Angel Food Cake #GBBO Bake Along

I am so excited that Great British Bake Off is back. It's one of my favourite shows, what did you think of the new contestants? They seemed to be under so much pressure, it was blue plasters all round with mishap after mishap with the knives. My early favourites for a place in the final are Rob, Lucy and Frances. I hope nerves don't get the better of Ruby as I think she has more to show us. Glen and Ali seemed so lovely, please be my baking buddies?





I really felt for Toby getting the salt and sugar mixed up. That's happened to me before. I was teaching in Japan and demonstrating a lovely cream tea, I had accidental added a generous pinch of salt to the whipped cream (I couldn't get clotted cream). I waited proudly for everyone to tuck into their glorious scones and as soon as I saw their faces I realised my mistake. In that case it was easily remedied with a new batch of cream. In Toby's case it was one blunder too many and his short lived British Bake Off journey was over.


It was a tricky one for the technical challenge with Mary Berry's Angel food cake recipe. A key missing point from the recipe that the contestants had was that you do not grease the pan. Learning from all their mistakes we decided to try the angel food cake ourselves this weekend with no time constraints and no judges looming over us we spend a lovely relaxed morning playing in the kitchen. For me that's the way baking should be, I doubt I could handle the pressure of the bake off kitchen.

We had to make a stop at Lakeland to get the right type of pan, we ended up with a fluted cake ring, it doesn't have feet or a spring form bottom. We raised the cooling rack up to get some more air underneath it but still had problems with it sticking. The recipe does suggest placing the centre of the pan over the wine bottle but we didn't have a bottle that fit the hole. If you can find a tin like the one from the show please let me know.



We had issues with the cake cooking time, at 180c it was in danger of being on the burnt side of brown but still wet inside. We dropped the temperature and cooked it for longer. Intuitively this seemed like the right thing to do but I've watched enough bake off to know deviating from the recipe is a cardinal sin. We needed to improvise here and it turned out well. If we were in the bake off kitchen we probably wouldn't have finished in time but then we would probably have use of a more consistent oven too.

After getting the bake sorted the lemon curd was simple.  Because the cake stuck in the tin a little it was a bit crumby on the outside and the delicate fluted edge detail was somewhat lost but the angel food cake turned out amazingly light and airy.



Next week on the Great British Bake Off it's bread week. I've told you before that Trevor is a master bread baker. Bread is his definitely speciality so we are eagerly awaiting this one, let's hope there is less blood shed in the kitchen as the bakers conquer their nerves. Bread is apparently Beca's favourite bake too so I'm looking forward to her show stopper.