I’m sure many of you are as excited as I am that The Great British Bake Off is back! 🙂
Anyone who read my first ever post on this blog knows I’m a big fan. And I credit it with pushing me much further and increasing my love of baking.
So when we realized it was returning to BBC, my husband suggested something that I couldn’t help but jump at: “Why don’t you try to make the technical challenge each week?”
Granted, one reason for this suggestion was the guarantee of an exciting bake to eat every week, potentially even more than one if I needed a few attempts!
But my husband also knows that I love a challenge, and that I really want to improve my technical skills and performance under stress when it comes to baking.
So, I have decided to give it my best shot, and to share my experiences of it on this blog, partly to share recipes and encourage you to bake too, and partly to hold me accountable to make sure I stick this challenge out!
With that in mind, here is the product of week one.
You can find the recipe here.
This wasn’t a complete success, but it was not far off!
The only real problem was that the cake came out quite dark golden, so looked overbaked. Fortunately, the inside was still lovely and soft and fluffy.
Our oven is quite an efficient fan oven, and often bakes things quickly, so perhaps if I were to make this cake again, I would lower the temperature to 160C and check after 30-35 mins to see if it was cooked through.
Also, I have a Charlotte/bundt tin which I used for this, but unfortunately it was a bigger one than suggested (27cm rather than 23), so that may have affected the bake as it rose a little too much and may well have contributed to the cake cooking too quickly due to the batter being more thinly spread.
It’s a really lovely, fluffy cake. It’s almost like a lemon drizzle cake that’s complemented by the sweet tangy taste of the cherries, and is made more dense in flavour with the addition of ground almonds in the batter. Yum.
Either way, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out for a first attempt! I’m not a fan of glacé cherries, but I actually enjoyed this cake. And my husband, the taste tester, was very happy with it.
But then, he is much easier to please than Paul and Mary!
