The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '25 - Week 3

It’s Bread week! 

Consistently, I get very excited for bread week. For once, I might get to make a not-sweet technical challenge. (Considering my distinct lack of a sweet tooth, doing this bake-along every year is a particularly stupid endeavour. Also for a lot of other reasons.) And yet, here we are. Don’t get me wrong, I love a doughnut. But god, what I wouldn’t have given to just knock up a loaf of bread this week. Admittedly, I’m doing that now anyway, because baking-along doesn’t free me from my needing-bread-in-the-house obligations. 

It was a not entirely unpredictable week on Bake Off. Things were underproved, because timings are a nightmare to manage in a hot tent where ingredients behave unpredictably. The showstopper was, once again, incomprehensible. I’m going to be incredibly controversial here - I do not think bread should be served in tiers. There. I said it. 

And then, the technical - doughnuts! Pushing the limits of what I’d call bread (is bread literally anything with yeast? Is Marmite bread?) but delicious, nonetheless. Also, deep-frying means we can’t technically call this baking. All semantics aside, let's see how I fried. (I’m sorry. I’m very tired.) 

The Rules:

• I have to recreate, to the best of my ability, the Technical Challenge. 
• I will not be looking at any kind of recipe. Each week, I have to do this purely with some context from the show and my own store of baking knowledge. 
• The time limit: The maximum amount of time I’ll be allowing myself is the time given to the bakers. However, as I don’t want to be wasting food and I don’t have a vast team of producers and camera operators to eat my bakes, I will sometimes be scaling my bakes down. When that happens, I’ll be reducing my total time accordingly. 
• The judging: I do not have handy professionals available to judge me. I have, however, considered purchasing some fabric to make my own gingham altar. I will be judging myself, and I’m a raging bitch so I won’t be particularly lenient. My partner will be scoring as well, and probably his office mates if there’s too much cake for us to consume in one sitting. 
• The equipment: I like to think I’ve got the sort of decently-stocked kitchen any skilled home baker would have. If a technical challenge requires specialist equipment I don’t have, I won’t be buying anything for the occasion. I will be MacGyvering it, and adjusting my handicaps accordingly. I do not own a deep-fryer, but I refused to let that stop me. 

Bread Week - Doughnuts

Now, I’ve never attempted to make doughnuts before. It seems like arcane, dangerous knowledge. If I know how to make doughnuts (which, theoretically, I now do) then I can make, and have, doughnuts whenever I want. Doing this bake-along might explain why I have an arse the size of Jupiter. 

Not knowing how to do something has never gotten in my way for long. I know I’m making an enriched dough, so I warm up some milk and whisk in some yeast, and a decent bit of honey to get the yeast waking up. According to the show, I’m meant to be using bread flour and self-raising flour. I do not have the latter, so I chuck in some baking powder. Probably not enough. In theory, I know the right ratios to turn plain flour into self-raising flour. In practice, those ratios like to whisk themselves out of my brain at inopportune moments. 

Once the yeast is doing that cursed, frothy-looking thing, the wet stuff goes in the mixer, along with an egg and some melted butter, and I leave the dough hook to do the hard work of kneading. 

Here is where I start getting thoughtful about timings. 

The time limit is 2 hours, 45 minutes. I need a decent amount of time for the dough to rise. The milk has to be warmed, the yeast woken up, the kneading has to happen. When I start dividing up that time limit, things start looking a little tight. Now, admittedly, needing to use a pan to warm the milk has slowed things down - I don’t own a microwave. Also, if I’d had fast-action yeast, I could have skipped that waking-up step. Based on those slow-downs, I assume the challenge timing might still be fair. 

The dough looks, well, like a dough, and with the first twenty minutes of the challenge down, I stick it in a warm spot to rise. I would like to give it an hour, but that simply isn’t an option. 

I have, at least, got time to make some icing. The glaze first - just icing sugar, milk and vanilla extract. I use oat milk, since that’s what I have, and it comes out a weird colour. I accept this. 

I flavour the pink icing with strawberry syrup, and experience some flashbacks to the fondant fancy challenge. I’m glad, at least, that I have another week free of buttercream. 

After forty minutes, all I can allow for, my dough does look like it’s risen. I get on with cutting out doughnuts as quickly as possible, and with one hour and thirty-five minutes left on the clock, the second prove starts. 

As mentioned, I don’t have a deep-fryer. I’ve got a large casserole dish, a hob, and willpower, and that will do. I start heating up the oil. It takes a while. Obviously, during this entire frying process, I have a damp tea-towel to hand. I, like many others of my generation, have been scarred by relentless PSA’s warning about the dangers of chip-pan fires. I have never experienced a chip-pan fire. 

After half an hour, my doughnuts look slightly puffier. Because I am a genius, I’ve saved my doughnut holes (insert dirty joke here) and use one to test the oil. It’s hot, the hole cooks. A delight. I start frying doughnuts, two at a time, and only manage to burn myself once. A win, all around. It takes about fifteen minutes to cook the lot, and now there’s nothing to do but wait for the bastards to cool down. Except there is. I fry the donut holes, and immediately chuck them in cinnamon-sugar. They taste like those terrible little doughnuts bought at a fair. It is the best thing I have ever done. They’re sexier than that time I dressed up as Jareth the Goblin King for Halloween (which required many, many pairs of socks.) If nothing else goes right this week, at least I have had this. 

I start the glazing process. It’s unfortunately sticky. The pink icing isn't thick enough, but quite frankly, I’m not that fussed. I’ve ignored the pretty squiggles demanded by Paul Hollywood and opted for sprinkles instead. If I’m going to make pink donuts, I’m at least going to make them look like the donuts on the Simpsons. 

With a whole 3 minutes left on the clock, my donuts are complete. 

The Judging

My partner gives me a ten for flavour, and an eight for appearance. He tells me that the doughnuts ‘are like something from a shop’, which is high praise indeed. 

I’m giving myself an eight for flavour. They’re a little dense - not enough baking powder, and I’d guess slightly under-proved. It’s almost as if the timing in the challenge doesn’t quite work. For appearance, I’m only giving myself a seven - I definitely have messed up the icing. 

Was this a fair challenge?  It was so close to being one. Just fifteen, even ten extra minutes could have made this fair. For bread-based challenges, it's always worth looking at the published recipe. Paul Hollywood says the first rise should take an hour. The second rise should take forty-five minutes to an hour. That leaves, potentially, forty-five minutes to knead the dough, shape the doughnuts, cook the doughnuts, and cool them enough for decorating. That really isn’t all that long. It might seem like I’m nit-picking here, but is it so hard to give the bakers a decent chance? 

Anyway. Next week, it seems we’re going back to school. I’m anticipating cornflake tart, trauma and hymns!