Trial, Error and The Great British Bake Off

So I started watching The Great British Bake Off.  I should never have started watching The Great British Bake Off.  I've become addicted, and now not only do I want to procrastibake even more, but I'm becoming a bit paranoid when I do, questioning: Is it baked all the way through?  What if I over-bake and it comes out dry??  Have I been innovative enough???  WHY AM I DOING THIS?!

Ok, that's an exaggeration.  Obviously I bake so I can eat more cake.  In truth, it isn't even the competition aspect of the show that has been holding my attention so much as it is the tid-bits that get thrown in, both by the judges and by the competitors, that teach some tricks, techniques and occasionally explain the science behind the baking.  My favourite parts, however, are the history of baking segments, which each week feature something relevant to that week's theme.  The first episode of this season told the history of the courting cake, which I'd never heard of, but shall be attempting (not for courtship purposes, it looks yummy and unusual - a shortbread base?  Yes please!).

This is all to say that I blame The Great British Bake Off for my latest baking endeavour, which I really didn't have time for but proceeded to undertake anyway.  The Great British Bake Off, and my own warped desire for pumpkin bread in August.

I picked a well-reviewed recipe for spiced pumpkin bread from epicurious.com, but wanted to experiment with swirling in mascarpone cheese.  I knew that mascarpone could be baked as it is sometimes an ingredient in cheesecake, and I believe it is also sometimes baked in the centre of cupcake (another thing I want to try...), so I was mildly surprised to find very few recipes with mascarpone swirls.  The recipe closest to what I was imagining that I could find was for brownies.  Enter more questioning: If I can't find a suggestion of someone trying this in the vast black hole that is the internet, is there a reason?  What will go wrong??

I decided to try it anyway.

In the end, the bread turned out pretty well, and I've added the recipe to the Recipe Box.  All in all it's pretty simple, but I made two missteps while figuring it out.  The first may be obvious to many bakers, but I'd never learned that you shouldn't grease and flour a pan with oil; butter is the way to go.  I was feeling lazy, I already had the oil out, and I thought 'Yeah why not?'.  The reason why not is because the flour becomes absorbed, at least in places, by the oil and beads up on the bottom of the pan.  I don't really know what would have happened if I'd decided to bake with the pan in that state because I opted not to, but I suspect it wouldn't have been very pretty.

The second misstep was over-beating the mascarpone.  I first beat the sugar into the cheese as per the brownie recipe, until the cheese was smooth and creamy.  Then I added the ground ginger and, as I was beating, saw the cheese begin to granulate.  I immediately realized that of course, like cream cheese, mascarpone can probably be over-beaten.  A quick check online informed me that yes, indeed it can.  So I beat the egg yolk by itself and carefully stirred it into the cheese mixture, which seemed to work (at least it didn't make it worse), but what I should have done in the first place was to beat the egg yolk with the sugar and ginger, and then mix the mascarpone into that.  Lesson learned.

First I prepared the bunt pan (again, with butter), and then made the bread batter.  I combined the dry ingredients first so they would be ready for me after I'd beaten the sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkin.

Then I actually beat the sugar, oil, eggs and pumpkin.  Mmm, pumpkin...

Finally I prepared the mascarpone mixture.  As I said, be careful not to over-beat the cheese; having come out a bit granulated, my swirls survived by could have been better.  It seems, however, if the cheese is over-beaten and curdles it will separate when baked.

I poured a layer of pumpkin batter into the bottom of the pan first, and then put dollops of mascarpone mix on top.  Next, because the cheese was thick, I swirled the mascarpone with a fork rather than a toothpick. Then I repeated these steps two more times, so that the top layer was swirled with mascarpone.  The photo above was taken halfway through the process, and note that the mascarpone doesn't look smooth.

It baked nicely, and actually more quickly than expected.  I baked at 325F (160C) rather than 350F because of the cheese, but even at 350F the recipe said to bake for one hour and ten minutes; I pulled it out at about one hour and five minutes, having resisted the urge to pull it out at one hour.  I think it would have been just about done at an hour.

No ivory swirls of cheese are visible in these slices, although there were some in a couple of others when I sliced the whole thing up.  Primarily the swirls appear as darker, moister streaks in the bread, and I'm not sure if that is because I over-beat the cheese, or if that is how it would always bake.  In any case, the swirls are discernible when eating the bread because you get a nice mild pop of ginger, one that I find to be a good complement to the pumpkin spices.  I think I'll have another slice now...

