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The Signature challenge this week was Apple Cake. I don’t think of apple cake as associated with Halloween, though the hosts tried to sell it by tying it in with bobbing for apples. It wasn’t a bad theme for the autumn season. I was completely unfamiliar with most of the apple varieties the bakers mentioned, but I’m American and even though I am an apple enthusiast, the varieties that I like (Nittany, Macoun, Stayeman Winesap, Spitzenburg) are mostly ones developed in my country, not British apples like Sharp Cox. Trying to keep apple as the prominent flavor without overdoing the spices was tricky and some of the bakers couldn’t manage it. I do want the recipe for Sybira’s sour plum, chile, and apple cake; it sounded delicious.
The technical challenge was s’mores -- but they defined them as toasted marshmallow between two digestive biscuits with chocolate ganache. That was a blatant attempt to fancy up s’mores, which are graham crackers, chocolate, and a marshmallow roasted over an open fire sandwiched into a smooshy melting desert. Making them refined is a) missing the point and b) doomed to failure. It didn’t help that most of the bakers were only familiar with s’mores from movies.
The first problem most of the bakers had is that making marshmallows from scratch is actually tricky and something you’re going to mess up the first time. Also, they were using leaf gelatin, which I don’t think works as well for marshmallows as powdered gelatin, if only because powdered gelatin dissolves in water easily.
None of them knew that you should oil your knife when cutting marshmallows (well, they were using cookie cutters, because they had to make them round to fit on the digestive cookies, but same difference); homemade marshmallows are sticky when you cut them apart. This is why you also roll them in powdered sugar when you cut them apart -- it coats the sides with sugar so the surface isn’t sticky anymore.
I don’t have anything against using digestive biscuits or hobnobs instead of graham crackers since I doubt they could have gotten the proper flour for graham crackers. Watching the bakers try to assemble and then blowtorch their s’mores was a bit painful; at least one of the bakers learned how flammable marshmallows are the hard way.
The showstopper challenge was a hanging lantern cake -- a hanging lantern piñata cake, though I don’t think anyone actually said the word ‘piñata’. Just as well after the painful mess that was Mexican week.
But the showstopper had to be a cake with a lantern shape/theme, that could hang, had at least two different kinds of smaller sweets inside, and could be broken by a good whack with a rolling pin to reveal the sweets inside. Sandro rather wisely refrained from baking a cake at all and made a skull-themed disco ball out of chocolate.
So this week was fun, though some of the choices and explanations sounded a little cock-eyed from this side of the Atlantic (apples as a Halloween-specific food, s’mores as fancy deserts, not using the word piñata).
The technical challenge was s’mores -- but they defined them as toasted marshmallow between two digestive biscuits with chocolate ganache. That was a blatant attempt to fancy up s’mores, which are graham crackers, chocolate, and a marshmallow roasted over an open fire sandwiched into a smooshy melting desert. Making them refined is a) missing the point and b) doomed to failure. It didn’t help that most of the bakers were only familiar with s’mores from movies.
The first problem most of the bakers had is that making marshmallows from scratch is actually tricky and something you’re going to mess up the first time. Also, they were using leaf gelatin, which I don’t think works as well for marshmallows as powdered gelatin, if only because powdered gelatin dissolves in water easily.
None of them knew that you should oil your knife when cutting marshmallows (well, they were using cookie cutters, because they had to make them round to fit on the digestive cookies, but same difference); homemade marshmallows are sticky when you cut them apart. This is why you also roll them in powdered sugar when you cut them apart -- it coats the sides with sugar so the surface isn’t sticky anymore.
I don’t have anything against using digestive biscuits or hobnobs instead of graham crackers since I doubt they could have gotten the proper flour for graham crackers. Watching the bakers try to assemble and then blowtorch their s’mores was a bit painful; at least one of the bakers learned how flammable marshmallows are the hard way.
The showstopper challenge was a hanging lantern cake -- a hanging lantern piñata cake, though I don’t think anyone actually said the word ‘piñata’. Just as well after the painful mess that was Mexican week.
But the showstopper had to be a cake with a lantern shape/theme, that could hang, had at least two different kinds of smaller sweets inside, and could be broken by a good whack with a rolling pin to reveal the sweets inside. Sandro rather wisely refrained from baking a cake at all and made a skull-themed disco ball out of chocolate.
So this week was fun, though some of the choices and explanations sounded a little cock-eyed from this side of the Atlantic (apples as a Halloween-specific food, s’mores as fancy deserts, not using the word piñata).
