasted good. Think it's fair to say that Bren won this round!

Next week: biscuits! 🍪🍫