Bake Off Binge (part 1/2)

The Great British Bake Off ended last week – and I’ve only seen one episode! Episode 1 aired the night before we left Ireland, so I did get to see Paul blown away by Syabira’s red velvet cake. But without access to Channel 4 or Netflix, I’m out of the loop. To avoid spoilers but also take part, I’ve limited my updates to the weekly themes so I could still bake, and buy, along. We’re waiting until December to sign up for a free trial on Netflix since Tim is eagerly awaiting Knives Out #2, so no spoilers, please!

Week 1: Cake Week

Leaving for Portugal left no time to get a cake in the oven, so as soon as I could, I picked up a substitute. Exploring the “fancy” section of Lidl – high end, I know – I alighted on a bolo de Mel Madeira, or honey cake, which is a traditional dessert in the Madeira Archipelago, north of the Canary Islands. The cake is made with cane honey and spiced with fennel, cinnamon, cloves, Madeira wine, and orange. Chopped walnuts add texture. Though quite stodgy, it made a good snacking cake, perfect for a little pick me up after long hiking days or to encourage me to complete my many freelancing articles. 

However, once we settled into our long-term Airbnb in Croatia, I was able to get baking again! My choice for cake week: a coffee and walnut cake, minus the walnuts. I’m not anti-walnut, but since I’d be sharing this bake at a get-together and one of the guests has food allergies, it meant concessions had to be made. It also meant this cake had to be egg-free (it’s also vegan), something I’d never done before. I topped the cake off with espresso buttercream, and even though I made a half-batch of icing, I still ended up with enough for two cakes.🙄 I haven’t yet found an icing recipe that makes just enough. 

I left the cake to cool overnight and found that it had shrunk to half its height by morning. This could have been because it isn’t supported by the structure that egg whites usually provide. As a result, the cake was denser than that “light and airy” ideal, but it was SUPER moist. And eating a square didn’t leave you feeling like you overindulged like many round layer cakes do. Tim wanted to eat several slices in a row, and he doesn’t even like cake!

Week 2: Biscuit Week

If we’re being honest, biscuit week is my least favourite. It’s not as exciting to watch, and they’re running out of ideas for the Showstoppers. I mean, how many variations of gingerbread houses do we need? 

But I came back from another trip to Lidl with broas de mel, a cane honey-flavored Portuguese biscuit. Though traditionally made with olive oil, pine nuts, and sweet wine, ours were flavored with limão (lemon). Personally, I’m not sure you can call them biscuits since they didn’t have that tell-tale crack. But I have a feeling it’s just the British who like crunchy cookies. No one else seems to be biscuits-in-tea dippers. Anyway, these cookies were soft and dense with a subtle flavour. Drier, too, but still moister than shortbread. I would attempt to replicate them at some point in the future, too.

And it was shortbread I made after arriving in Croatia (these are egg-free, too!). Though I dressed them up a bit, adding three tablespoons of espresso into the batter (I seem to have found a flavour of the moment. I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to bake with what you have – and we have plenty of espresso!). I finished them off by dipping them in dark chocolate. They made a tasty snack! Still no crunch here, though. Soft shortbread is the name of the game. 😄 

The recipe has you pipe the dough into “kisses,” but I elected to roll them into balls and smash them with the base of a glass.

Week 3: Bread Week

I went to a legit bakery in Sintra, Portugal, for this week’s buy-along! The bread at Padaria Saloia was delicious – I really enjoyed the sweet bread glazed with jam or syrup (like a hot cross bun), but they also made tasty sandwich bread. And their pizzas looked heavenly, but we had dinner at home. 

For my bake, I cheated a bit for bread week – no personal challenge, no new flavours. Yes, you guessed it! I whipped a batch of scones. I chose lemon blueberry. Our Airbnb hosts have a lemon tree, and they’ve given us permission to pick what we need, so we try to use them as frequently as we can. And the blueberries at the Kaufland were pretty big – probably the biggest I’d ever seen at a store – so it was fun mixing those in. 

It was one of my first bakes here, so I was pretty pleased with them. I had to learn my way around the Croatian baking aisle, after all! Since then, I’ve also made Italian bread and a couple batches of what a blogger has labeled lepinje (Croatian flatbread), but after reviewing a Croatian cookbook (on loan from our lovely hosts), I think they’re more like dizani knedli (steamed yeast dumplings). 

Week 4: Mexican Week

When this week’s theme was announced, I was baffled. What happened to Pastry Week!? They usually do the four main categories right off. Thrown for a loop, it took me quite a while to figure out my next move. 

kakorrhaphiophobia (n): the fear of failure

No buy-along this week. Mexican food is almost non-existent here. We can find plenty of tortilla shells and have made a host of wraps and quesadillas, but we couldn’t get our hands on taco seasoning. Tim attempted to spice his own, but the hamburger came out tasting more like Croatian food than Mexican, thanks to the paprika. Oh well. 🤷‍♀️

At the outset, I was excited about this bake. I elected to make pan de muerto, Day of the Dead bread. And since Halloween and All Saints Day were fast approaching, I thought it’d be the perfect choice. Besides, I’d been wanting another bite of this sweet bread since my high school Spanish teacher brought it in for a cultural lesson.

*pretend there’s a photo here – apparently, I’d deleted it 😆🤦‍♀️*

By the time I had finished the bake, however, I was no longer excited. I’m usually pretty confident in my bread-making skills and can revise a recipe as I go if I don’t trust its method. But this was the weirdest and most un-bread-like bread I have ever made. The recipe began by creaming together butter and sugar – umm? I didn’t think I was making cookies. Things didn’t really get better. The dough remained a lot like cookie dough in texture, except I could knead it. As a relatively knowledgeable baker, this made me really uncomfortable. And then it didn’t bake. I left it in the oven for at least 30 minutes longer than the recipe instructed; the centre remained doughy for far too long. So, of course, by the time I finally pulled it out, the loaf was overbaked, thick-crusted, and very dry. We maybe ate half of it before chucking the rest in the compost. I’m still not sure what went wrong.

Week 6: Halloween Week

I’ve skipped week five for now since I haven’t had time to put a dessert together. I haven’t wanted one either after the cake and cookies and this bake. 

Again, no buy-along. The only Halloween-y food I could locate were pumpkin-shaped gummies and iced donuts with Halloween sprinkles. No thanks! 

Since the signature bake for this week was an apple cake, I decided to make my own. Tim and I are more motivated to begin our days if there’s a tasty treat involved, so I made an apple coffee cake covered with lots of streusel, of course! And because you can never have too many apples, I mixed some into the batter AND the streusel. 😏 The apples added a lot of moisture to the cake, so I may have overbaked it a bit, just to make sure, but because of the apples’ moisture, it definitely wasn’t dry. 

As with most coffee cakes, it was best fresh, and I was definitely glad when we’d finished it off. I was ready for something else! It also made a very messy packed breakfast, as we realised on the ferry crossing to Hvar. 

Stay tuned for my last five GBBO bakes!