The Bake Off Bake Along 2015: Week 2 – Biscuits

Week two came around so quickly and this episode was a shocker! It’s biscuit week and the contestants were challenged to make biscotti (the teeth braking crunchy bread like biscuits you get with your coffee in the hairdressers), arlettes (cinnamon sugar puff pastry swirls) or a biscuit box in one flavour, filled with mini biscuits in another flavour).

This got me thinking, as I’m not a huge fan of biscotti (plus, I think its a pretty boring biscuit!), the arlettes looked so laborious, and a biscuit box seemed like a LOT of effort. So after much deliberating at work, and with the offer to borrow some cute alphabet biscuit cutters, I came up with my master plan. I would do the showstopper biscuit box and as I had alphabet cutters, they reminded me of fridge magnets…so I made a biscuit fridge!

Playing on the whole fridge idea, I was thinking about what biscuits to make using the letters and fell upon the idea of making fridge cake biscuits (which definitely isn’t cake by the way, it’s totally a biscuit!)

For the flavours I knew I needed a strong biscuit for my box, so decided that I’d make an orange flavoured shortbread with chocolate chips, and the fridge cake would be cranberry, almond and orange flavour with white chocolate chips and marshmallows, just like all decent tiffin should have!

I will admit right now, this bake was HARD. The individual components were fine, I can make a pretty great shortbread, and the fridge cake was easy enough (especially as I cheated ever so slightly and used shop bought digestives – I have so many other things to think about I didn’t have time to make the biscuits for that too!!). There just seemed to be so many other issues including:

• Only having one tray to bake the shortbread slabs on, so having to do it in three batches
• The shortbread cracking as soon as I tried to cut it using my templates – I glued it back together with melted chocolate
• The fridge cake not liking the delicate tiny letter cutters – if you hit a marshmallow, it was game over and it would all fall apart! Therefore only 7 letters were properly attempted, the rest of the fridge cake that hadn’t been destroyed in the process was cut into neat-ish squares
• Not realising that food colouring and white chocolate DO NOT MIX
• Trying to stick biscuit box sides together using homemade orange flavoured fondant icing is near impossible.
• You also need to make your fridge door bigger than the back of the fridge – WHY??
• Hinges cannot be achieved out of icing, nope, not even going there…

On and off for all of Sunday afternoon, whilst watching 4 separate episodes of One Born Every Minute (Adam was away so it meant I had free choice of programmes – but on the downside had noone to take photos of me – hence the terribly blurry selfie – I propped the camera in the fridge on self timer!), eating nothing all day other than bits of fridge cake, biscuit and icing (resulting in a furry sugary mouth, a headache and feeling pretty high) and at times wanting to smash up that little white box, I was kind of pleased how it turned out. Yes it didn’t really resemble a fridge, yes I spent a stupid number of hours constructing it and yes, the photos make it look better than it actually did in real life, but overall I’m quite proud that I stuck with it, plus it actually tastes amazing, so that’s the main thing right. Just remind me in future that “it’s just a cake…” (there’s a lovely reference for you from last week’s episode)

The FRIDGE (Chocolate Chip Orange Shortbread with orange flavoured icing) 

Note: I doubled up the mixture, so for a normal sized batch, halve the ingredients

Ingredients

• 330g unsalted butter
• 300g caster sugar
• 2 medium eggs
• 450g flour
• Grated zest of 1 orange
• 3 tsp orange essence
• 250g Icing Sugar
• 3-4 tsps water
• 1-2 tsps orange essence
  

Method

1. Cream together the butter and sugar in a bowl until smooth and creamy
2. Stir in the eggs one at a time
3. Sieve the flour into the bowl and mix thoroughly until it forms a dough (if it’s too sticky add more flour)
4. Add in the zest, orange essence and chocolate chips, combine thoroughly
5. Wrap the dough ball in cling film and refrigerate for 1-2 hours
6. To make the icing, mix icing sugar, orange essence and water one drop at a time until it forms a smooth rollable ball.
7. Also wrap with cling film and leave in the fridge to harden a little
8. When the biscuit dough has chilled, chop into three parts and roll out each section separately until approximately 0.5-1cm thick.
9. Lay on a baking tray covered with greaseproof paper and bake in an oven for 10-15 mins until golden brown at 180 degrees celcius.
10. Repeat for all remaining dough and cool all biscuits on a cooling rack.
11. When nearly cool, using your box templates to measure, chop the biscuits into the correct sizes (if they crack, stick the bits together with melted chocolate…!!)
12. I found rolling the icing out on greaseproof paper helpful as then it didn’t stick to the work surface and I could wrap each side of the fridge in icing really easily. Repeat for all 6 sides of the box.
13. To stick each side together, using a little more icing, smoothing down each join (hopefully more successfully than me!!)
14. For the fridge door, you’ll need extra icing to prop it open.

The FRIDGE CAKE BISCUITS (cranberry, almond and orange chocolate tiffin with white chocolate and marshmallows)

Ingredients

• 1 large pack digestive biscuits (250-300g)
• 150g milk chocolate
• 150g dark chocolate
• 300g chocolate to cover
• 100g butter
• 150g golden syrup
• 100g cranberries
• 1 packet white chocolate chips
• 75g flaked almonds
• 1 handful marshmallows (chopped up big ones or mini ones)

Method

1. Melt the chocolate, butter and golden syrup together in a pan
2. Crush the digestives in a large bowl and combine with all other dry ingredients
3. Pour the chocolately buttery syrupy liquid into the bowl and mix thoroughly
4. Press the mixture into a greaseproof lined tray and refrigerate for 1- hour until cold
5. Melt your remaining chocolate and pout over the top of the fridge cake. If like me you want coloured “fridge magnets” you have to be super stealthy with white chocolate as it really doesn’t like food colouring! Cut out individual squares and cover separately with each colour.
6. Refrigerate again for about another hour
7. If using alphabet cutters, carefully squidge them into the fridge cake, or just chop the whole thing into neat squares

Phew, that’s it! You can now site down, relax, savour that furry tongue from eating too much icing and vow never to attempt this recipe again (unless you happen to have an entire afternoon free to bake, ice, melt and roll your way through a shortbread fridge and individual fridge cakes to match!!)