Mary's Chocolate Orange Tart - GBBO Bakealong

Chocolate week on Great British Bake Off would once have seen me coming up with some elaborate creation, no doubt a lavishly decorated cake. But I don’t have the luxury of a lot of time any more and wasn’t really in the mood for cake - I fancied making a dessert that would keep for a couple of days. It seemed appropriate to use a GBBO recipe book and having a flick through, I settled on Mary Berry's chocolate orange tart from the Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking.

The chocolate filling is a mixture of chocolate, sugar, butter, flour and eggs - so it's no wonder that it seemed quite cake-y to me. But the trick is not to overbake it and leave it slightly wobbly in the centre - I always have my mum's voice in the back of my mind at times like that, warning me that it isn’t cooked (or half raw, as she would probably put it) which explains why my brownies are usually overbaked! 

There is also an orange filling that you make in a similar way but using egg yolks not whole eggs, white chocolate, and the grated zest of one orange. But for some reason oranges were completely out of stock on my online shop that week (perhaps as we go into lockdown in winter, people are worried they will get scurvy?!) so I made do with a few drops of orange essence instead.

The idea is to swirl the two fillings together inside your pastry case to create a marbled effect. I think this looks quite pretty, don't you?

It is delicious served warm and also very good served cold a day or two later - if it lasts that long!

Mary Berry Lavender Shortbread Biscuits

The area around where I live in Surrey is known for its lavender – in fact, it was once known as the lavender capital of the world. In the summer there are beautiful purple fields stretching into the distance. Apparently Yardley, a British toiletries brand that is known for lavender talcum powder, ties back to the area but eventually cheaper French lavender flooded the market and a lot of the lavender fields in Surrey were given over to housing estates.

 

Now, there are two main operators of the lavender fields, at least that I'm aware of. Mayfield Lavender is a commercial enterprise, but still a family-run farm; they are open every day through June, July and August where you can buy lavender plants and products. I've never been and it's not clear to me from their website whether you can actually pick your own lavender or not - I would assume so, but can't be sure!

The place that I've preferred to go to over the last couple of years is the non-profit allotment run by Carshalton Lavender. It's a volunteer-led project and they have an annual harvest one weekend a year (this year it was at the end of July) where you can go and pick your own lavender. They charge a reasonable £5 for a large bunch and £10 for a bucket-ful, and there are stands selling food and drinks, cakes and lavender products. That's me in the photo above picking lavender.

My husband and I went with some friends who live locally and I picked a large bunch of lavender, as I was planning to do various things with it from baking to making lavender bags (if I ever get around to using my sewing machine!).

It was my father-in-law's birthday not long after and he really likes shortbread, so I decided to make him some lavender shortbread with local lavender, and parcel a few pieces (as he isn't meant to be eating much sugar) up as a gift.

I used this Mary Berry recipe - lavender shortbread seems a very Mary Berry thing to make. It was very easy to make though you do need to factor in chilling time for the dough - I actually did mine overnight.

Here's the lavender that I picked:

I made up the dough and added the lavender

Make into a cylinder, roll in brown sugar, wrap in foil or parchment and chill in the fridge until firm.

Slice into rounds and bake in the oven

The finished product

 

 I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat at the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi.

Mary Berry's Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake for Picnics

Copyright Caroline Makes dot Net

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to Castle Combe in Wiltshire, where there is a racing circuit. This was a special event where you could drive your own car around the track - it's not like some events where you can go as fast as you like and need a helmet and special race day insurance, as there is a pace car that sets the speed, no overtaking is allowed and you stay in the order you start in.

Once or twice we got up to 90mph in my husband's Aston Martin - we were there with the local branch of the Aston Martin Members Club - but we were following behind a lady who sometimes drove at 90mph and sometimes at 25mph. Which might have been understandable on the corners, but this was on the straight. She was very erratic which didn't make for a pleasant drive!

The next time we got to do a few laps, the Lotus car club went first, and then just after we started, I wondered aloud why there was a Lotus at the front of the group of Astons. My husband said it had been part of the group in front but was so slow, they had all finished and it was now sat in front of our group, holding everyone up. The Lotus did a nice sedate 30mph all the way around the track for three laps. I'm not a speed freak and was gripping the side of my seat as we got up to 90mph earlier, s the fact that even I was frustrated and shouting at the car to hurry up - since nobody was allowed to overtake - was saying something!

