#tohrgbbo

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 2: Tarts; Showstopper: Sweet mini tarts

I did muffin-pan-sized tarts last time, so this time I'm going half-size pies. One I have an actual half-size pie pan for, the other I have a nice mini cast iron. I am also doing STASH-BUSTING.

Or attempting to. The chocolate cream was supposed to use up the frozen raspberries, but the berries have gotten too icy, so I'll have to smoothie them or something.

The fruit pie/tart/etc. (it came out of the pie pan intact, it's a tart now) did succeed in using up my canned pears and some candied ginger. Actually didn't have enough pears, so threw in a bunch of frozen blueberries as well.

Cons of this approach: didn't add more ginger when improvising, so it basically became a normal blueberry pie with pear chunks; didn't thaw the berries first so my baking time got weird and I singed the pie a little.

Pros: I can't taste the pear at all, so very glad there are blueberries in there for flavor. It's essentially a sweeter, lighter blueberry pie.

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 1: Cakes; Showstopper: Chocolate celebration cake

Postponed due to wrist injury.

Posted!

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 1: Cakes; Signature: Cupcakes

Postponed due to wrist injury.

[tohrinha]

Season 1, Week 6: Tea Party (Final); Signature: Cupcakes

Postponed due to wrist injury.

Update: posted!

[tohrinha]

Season 1, Week 5: Pastry; Showstopper: Savory canapes and sweet tartlets

Canapes - my original plan was to make spanakopita triangles, because they are delicious and I wanted a nice hubris bake. This very rapidly turned into spanakopita pie, because triangles are hard, especially if you're making your own phyllo for the first time. (And, uh, working with phyllo at all for the first time.) (Told you it was a hubris bake.)

(Look! There's one nice triangle!)

(The phyllo went... decently? It is fun and stretchy and how do you get the edges thin)

Tartlets - orange curd and vanilla custard in an orange-flavored shell, topped with candied orange peel. Another experiment, that turned out better than the phyllo; turns out candied orange peel tastes like orange candy, who could have guessed.

Did underdo the orange curd, though. Delicious on its own, too toned down with the addition of the custard

[tohrinha]

Season 1, Week 5: Pastry; Signature: Savory pie

Pork pot pies, but with fancy tops

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 3: Bread; Signature: Free-form loaf

Anadama bread from the Northeastern US, a brown bread with cornmeal and molasses

Perfectly serviceable. Not sure the cornmeal comes through at all - tastes like a typical whole wheat bread to me. Might start adding molasses to more breads for the color, though

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 2: Tarts; Technical: Tart au citron

Aka lemon meringue without the meringue, my favorite type of lemon meringue.

I do need to get better about homogenizing the eggs though.

Bonus side of hot fudge sauce.

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 2: Tarts; Signature: Quiche

Quiche is one of those dishes that I like in theory, but never make for some reason. With this challenge, I have figured out that I may never make quiche again*, not because it's bad, but because I have a live-in omelet-maker, so why would I bother making a highly engineered omelet myself?

*minus the 80s challenge years down the line

That said. Quiche tasty.

Traditional garbage plate quiche (includes pork, celery, green onion, basil, a mix of parmesan and pre-blended cheese, and probably something else I'm forgetting because I didn't post this day of). Plus brussels sprouts, which are... fine. I'd eat them again. Don't think I'll buy them to make myself again soon, despite being easy to make.

[tohrinha]

Season 2, Week 1: Cakes; Technical: Battenberg!

The official technical challenge is to make a coffee and walnut variation, but I'm not doing that because 1) I would die and 2) I've never had any Battenberg cakes before! So I made the classic almond cake and apricot jam with marzipan

This is. So cute.

For tracking purposes: the apricot jam is storebought, but sponge and marzipan are homemade - marzipan is vegan (used corn syrup instead of egg white).

[tohrinha]

Season 1, Week 6: Tea Party (Final); Showstopper: Tea party feast (mini tarts, scones, choux buns, finger sandwiches)

No technical this week! Season 1 is season 1'ing.

I've already made the first three elements of this challenge, to varying degrees of success, and the ones I'm not satisfied with I know I'll be making for future challenges. So, only finger sandwiches this week:

White bread, cream cheese, and tomatoes and jalapeno from my dad's garden

[tohrinha]

Season 1, Week 5: Pastry; Technical: Cornish pasties

These are Cornishesque pasties, partially because "Cornish pasty" is now a geographically protected term and absolutely zero of this baking was done in Cornwall, but also because the store was out of rutabaga. They've got some carrot and broccoli stem in instead.

[Video description: A dinner plate-sized pastry cut in half to reveal the steaming cubes of meat and vegetables inside.]

Definitely a solid mining meal.

[tohrinha]

TohrGBBO 1.4 Showstopper - Crumble, bread, and suet puddings, here represented by apple crumble, apple charlotte, and jam roly-poly, respectively

My roly-poly does not resemble how Ms. Potter led me to believe

The charlotte worked way better than I expected just wrapping buttered bread around a bowl to. If my wrapping was a little better, I could've put some of the apple's sauce in and made the filling a bit more cohesive

Also my roly-poly is neither roly nor poly shhh

Take aways from pudding week:

-Steamed puddings on the stove in my sealable bowl are good

-Steamed puddings in the oven wrapped in paper and foil are... not good (had to bake the roly-poly a while after the given steaming time)

-Shortening may be the optimal suet sub but butter works fine

[tohrinha]

TohrGBBO 1.4 Technical - Lemon souffles

In fairness, an unadapted recipe wasn't going to work at altitude.

That said, the recipe had me open the oven at 14 minutes (and then slam it closed for another 14 because they were nowhere near done). Immediate collapse

This is the closest to what the internet says souffles should be like (moussey); the rest are over engineered lemon curd

I am counting this as a win because 1: I like lemon curd and 2: turns out Pix knows what a souffle texture should be, so I have a proper taste tester!

[tohrinha]

TohrGBBO 1.4 Signature - Pudding week! (Don't worry, I have outsourced my recipe ideas to Scarab and her mam, so I will be making actual puddings and not "this is a dessert so it must be a pudding") Prompt is classic British pudding, so spotted dick, naturally

[tohrinha]

TohrGBBO 1.3 Showstopper - rolls, three savory, three sweet. Again too big for one week unless I make one batch of dough and flavor in small quantities, and where's the fun in that?

Week 1/3: Gluten-free theme, dinner rolls and iced buns

Week 2/3: Latinx theme, pão de queijo and conchas Both need some tweaking (and for conchas, to maybe actually sample some for reference), but good warm breads

Week 3/3 WAS going to be Filled Buns theme, but one of my recipes came out extremely sticky and is now becoming sandwich bread, so I'm subbing in my pumpkin rolls Also cinnamon/pumpkin pie spice rolls