Great British Baking - Week Two

We are moving right along into Week Two of the Great British Bake Off! This week is all about the biscuits- aka cookies. I love making them (and eating them) and always love the interesting and creative creations that the bakers come up with for the Showstoppers.

First challenge for the bakers was a Brandy Snap- which sounded like a delicious test and one that I might try out myself. The Showstopper was a childhood toy recreated in biscuit form with some sort of interactive feature. I really loved Crystelle's vanity and Chig's snooker table- so clever and well made!

In between these two bakes was the Technical, which was a Jammy Biscuit. This sounded really delicious and somewhat easy to make- two shortbread cookies with some buttercream and homemade raspberry jam in between. Yum!!

Overall this was another pretty easy bake, but was all about timing and keeping the dough chilled. There's a lot of butter in the cookies, so if it's too soft the butter will all melt away and will be a disaster! While I was making these, I improvised with my equipment since I don't have cookie cutters or stamps, so they were definitely not as pretty as the others, but tasted great. I improvised a bit with some things I had laying around the kitchen and free handing the designs, and I thought they came out pretty cute!

This was also my first time making a jam! I wasn't able to find pectin or jam sugar at the store, so I just used regular sugar and some lemon juice. I had to boil the mixture a bit longer in order to get that jammy texture, but it ended up being really delicious and the perfect zingy compliment to the sweet buttercream.

Overall, this was a fun challenge and a really delicious end product!

The Good

• All of the components tasted great, and the textures were all right on!

The "Needs Improvement"

• Design obviously wasn't there. Hard to say if these would have kept up the design but they seemed to hold their shape pretty well.