I have a New Love.
Last weekend I was looking for some entertainment while Elwood was away, and I clicked idly on a Great British Bake-Off video. You guys! How did I not know about the Great British Bake-Off?
It ticks SO MANY of my boxes. Britophile heaven? Check! A nicely balanced blend of classic cookery and innovation? Check! Fun food history interviews? Check! Fast-talking hosts who make terrible puns and spout off in other languages? Check! A roomful of people for whom Baking = Love with an overlay of competitiveness? Oh, my, I am embarrassed to admit to the magnitude of that particular check.
The thing I love most about it, I think, is the common language that the contestants speak. Norman from the north of Scotland and Kate from the south of England have very different accents (oh! the accents! love the accents!), but they share a mental image of fairy cakes and Bakewell tart. They share, too, a belief that time spent baking is time well spent, and a mastery of skills that have become uncommon in the States.
Probably the Great American Bake-Off would feature Oreo dirt cake.
When the boys came back from their weekend away, I told them about my New Love. They watched an episode, and then another. They have watched almost all of season 5 now, with an enthusiasm that surprises me. (Maybe if a boy grows up in a house without a TV, he'll watch 1980s episodes of the McNeil-Lehrer Report with alacrity -- compared to which the Great British Bake-Off is positively thrilling.) Joe, the 12-year-old with a sweet tooth, is the biggest fan. One day this week when I was opining crabbily about people who had failed to pick up after themselves, he asked in a voice full of tentative hope if perhaps a GBBO episode might dispel my bad mood. He doesn't just want to watch, though.
We should bake more, he said last weekend. We should bake more, he said most days of the intervening week. We should bake more, he said yesterday. And so we baked. I have mentioned this book before -- it is my go-to resource when I want to make something fancy. He wanted to make something that combined chocolate and orange. (That's another thing we all enjoy about the show -- the flavor combinations that are so familiar to the bakers and so exotic to my crew of viewers. OH did I love Jaffa cakes when we lived in Scotland. It's funny that something entirely ordinary there is so unfamiliar here.)
We made orange mousseline buttercream. We beat egg yolks with sugar to the ribbon stage, and dusted in flour and cocoa and ground almonds and stiffened egg whites. I shuffled kids off to bed and split the layers carefully in two.
And then I realized that I'd had a recipe-reading fail, glossing right over the line that said I needed "2.5 quantities of orange mousseline buttercream" and making a single batch instead. That's the cake in progress at left, awaiting the rest of its buttercream. So I am going to separate some more eggs, and boil up some more syrup, and beat in some more butter, and try to coax my piping skills out of the dim space in my brain where they have lain dormant for years. If they were to see the finished product, Paul and Mary would doubtless point out that my cake layers are uneven (stupid oven is not level) and Joe's chocolate fans are pretty freeform (all the more so since someone used the toaster oven upon which they were resting). I expect, though, that despite those shortcomings he and I will return to bake another week.
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