Technical Thursday: Mary's Florentines

By this stage I think it's pretty obvious that I love to bake, and as far as television goes there's nothing quite like The Great British Bake Off.

As it's one of my favourite shows I'm beyond excited that it's back on our screens, and on BBC1 nonetheless! For those that have been living under a rock, GBBO pits twelve homebakers against each other in a 'bake off' every week in a quest to become the weekly Star Baker and ultimately be crowned Britain's Best Amateur Baker. It all sounds very twee, and the pastel KitchenAids, Cath Kidston paraphernalia and union flag bunting adoring the bake off tent don't help dispel the image, but it's more stressful than you think. Each week is a nail-biting hour filled with potential soggy bottoms, 3D biscuits with questionable structural integrity and bizarre flavour combinations you just know will earn a disapproving Mary Berry stare. The bakers often berate themselves for crying over cake but it's easy to understand why: for some insane reason GBBO has moments that seem as tense as the likes of Breaking Bad, Homeland and House of Cards. This is serious stuff, lingering shots of squirrels with enormous nuts aside…

Each week the bakers are asked to present a Signature Bake, attempt to muddle their way through the Technical Challenge and then end with a dazzling Showstopper. I'm very unadventurous with my baking: I make things I know I'm good at and very rarely step outside of my comfort zone. This is about to change. For the next nine weeks I'm going to have a stab at the Technical Challenge recipe every Thursday and blog about it.

I know I'm at an advantage: I'm not under a time constraint; I've watched the other bakers succeed/epically fail the day before so have an inclining of what I have to do; I have the entire recipe; and I don't have Paul Hollywood breathing down my neck. However, I doubt I'll have made these things before, so it'll still be a challenge!

This week was biscuit week, and the bakers were asked to present a version of Mary Berry's Florentines. The recipe can be found online here, in the new GBBO book here, and below with my notes.

(IMAGE SOURCED FROM www.bbc.co.uk)

Ingredients:

50g unsalted butter
50g demerara sugar
50g golden syrup
50g plain flour
25g cranberries, finely chopped
50g candied peel, finely chopped
25g blanched almonds, finely chopped
25g walnut pieces, finely chopped
200g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

Method:

Heat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4 and line three baking trays with baking parchment. I absolutely love Lakeland's Parchment Lined Foil, and if you haven't already tried it then I'd definitely recommend it!

Place the butter, sugar and syrup into a pan and heat gently until the butter has melted.

Remove from the heat.

Prepare the cranberries, candied peel and nuts by chopping finely. Mine definitely aren't fine enough (as I'll talk about later) so make sure your pieces are smaller than these.

Place in the pan with the flour and stir well to mix.

Using a teaspoon of mixture for each Florentine, spoon dollops on to each of the prepared trays, leaving plenty of room for the biscuits to spread.

Bake in the heated oven for 8-10 minutes until golden brown.

Leave them to cool and firm up before transferring them to a wire rack using a palette knife. If they have become too hard to remove, pop them back into the oven for a few moments to soften up.

Break 100g of the chocolate into a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water. Heat, frequently stirring, until the chocolate reaches a melting temperature of 53C. I used my Thermapen for this - it's fantastic, comes in a million different colours and is definitely a good investment buy!

Meanwhile, finely chop the remaining chocolate.

Carefully remove the bowl from the pan. Add the finely chopped chocolate and stir gently until smooth. Keep stirring until the chocolate has cooled to 26C. I really struggled with this so ended up putting the bowl in the freezer for a couple of minutes at a time to cool it down quicker. It probably wasn't a good idea to do this, but never mind! I'd certainly recommend having more patience than me!

Turn all the Florentines upside down, and spread a layer of the melted chocolate over the flat base of each.

Allow it to cool slightly before marking a zigzag in the chocolate with a fork. This is where it all went a little wrong for me! The recipe said a "little" chocolate so I only used a very thin layer which really wasn't enough when it came to adding the pattern. Plus, I really wasn't sure how long to leave the chocolate to set before attacking it with a fork and the end result was unfortunately a bit of a mess!

Leave the Florentines to set, chocolate side up, on the wire rack or baking paper, and then enjoy!

I came a bit unstuck now as I can't actually eat them, so had to force my parents to describe them so I could attempt to gauge if they were a success. Although I'm normally a massive perfectionist I think they don't look too bad even though I didn't end up with 18 of a uniform size - they're a bit all over the place, clearly an indication of my lack of pressure and need to impress! Apparently the cranberries and nuts were all a little big and needed to chopped a lot finer, as with each bite whichever ingredient was biggest completely overpowered everything else. Also, mine were really chewy, which goes completely against what Mary Berry said on the show! The edges were crunchy but the centre was completely soft, so maybe they needed longer in the oven? There's clearly no way I'd win this challenge in the tent!

Having only fully decided to attempt this challenge this morning, and not able to start baking till this evening after having to spend the majority of the day busy and then driving round trying to find ingredients I'm quite pleased I managed to pull it all together! Hopefully in the coming weeks I'll be a bit more organised and can give each challenge much more care and attention.

My main aim with this series is to try new things, and as I've made Florentines for the first time as far as I'm concerned it wasn't a complete disaster! However, that being said let's hope next week is a bit more of a success...