Pop-up Ty

popty, n., Welsh - bakery.  From Welsh pobi, 'to bake' and tŷ, 'house'.

pop-up tŷ, n., Gibberish - a mobile, home-based bakery, most likely to be found in Aberystwyth during the month of August.

Baking outside of the warm (sometimes hot, depending on how long you've been preheating the oven) confines of your own kitchen can be cumbersome.  Adjusting to a new layout is one thing, but unfamiliarity with the temperament of the oven (every baker knows they can be finicky) and a potential lack of tools can be more seriously problematic.  That is why, knowing that I'd be spending nearly the entire month in a student dormitory, I promised there would be no baking in August.

I lied.

It's hard to say no when someone asks nicely for cake.  It's harder to say no when you're sitting in the pub having a few pints.  So I said yes, realizing that I would need to select a simple cake and borrow equipment/a kitchen.

I based my cake selection on cream cheese frosting, because it's as easy as it is delectable.  Then I decided on chocolate cake, as it would give a similar effect to red velvet, but without the hassle of actually making red velvet.  I googled the pairing, and found this recipe, which was originally created by Ina Garten.  It seemed like a simple recipe, and I'm a fan of using coffee to enhance the flavour of chocolate cake, but I was really sold on it for the illegitimate reason that the blog's author lives in Corte Madera, which is a lovely town housing one of my favourite shopping centres...  I did say the reason was illegitimate.

Arranging baking facilities took a bit more planning.  The cake was to be for a reading group held at a friend's house, but unfortunately his kitchen was not the best-equipped for baking.  In the end I encroached on another friend's hospitality (and her baking pans and mixer) to bake the layers a day early (that is pop-up ty #1), and made the frosting on the night of the meeting in the less-baking friendly kitchen (pop-up ty #2).  Even if I had been home, I would have preferred to bake the cake itself ahead of time, in order to freeze it.  If I haven't mentioned it before, it is much easier to split frozen cake layers (if you choose to split them) than room temperature layers, because as nice as moist, fluffy room temperature cake is, it isn't terribly stable.  It is also a lot more crumbly than frozen cake, so frosting while frozen means fewer crumbs in the icing.

Down to the baking.

The recipes for chocolate cake and cream cheese frosting can be found in the Recipe Box, or find both on Marin Mama Cooks.  This recipe presented a trick for chocolate cake that I'd vaguely thought about in the past, but wasn't sure would work.  The trick is flouring the baking pans not with flour, but with cocoa powder.  Powdering the pans.  Makes them sound a bit like Victorian ladies...  In any case, I wanted to try it, and did that first.

Next you mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl, and the wet ingredients in another.

(Note: The wet ingredients haven't been mixed yet in this photo, I thought the various ingredients repelling each other were interesting).  This recipe calls for buttermilk, but if you don't have that on hand you can use approximately a tablespoon of white vinegar in a cup of milk as a substitute.  Allow the vinegar to sit in the milk for a few minutes to curdle, stir, and proceed with the recipe as written.  The recipe also called for two extra large eggs, but since I had medium eggs I used three.

The recipe as found in the blog then directs to add the wet ingredients to the dry, and I'm not sure why.  I did not do this, and I wouldn't recommend it unless, perhaps, you were stirring very gently with a spoon and adding the liquids a very little at a time.  If you're using any sort of electric mixer, as soon as you turn it on in a bowl-full of dry ingredients you're going to see a dusty explosion and, when the cloud clears, find yourself and probably everything else covered in a fine layer of cocoa-flour...  It seems unwise.  Mix only until just combined.  I was especially leery of over-mixing with this recipe, since I'd seen from the blog how liquid it ends up, in part because of the cup of coffee that is added after the wet and dry ingredients are combined.  I used a pour-over brewer, brewing directly into a measuring cup to make and measure to coffee.

Pour the hot cup of coffee into the batter and combine.  Don't be worried if it looks really runny; although it would be (to me) fairly concerning to see a batter so liquid, it evidently is supposed to be that way, and it does bake normally.

The resultant cake is very moist, but not dense.  I did adjust the oven for one layer, turning it down and extending bake time, but I believe that was because the oven was not a convection oven.

In the end I didn't have time to split the layers (I had to get to the text the reading group was working on, as it was [nominally] the reason the meeting was being held), but that allowed me to put a thicker layer of frosting between the cake layers, and extra cream cheese frosting is certainly no hardship.  The reading group was happy, and so was I.  Watch out for a pop-up tŷ opening in a kitchen near you.