The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along Week 8

It’s dessert week!  As most desserts are also baking and almost all baking could technically be a dessert (I said almost! Don’t remind me of the pork-and-egg-pie-fandango) this gets to be a very vague week! 

Almost all of this week infuriated me. Largely, this is because I’m once again dying (it’s just a cold and my sinuses hurt a bit). Iain going home - a travesty. Basque cheesecake as a signature could have been fine, but why the hell did it have to be ‘highly decorated’? This is not a dessert for decoration! The showstopper - a free-standing trifle. Once again, an incredible job making that sound like a real thing. What the judges were asking for, however, was a cake filled with unpleasant, gelatinous textures. Then they complained about the textures. I’m not a trifle fan to begin with, but I would take one thousand trifles over this free-standing nonsense.

Then, there was the technical. I’m considering writing to the Bake Off producers and letting them know that there are, in fact, more desserts in the world than just steamed puddings. Still, despite the fact that I am not long for this world (I also have a bit of a headache), I soldiered bravely on and steamed these little bastards. 

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. 

Dessert Week - Gluten-Free Orange and Cardamom Puddings

I start by boiling an orange. This does not feel like a normal thing to be doing. 

Next, the syrup. Luckily, I spotted that this is just the golden syrup from last year - a dry caramel, then some boiling water, more sugar, and a lemon. I measure nothing, because I’m tired and have to make a lot of things very quickly and I don’t want to. Suffice to say, this all passes without incident. 

Next, I need pretty slices of orange to go on the bottom (future top) of the puddings. This looked dead easy on television. Just cut the middle out of a slice of orange with a cookie cutter. It turns out to not be so easy. It takes multiple attempts before I realise I could just do this with a knife. There is orange juice everywhere. 

I decide my orange has boiled long enough, considering I don’t have long to get these bastards into the oven. I hack the boiled orange into pieces, blitz those pieces with a stick blender, and pass the gunk through a sieve. The yield is not particularly high. There is orange juice everywhere. 

I usually take a decent amount of notes while doing these challenges. On one side of the page, I’ll note down what time things are done/not done, for the sake of these write-ups. On the other side, I’ll note down things like quantities and techniques used, in case I want to attempt this again. Please enjoy my extensive notes on the recipe side: 

I took this very seriously. 

Anyway, with syrup bubbling and boiled orange blitzed, I could finally make the actual sponges. Sugar, butter, eggs, orange gunk, ground almonds, gluten-free self-raising flour and cardamom become a solid mixture without incident. I do wonder what the point was in making these gluten-free. Not that I’m weirdly anti-coeliac or anything, but the bakers didn’t have to put any thought into adapting this to a gluten-free recipe themselves - it’s a 1:1 flour swap that has absolutely no bearing on the final recipe. 

Anyway, now I can finally spoon syrup into my pudding tins, along with my wonky orange slices, and chuck in the sponge mixture. Then I get the wonderful faff of making the puddings little parchment and tinfoil lids, and tying them on with string. Some boiling water goes into a tray, the puddings are precariously balanced on top, and the whole lot goes into the oven. I have fifty-three minutes to go. 

Pulling all of that together was quite a stressful half hour, but the rest of the challenge is a breeze. I juice more oranges into the leftover syrup, and chuck in some cardamom pods. 

I make a passable creme anglaise, without real vanilla because I had to go to three different shops to find cardamom, I was not going to find real vanilla beans in this wonderful little town. I think we can take my complaints about custard filling camera time as read, can’t we? 

With ten minutes to go, it’s back to panic stations. I take out a sponge - it seems cooked. Now I have to cut the strings and demold these little bastards. I do so, with a lot of swearing. It takes six minutes. With the timer really ticking down, I manage to blowtorch the tops (a totally skippable step, but I just got a new blowtorch and will take any opportunity to play with it), pour on extra syrup, and get the custard into a jug with just two minutes to go. I am done. 

The Judging

My partner gives me eights for appearance and flavour. The orange slices aren’t particularly pretty, and the cardamom taste could be stronger. I score myself almost identically, going down to seven for flavour. Admittedly, both of us are lacking in the fully-functioning taste bud department, so for all we know these sponges could have absolutely reeked of cardamom. Honestly though, they were still pretty damn tasty, especially when drowned in custard.  

Was this a fair challenge? Fuck no. 

I said, the moment I spotted the puddings on the next-time-on, that the bakers were going to get screwed over on timings in the technical challenge. Lo and behold, the bakers were screwed over on the timings. 

Prue’s recipe recommends simmering that orange for fifteen minutes. Then, it still has to be blitzed and passed, before the sponge mixture can come together. The syrup needs to simmer for twenty minutes. According to the recipe, these sponges need to be steamed for an hour. Realistically, even a very skilled baker will need over five minutes to demold them, burn the tops and pour over the syrup at the end. These timings barely add up. I predicted over half the bakers would have underdone sponges, and they did! 

This is my third year of baking along with technicals. This is the third year in a row that the technical challenge has been a steamed pudding, with a barely do-able time limit. This is a wildly dull test of anyone’s technical skill, because (as far as I know) none of the bakers are wizards, able to manipulate the passing of time. 

Anyway, patisserie next week! What fresh hell awaits?