As I knew it would be a long day out I had taken some food with us, and the day before baked this lemon drizzle cake from a Mary Berry recipe.

 

The recipe is available on the BBC Good Food website and is very easy to follow. You only have to mix a few ingredients...

 

Spread it in a tin and bake.....

Make a lemon and sugar syrup which you then drizzle over the cake while it is still warm

The drizzle meant the cake was incredibly moist and very lemony; I don't think I've ever made a simple lemon traybake before and I can't understand why not as it was so good!

 

I'm sharing this with Treat Petite, hosted by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat the Baking Explorer as 'anything goes' this month.

 

 

I'm also sending it to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, as the theme is afternoon tea.

 

 

August is national afternoon tea week so I'm also sending this to Charlotte's Lively Kitchen as she hosts The Food Calendar linkup.

 



Chocolate Yule Log

We had a bake sale at work in conjunction with Save the Children's Christmas jumper day  and I wanted to make something festive, so I decided on this yule log. Unfortunately the final photo that I remembered to take shows the log on a piece of baking paper rather than the nice white plate it was displayed on later. It also looks a little messy but that was the intended effect as tree bark is not smooth!

I used a Mary Berry recipe which you can find here.

You need:

4 eggs

100g caster sugar

65g self raising flour

40g cocoa powder

600ml double cream

300g plain chocolate

Preheat the oven to 200C. Beat the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer.

 

Beat in the flour and cocoa powder

Line a Swiss roll tin with baking parchment and pour in the mixture.Spread it right to the edges - it will be fairly shallow but this is what you want.

Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. To turn the cake out of the tin, place a piece of baking parchment over the top and holding it in place, flip the tin over and place it on a work surface. Carefully peel off the piece of baking paper that was lining the tin from the top of the cake.

Use the baking parchment to roll the cake up as tightly as you can. I found this recipe worked really well as the cake did not break up or even crack slightly; in the past when I've made a Swiss roll it was a softer cake (this is a little more dense) but it cracked all around as I rolled it.

Leave to cool while you make the ganache.

Bring half the cream to the boil in a small saucepan then remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate broken into pieces.

Stir until the chocolate has melted and then leave to cool. When it has cooled a little, transfer to a bowl and place in the fridge for an hour or two until it is really thick and stiff.

Whisk the rest of the cream in another bowl. The recipe I used did not say to add sugar or sweetener, and it worked well as overall the cake was not too sweet. But I think if you wanted to appeal more to children I would either use milk chocolate instead of plain, which is more bitter, or add sugar to the cream.

When the cream is stiff, unroll the Swiss roll, spread the cream over in a thick layer and roll the cake back up.

I started to spread a little of the ganache on the cake and decided it wasn't thick enough so returned it to the fridge.

When the ganache is really thick, spread it on thickly. Don't worry about smoothing it; alternatively you can make it smooth then run a fork through it to make lines but I prefer it this way.

 Most months I take part in Food 'n' Flix, a challenge where participants watch the same film and make a dish inspired by that movie. This month the challenge is hosted by Elizabeth at Law Student's Cookbook and she has chosen the Christmas movie Elf.

 I have to confess to never having seen the film before as I'm not really one for Christmas movies and it seemed a bit childish. It is definitely one of the better ones of the genre and both funny and heartwarming - in fact it has all the elements of a good Christmas movie and I think children would love it. I don't entirely understand why some of my friends in their 30s think it is such a brilliant movie though!

The basic premise of the film is that a baby in an orphanage crawls into Santa's sack one Christmas eve when Santa is delivering presents, and ends up being taken back to the north pole. Buddy is brought up by elves and believes he is one of them, despite being four times their size. Eventually he learns he is a human and ventures to New York to find his father - who of course is a 'bah humbug' type of guy. He has various adventures and even falls in love and converts his father to the Christmas spirit - and indeed "saves Christmas".

