Technical Thursday: Egg Custard Tarts

So it turns out I'm a bit of a disaster when it comes to basic recipes.

Give me something with a million ingredients I've never heard of, a series of complicated instructions that reduce me to a state of mild panic and a finished product the name of which I can't pronounce properly and I'm in my element. However when I'm faced with the sort of recipe I should technically be able to do in my sleep I slowly fall apart until I'm so frustrated that I just want to throw it all away and give up on baking as a hobby altogether.

Step forward, Paul Hollywood's Egg Custard Tarts, made from a recipe so simple I had to read it three times to check I wasn't missing vital steps and yet required two attempts at the pastry, a flap about the custard that turned my language so colourful I felt like Gordon Ramsey, and resulted in 12 rather sad looking tarts that definitely aren't at the standard I'd like them to be.

Eugh. According to everyone at work they tasted okay though, so all is not lost!

Technical Thursday: Floating Islands

I think everyone remembers Dessert Week of The Great British Bake Off Series 4, as it's the one that highlighted how a quaint little show about cake wasn't immune to scandal.

When making their signature bakes - trifles - at the beginning of the episode Deborah accidentally used Howard's custard instead of her own, and not only did it ruffle feathers in the tent and cause a bit of a commotion, but it ushered in an entirely new era on the show. Custard-gate overtook the weather as the main topic of conversation in Britain that week, and I like to believe that it's heart-racing and deliciously tense episodes like this that elevated GBBO to BBC1 for the following series.

In amongst all the custard excitement at the start of the episode it's ridiculously easy to forget what on earth happened in the rest of it. The Technical Challenge was Mary Berry's Floating Islands, a "classy, dreamy dessert" that features quenelles of poached meringue floating on top of custard and decorated with a ball of spun sugar. Don't worry, I hadn't heard of them before the episode either.

Easy peasy? Not. At. All.

Technical Thursday: English Muffins

Technical Thursday is back! Woop woop!

Life feels very strange without the weekly dose of the Great British Bake Off. In order to cope with this I'm going to carry on with a GBBO-themed bake each week by working my way through more Technical Challenges. I loved doing them each week during Series 5, and given the fact that I'd never made the majority of the bakes before I found it really helpful to try them out and expand my baking knowledge in the process.

After very little deliberation I figured, why stop now? I spent an hour or so the other day working out a plan of attack, and have decided to go back to Series 4 - famous for the tense episode where Deborah stole Howard's custard - and start doing the Technical Challenges from Week 1 through to the Final. I'm not going to lie: I'm very excited for the next few weeks.