Gibby Bakes

After a wee baking slump at the end of August, these ricciarelli were the perfect quick and easy way to dedicate some time to my favourite hobby and get back into the swing of baking! It's only now that I'm finding time to sit down and write a quick post about them! Ricciarelli; a chewy Italian biscuit! Biscuits are certainly an area in baking that I neglect. There's no real reason for this, but like I mentioned in my Indian Potato Raised Pie post I tend to be emphasising cupcakes and similar bakes at the minute. I first came across these biscuits in the Bake Off: Love to Bake book whilst at university, and since they require few ingredients and no special equipment (a bowl, a whisk and a wooden spoon is all that's required!) they were an ideal bake for a cash-strapped uni student with only a couple of baking tins to hand.  The ricciarelli I produced at university were just as good as this batch, even with the faulty oven in our third year house (it took us around 6 hou...

I've never tried anything matcha before, and I've been itching to use it in a bake for a long time now, so I decided to start with a relatively easy bake where the flavour would not be fighting for the spotlight with other ingredients. Enter this Matcha and Kiwi Hurricane Swiss Roll! This recipe comes from Nadiya Hussain's first book, a treasure trove I stumbled across in a charity shop! The thing I love most about Nadiya's book is that she provides step by step photos alongside her methods, making it so much easier to produce winning bakes! A cross section of the Swiss  roll, note the "hurricane" effect! Making this roll look appealing  on photos was so difficult because of the kiwi puree (and my shocking photography skills)! Making a Swiss roll allowed me the opportunity to practice making a whisked sponge, as I'd not made this kind of sponge for a long time. The unique thing about this method is that you use no fat, and only three base ingredients. By w...

Recently I've become aware that my baking has placed a heavy emphasis on cupcakes and other "cakey" bakes, which of course there is nothing wrong with! However, I'm keen to try out a variety of different bakes to develop new techniques and find new flavours. So when I stumbled upon Bake Off's Chetna Makan's recipe for this Indian Potato Raised Pie I knew I had to give it a go!  Although capybaras might have nothing to do with India, I couldn't resist  using my cute cookie cutter for decoration! I've only made hot water crust pastry once before, back in January when I made a Garlic, Tarragon and Mushroom Pie! I was surprised at how easy I found making the dough then, however I remember that I didn't roll the dough out quickly enough. With hot water crust pastry the trick is to work quickly whilst the dough is warm and pliable after the just-boiling water and melted fat is added. This time I knew to move faster.  Upon closer inspection you can see  w...

Chocolate Babka... where to start with this one... My final product on my third attempt wasn't half bad, but it sure took some time and effort to get there! This bake was haunting me for weeks before I finally got it right! I was on a little bit of a patisserie/pastry baking mission, having just made cinnamon roles, cardamom buns and palmiers, so babka felt like the perfect challenge!  Chocolate and Hazelnut  Babka! Making the dough was the easy part, thanks to Veronica (if I haven't mentioned already Veronica is my stand mixer, named after Tony Stark's "Hulkbuster" satellite in Avengers: Age of Ultron! Geeky, I know). The dough is relatively simple, and is enriched with butter, eggs, and whole milk. Whilst the dough was proofing for the first time, I had time to prepare the filling. I have absolutely no idea what the mixture for the filling is called, if it even has a name at all, but it is also simple to prepare. I simply had to combine butter, caster sugar and ...

September is always a busy month for me, with it being my Dad's, Sister's, and friend's birthdays within a little over a week of each other. What better excuse then to get some baking in! I like to think I've made it clear by now that I love cake... but for this birthday celebration I decided to do something a little different. Whilst decorating a big cake is fun and a great opportunity to get creative, it can take me most of an afternoon to settle on a design, bake the cake, ice it and decorate. I don't begrudge this at all, but with my current job, job hunting, and fitting in exercise and other hobbies too I was struggling to find a whole afternoon to dedicate to this bake. A brownie stack felt like the perfect way to experiment with presentation whilst managing to pack in some tasty flavour combinations. I was able to bake the different components in stages over a few days, which really helped with my time management. The Brownie Stack! Now, if truth be told I ha...

It's September, which means Christmas is basically around the corner. Autumn is probably my favourite season, and not just for the colours of the trees and the cosy jumper weather. The flavours and spices associated with these seasons are my absolute favourites (pumpkin spiced everything!). Cinnamon is another of these flavours, and one of my favourite flavours ever! Although it's a typically Christmassy flavour, I see no problem with enjoying cinnamon all the year round! A torn-off cinnamon roll! I decided to kick off my autumn baking with these cinnamon roles! I came across this recipe whilst looking through my copy of Jane Dunn's book. Jane describes these rolls as 'heaven in a bite', and trust me she really isn't wrong. These rolls were surprisingly easy to make, and Jane's recipe is very simple to follow. By mixing strong flour, sugar, yeast, butter and vanilla with warmed milk, and kneading for a few minutes you end up with this beautifully enriched do...

It's been so long since I last posted! I'm quietly confident that no one has really missed these posts, but I enjoy writing them, and they're a good record of how my bakes go. I've been itching to give my favourite hobby some attention, but with work, hunting for grad schemes, running etc etc I've been struggle to find the time to bake at all, never mind to sit down and write about it! Seeing as it's been well over a month, I have a few bakes in the bag that I can write about now, and I've decided to start with these filo pastry parcels! Salted Caramel and Apple, Pear, Almond and Dark Chocolate, and Rhubarb and Ginger Parcels! For my first attempt at these filo parcels I simply had to have a go at making my own filo pastry, and it was nothing short of disastrous! The first recipe (from a chef I wouldn't dare call out) called for flour, salt, water and olive oil. Surely this would be a simple enough dough to bring together? Apparently not. I tried to foll...