The Great British Bake Off, Flapjacks, a Plaited Loaf and a Review

I was recently contacted and asked whether I would like to receive a copy of the Great British Bake Off book to review. Not being one to say no to the offer of a lovely free new book, and being a book which is perfectly in-keeping with the theme of my blog I jumped at the chance. Shortly after, a thump was heard on the doormat and the book was in my possession. Actually, that's a bit of artistic license... what really happened was that I heard the postman trying his very best to shove the book unceremoniously through the letterbox and went and quickly opened the door to relieve him of it before my letterbox was broken. Anyhow, I have my copy which is the important part.

 Ginger flapjacks

I've been enjoying watching the bake off as it has progressed on the television, but don't worry, there are no spoilers here - I haven't really been keeping up to date, what with one thing and another - which is also why it has taken me so long to get round to writing this review of the book. 

6-braided plait

As you may have surmised from the altercation the book had with my letterbox, it's pretty hefty. 320 pages with many, many delicious looking recipes. As in previous years, the majority of the recipes are by Linda Collister, an author whose recipes I enjoy making and has my trust. At the beginning of each chapter is the 'Showstopping Challenge' recipe - a basic recipe is given and then variations on that theme getting more difficult. For example - in the biscuit chapter the basic gingerbread is used to make Gingerbread People (easy), Iced Stars (takes a little time) and then Winter Woodland Cottage (needs a little skill). There are also technical challenge recipes from Paul and Mary throughout the book along with the best of the contestants recipes from the bake off. There are also really helpful pages devoted to 'Showstopping Techniques' such as icing and stacking a cake and chocolate ribbons and bows in the cake chapter, crimping and decorating in the pie chapter and piping meringue swirls in the desserts chapter, among many, many more.

5 braided plait

The chapters of the book are *Cakes *Biscuits *Breads & Sweet Dough *Tarts *Pies *Desserts *Puddings and then finally *The Basics. The majority of the recipes have illustrations (just), and generally the book is beautifully photographed, so it's a little irritating to find that some of the recipes are not illustrated. I counted 108 recipes, of which 37 do not have an illustration (just over a third of them). I wonder if this is down to budget but I wouldn't think so - there are plenty of full page 'lifestyle' shots and shots of the contestants working. It does seem a pity to have so many recipes without any idea of what they should look like when a small photo on the corner of the page would have been more than adequate for some. I do think it's important for the styling of the book that there are 'lifestyle' and contestant photos, but it seems to be at the expense of the recipe shots here.

Ginger flapjacks

For my recipes I decided to choose something really easy, and something that required a little more time. I decided to make the 'Ruby Jacks', a variation on flapjack. The recipe was easy to follow, but used a rather smaller proportion of oats to the recipes for flapjack I usually use, resulting in a rather spectacular rising of the mixture in the oven (I didn't know flapjacks could puff up like these did) and subsequent sinking and the resulting flapjack was very buttery and soft indeed rather than being substantial and chewy. They were very nice, but I'm not quite sure where the name 'Ruby' comes from - the introduction to the recipe suggests that this is due to the ruby hint given by the inclusion of the stem ginger (mmm, ginger, I am such a ginger fiend), but given that stem ginger is yellow(ish) I can't really see why they'd be red(dish) and they weren't! Still tasty though.

Braiding and baking bread

My other recipe was Paul's technical challenge from the Bread episode - a braided bread. The recipe and full instructions can be found on the BBC Food website, so I won't reproduce them in full. The dough itself was straightforward to make - just a simple white dough so I was more interested in the actual braiding process, having never done this before (but having meant to for a very long time - Celia has a lot to answer for I think!). I know that my loaf wouldn't have passed muster with the master of bread - firstly I couldn't get his instructions for an eight stranded plait to work for me (and I haven't had chance to try with a bit of appropriately sized rope - I just don't have that sort of thing hanging around in my house!) and secondly when I baked and cut my bread I had clearly used too much flour to keep the strands separate - they were still visible in the cross section of the loaf. The bread tasted fine - plain white bread but I'm annoyed I couldn't follow the instructions (I'm sure this is my fault, although if the bake-off contestants were given the same instructions I'm not surprised they found it tricky!). In the end I resorted to a different baking book, Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman as I knew it had some alternative braiding instructions in there and I successfully followed his instructions for a five stranded braid and then cut my remaining three strands in half to give six short ones and made a six-strand braid too. Celia's right though - it is fairly addictive and I'm going to give it a go again (perhaps when I have more time and give myself a chance to read through the instructions for braiding first!)