There is one very funny scene where Buddy is with his 'real' family in New York eating spaghetti for dinner. He explains that elves like to stick to the four main food groups -  candy, candy cane, candy corn and syrup, and pours a bottle of syrup over his spaghetti. The next morning he decides to make breakfast as a surprise for his family - and serves them spaghetti with syrup. Later, he eats his own breakfast - spaghetti with syrup and sprinkled with candy and crushed pop tarts. I normally like to make a dish that is actually featured in the movie when I take part in Food 'n'Flix but I had to draw the line when it came to spaghetti with syrup and pop tarts! Instead, I decided that this yule log would tie in with the film as it is suitably festive, so I am sending it in to Food 'n'Flix.

I'm also sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter we have chosen this month is X, and we are accepting Xmas bakes.

I'm also sharing this with Four Seasons Food, hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Eat Your Veg. Their theme this month is festive party food and a yule log is a great centrepiece for a Boxing Day buffet in my opinion.

Christmas is of course the theme for this month's Calendar Cakes, hosted by Rachel at DollyBakes and Laura of Laura Loves Cakes. I am sending my yule log over to them for the challenge.

This month's Let's Cook challenge is Christmas party food so I am also sending my yule log over to Simply Sensational Food who is hosting the challenge.

Sachertorte

A Sachertorte is a chocolate cake invented by Franz Sacher in 1832 in Vienna, Austria, for Prince Wenzel von Metternich. Sacher was the 16-year-old apprentice to the Prince's chef, who had to step in when the chef fell ill one day, and invented this cake. Not bad for a teenager! Later Sacher's eldest son Edward opened a hotel and the cake was a speciality of the Hotel Sacher.

According to Wikipedia and other websites, December 5 is National Sachertorte Day - presumably in Austria, though it doesn't say. I didn't know that, but it's perfect timing for this blog post!

I hit upon the idea as soon as I saw Ros had randomly selected the letter S for this month's Alphabakes (a slightly easier letter for those of you who grumbled good-naturedly about J last month!). I've never eaten a Sachertorte before, let alone made one, and while I've spent a lot of time in Germany (including living there twice), I've never been to Austria. So I wasn't sure what this was supposed to taste or even really look like, though I knew that the cake always has the name "Sacher" piped on top in a scrolling script.

I found a recipe on the BBC Food website which is by Mary Berry - though strangely there wasn't a picture so I had to look it up separately on Google Images to check what it was meant to look like!

You need:
140g plain chocolate
140g butter, softened
115g caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
5 eggs, separated
85g ground almonds
55g plain flour

For the icing:
6 tbsp apricot jam, sieved
140g plain chocolate
200ml double cream
25g milk chocolate to pipe the word Sacher - though I used ready made chocolate piping icing.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease a 9 inch loose-bottomed cake tin and line the base with a circle of greaseproof paper.

Melt the chocolate in a bain marie or, as I did, in a microwave.

Beat the butter until soft then gradually add in the sugar - this is a cinch in a Kitchenaid.

Add the vanilla extract - it came out of the bottle much faster than I expected so I used a little too much!

Add the melted chocolate and beat again.

Separate the eggs and add the yolks

Fold in the ground almonds and the flour

Mix again - the mixture will be quite thick at this point

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff.

Fold in a third of the egg whites to the chocolate mixture, then fold in the rest.

Pour the mixture into the greased and lined tin. Bake for about 45 mins.

Pass the jam through a sieve so it is totally smooth, then heat it in a small pan. When it's fairly runny, use a pastry brush to spread over the top and sides of the cake.

To make the ganache, melt the chocolate in a pan with the double cream

 It will become thick but still runny

Allow to cool a little, then spread over the top and sides of the cake and leave to set

 To pipe the word 'Sacher' on top I melted some milk chocolate and put it in a piping bag with a very fine nozzle - but the chocolate was too thick to come out of the nozzle! Has anyone tried piping actual chocolate before and can give me any advice? Instead I decided to use this pouch of chocolate-flavoured designer icing from Dr. Oetker, but as I've said before, for the life of me I can't work out how to get the piping nozzle to stay on. Like last time, I had to hold it in place with one hand while I squeezed the icing bag with the other - not ideal but it did work!

I tried to copy the handwriting style that is traditionally used on Sachertorte; this isn't quite perfect but I was happy with it.

The finished cake. It was quite a dense texture but lovely and chocolatey, and the ganache on top was excellent.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blogging challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she randomly selected this month is S. We've got a prize this month so it's definitely worth entering!

I'm also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked, as their theme this month is chocolate.