Posts Tagged ‘baking’

Aww no, not Paul! Weeks and weeks and bakes and bakes after and we all still remember the lion. Eliminating Paul was the wrong decision in my opinion. He definitely had bad days. However, on the good days he showed real flare, creativity and skill.

Here are my power rankings for week 8.

1. Tamal

Tamal did not do the double for Star Baker this week, but he was up there. He soon recovered him his shaky start to put in another consistent performance with excellent flavours throughout his bakes. So for me, he still maintains his number one spot.

2. Nadiya

Obviously an excellent for Nadiya willing Star Baker, so moves up one place from last week. Now is the time to get hot, so things are looking good for her.

3. Ian

Only a week after I said Ian does well when he goes bold and not-so-well when he doesn’t, he goes bold with his two different kinds of pastry and things do not go well. Whether he did this deliberately to prove most pundit predictions are nonsense, I do not know. he needs another consistent weekend to secure him a place in the final.

4. Flora

Flora’s bakes are consistently boring. They might have a lot of fancy touches on them, but the core bake cannot match the flare of the other bakers. She also achieves consistently mediocre results. Lovely as she is, can you honestly imagine her winning Bake Off? I can’t, which makes her an obvious candidate for elimination.

Not all of my work as a consultant is about driving better use of best practice software development techniques. Much like Neelix, I also take it upon myself to improve the moral of the people I work with, even though that is neither required, nor wanted, by the companies I am working with.

Thus when the Sky Leeds Bake Off was announced I jumped in straight away.

Sky’s slogan is “believe in better” so I was originally going to write “believe in butter” on the cake. However, I soon realised there was not enough space, so opted for some simple branding instead. In turns out I was the only person to suck up like a spineless worm in this way.

Competition was tough. Mine scores well for taste but ended up only ranking in the middle of the field with a score of 15/20. The runaway winner was Dave, by a clear 1.5 points. His dedication really has to be admired. He demonstrated he had the skill, the dedication, and the balls, to drag his 8-month pregnant wife out of bed at 4am to make the cake for him. You just can’t compete with that tenacity.

After the results we were encouraged to throw some money into the put and have a slice of cake. Most people threw some loose change in, so doing the maths I put a note in and covered a dinner plate in cake. I have no idea which ones were the best because it was all mixed in to one mountain of cake. I felt so sick. Totally worth it.

Two weeks on from my Week 5 post and we have just had to endure the heartbreak of losing Mat from the tent. He was so lovely. It made me sad.

The week before we lost Alvin. Another lovely guy, though obvious choice for elimination. After that is when the competition got really tough, and as I discussed last time, this was always when Mat was going to struggle. To go from Star Baker to out though is pretty harsh.

Here are my power rankings for Week 7.

1. Tamal

Wow was I wrong on this one. Two weeks later and he has had two excellent weeks. His creations have continued to impress and winning Star Baker this week was well deserved and a clear choice. If he continues on this form it will be a struggle to beat him.

2. Ian

A couple of dangerous weeks for Ian but his showstopper demonstrated that he can work magic. He actually seems to do better when we pushes the boat out than when he plays it safe. Hopefully, he will realise that and keep pushing it.

3. Nadiya

Go Leeds! I don’t think Nadiya is a likely candidate to win as her performance is a little too inconsistent. However, I think if things stay as they are she could easily earn herself a place in the final.

4. Paul

Paul has had a tough few weeks. He produced some amazing stuff early on but mistakes have really let him down. He does not strike me as mediocre baker though – I think he will go big or go home, and either is clear possibility.

5. Flora

Flora is lovely. However, she is not going to win. Her bakes are just not as good as the competition. So despite being clear of elimination this week, she falls at the bottom of my list. She could find herself in the final, but only by virtue of Paul having a nightmare one week and Nadiya having one the other. Without coasting through though, it will be all over.

Up until this week, I feel like it has been easy pickings for the judges. Stu, Dorret, Sandy and Marie were obvious choices to leave the tent. As of week five though, things have started to get tough.

This week we lost Ugne. It’s a shame to lose the new Chetna this early on. She did some brave things and they consistently came off. Just not consistently enough to save her from elimination. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying she was kicked off the Great British Bake Off because it’s a racist show that gets rid of foreigners. I’m not saying that…

I’m actually not. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the remaining contestants:

Alvin

Alvin has had some bad bakes. Watching him cry at his pile of build-it-yourself box pieces was heartbreaking. Then other times he is finished in half the time and sitting around waiting. He does consistently produce excellent flavours though, so I think will hang on in there as long as there are other less-than-perfect bakers. Whether he will go all the way though seems unlikely.