Jeffrey Hamelman's 'Bread' with braiding instructions

I know I am biased because I am a keen buyer of cookbooks, and baking books too but I would recommend this one. I was unsure as to whether it would just be full of 'Showstoppers' that are unachievable, but actually, there are loads of recipes in there that I'd like to make, ranging from very basic to rather special. There are far too many to list here, but I'd really like to try the 'Chess Cake', the 'Caramel Layer Cake', the 'Camembert and Quince Flatbreads', the 'Double Crust Pear Pie' and Mary's 'Creme Caramel' among many others. 

Because these loaves are plaited (or braided) I'm entering them into this month's alphabakes, where the letter is P. Alphabakes is a monthly challenge hosted by Caroline of Caroline Makes and Ros of The More than Occasional Baker. The letter for this month is P and the host is Caroline.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book to review. All views expressed are my own and aside from the book I did not receive payment.

Golden raisin bread - Mellow Bakers

I have the lovely Joanna over at Zeb Bakes to thank for this bread (via gentle encouragement and support!), and hopefully many more in the coming months. I've admired her baking for many months now, and have followed her Mellow Bakers posts with great interest - they all look so good, and it's really interesting to see how many different kinds of bread you can make and which ones appeal to different people. You can see all of Joanna's Mellow baking here - inspiring stuff, and the Mellow Bakers forums are here.

Anyway, just after Christmas I decided to take the plunge and order the book - Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread, so that I could join in the action. After far too long a wait (I'm impatient when it comes to receiving things through the post) the book arrived and I jumped straight in with one of the January Mellow Bakers recipes.

The book itself is quite thick and I confess to not having read any of the preamble - it feels almost like I'm a small child with a new toy - I want to just play straightaway and not read the instruction book first! However, I'm really looking forward to reading all the technical detail behind the bread making process soon. This bread must have been pretty forgiving because it still turned out well!

It's a sourdough/yeast hybrid (and yes, whisper it quietly - that means I've got my sourdough starter going again....) and I think that the yeast probably did most of the work in this bread. I could detect a faint sourdough tang, but it was very much in the background. I suppose this was a good thing really, given that I've been eating this buttered for breakfast - I wouldn't have wanted it to be too assertively sour! I halved the quantities given for home bakers and converted them to metric too, for the next time I decide I want to make this. Next time I work with a bread that requires additions, I'll mix them in by hand - my mixer didn't really distribute the raisins all that well - as you can see in the top photo, though further through the loaf the distribution was better - see photo below.

I really enjoyed this bread as a first foray into the book and am looking forward to baking more from it - there are so many different breads I want to try. It's a good job that the group is mellow - there are more breads for this month that I'm not going to get round to making (though this is partly because I didn't receive my copy of the book until pretty late in the month - excuses, excuses!) so it's great that there's no pressure to make them all.

New bread for a new year - Hamelman's Corn Bread

I wanted to try a new bread recipe - it seems ages since I've had something new (bearing in mind that the soured cream loaf I posted recently was made in October or something ridiculous like that!) and after reading about the Mellow Baker's group on Joanna's lovely blog, Zeb Bakes, I decided that as a new year treat (I can justify anything if I try hard enough) I would order Jeffrey Hamelman's book, 'Bread'. I'm not sure yet if I'll bake along with the Mellow Bakers, or just pick and choose what I fancy from the book, but it clearly has some interesting and different recipes in it.

I asked Joanna which recipes she'd found particularly good from the book and she gave me a little list of yeasted breads that she had found very successful. I decided to make the Corn Bread. I've previously made Dan Lepard's Semolina BBQ buns and wondered if this would be similar in any way. I followed Joanna's instructions here, using fine semolina as this is what I had available. I think I probably left my bread for longer than 45 mins x 2, but I don't think it suffered too much. I think it might be overproofed a little, as there wasn't an awful lot of oven spring. The slashes have opened quite nicely, but they're quite deep and I was probably expecting more rise, however, I did leave the loaf to proove for about 90 mins which is possibly why!

The bread is nothing at all like Dan's Semolina BBQ buns, but is just as delicious. The overnight poolish definitely adds a good tang and flavour. The crust is nice and thin and well flavoured with a close grained crumb making it really excellent for sandwiches. A really good loaf to start with (and I haven't even received the book yet!) so thank you to Joanna for recommending it and I'll look forward to looking at all the other breads the Mellow Bakers have made and deciding what to go for next!