Flora

Ah, the token posh girl. She reminds me a lot of Martha from last year. A good solid baker, but a lack of flair and consistently will eventually be her downfall.

Ian

I can’t believe Paul described Ian as being in trouble. It would have been stupid to eliminate someone who had so far won three star bakers out of five. He is likeable and modest, definitely a potential winner.

Mat

Mat is not the most exciting baker in the world, but tends to perform consistently middle of the field. I think he will continue on until the competition gets really tough.

Nadiya

Yeah, go Nadiya, flying the flag for Leeds! If she can nail more of the technical challenges, she could be a potential winner too. Which makes sense given she is from the town that invented jelly tots and Thai gumbo.

Paul

Paul produces some incredible stuff. He had some shaky moments early on but could continue to improve and go a long way.

Tamal

Injecting cakes with a syringe? This man is amazing! Whether he can consistently deliver with enough flair though, I’m not sold.

Predictions

If I have learned anything from the books I have been reading it is that predictions are almost certainly going to be hopelessly wrong. However, that is the fun. Here are my top three potential leavers this week:

• Tamal
• Flora
• Alvin

My gran’s side is quite a large family and we used to get together on a regular basis. Unfortunately, as people have got older, it is become a little too much to organise a large party, so they have gradually faded away.

That is until my parents stepped up and said they would organise a summer BBQ.

We ended up taking ten dishes – four breads (bloomer, stout, focaccia, stilton and bacon rolls), two sides (coleslaw, noodle salad), two starters (tomato and goat’s cheese tart, smoked trout pâté) and two dessert (devil’s food cake and eclairs). Most of it got eaten though due to the volume of food other people also brought we ended up coming home with boxes of new things as well!

We were reasonably lucky with the weather. There was a tiny bit of rain, but not enough to drive us inside, and the night was chilly but not survivable once we had the fire put going.

John Seymour gives loads of examples of how to make fun bread in The New Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. However, unlike Paul Hollywood’s nice step by step instructions, John is more of a “why not try adding honey” method, and then just lets you get on with.

Results vary.

The barley bread turned out okay. This was just a standard bloomer recipe with half of the white flour substituted for bread flour. It came out well though I’m not a huge fan of the taste.

This was a mess. According to John’s recipe, you make it with boiling water. This makes it difficult to mix and never formed one cohesive ball. It is also made with baking powder rather than yeast. This made for a flat, flavourless bread.

Another recipe where I swapped out half of the flour, this time for buckwheat. I also added one and a half eggs to see what happened. What happened was that the dough collapsed while proving. I probably added too much liquid.

Surprisingly tasty though. Quite a nutty flavour.

Someone should definitely start this group.

That someone will not be me given the number of groups I already run, but I would definitely come along to some meetings out of curiosity.

In the final section of The New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency John Seymour talks about starting local groups to work on self-sufficiency projects. This could be doing small things like brewing beer or baking bread, or maybe a foraging club.

It sounds like he speaks from experience. Phrases along the lines of “doing all the organising” and “not being an instant success” sound to me like a fellow group organiser! And that is before the pendants have bemoaned being self-sufficient in a group.

Anyway, hopefully, you will have searched for a group, found my blog and been inspired to start such a group. If so, ignore that last paragraph and get going!

I recently purchased Paul Hollywood’s book on bread. My white bloomer went okay, but I swiftly moved on to the rye and ale bread. I carefully followed his advice and made a nice sticky dough. turns out it was too sticky. In the proving stage, the dough just spread out horizontally until it was a cookie.

In my second attempt I cut down on the liquid I used and dusted the work surface with flour instead of oil and this time it worked out well.

Bread baking is currently in vogue in the Worfolk household. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall assures me that once I start I will never go back. I’m sceptical, because I actually do really like the supermarket bread I buy, but I thought I would give it a try.

This was super-easy to make. I made a quantity of Hugh’s magic bread dough, put it in a tin and baked it in the oven (where else would I bake it?) for half an hour. It probably would have been even better if I had let it rise more in the tin, but I have places to be.

Focaccia has turned out to be a real winner. I bake this regularly now and take it to work in pieces to eat – it’s tasty enough to eat by itself. Pretty simple to make as well.

I’ve had soda bread from the Briggate farmers’ market and it was quite good, but mine turned out rather disappointing. It was too hard on the outside and the flavour inside was too strong.

The jury is still out on the sour dough. I spent a week feeding up my starter so I am reluctant to give up on it but it has far too much flavour. Elina quite likes that, but I like the tastelessness of white bread. I have started feeding it with white flour instead of wholemeal to see if that makes a difference.

A lot heavier snow fall compared with 2012 and a definite improvement on 2011.