One of my favourite things about the Great British Bake-Off is how much discussion on social media. Whenever I can watch it live, I always tweet along and discuss how to make the various signature, technical and show-stoppers. I love finding out what people know how to make, what is considered difficult to make or not.
One of these conversations eventually brought up the idea that we should have a baking day to swap techniques. After weeks of scheduling conflict after scheduling conflict it finally happened!
On Saturday, I had the lovely @Jenepel and @pennyplainknits over at my place and we made bagels, marshmallows and salted caramel cupcakes from scratch!
We started with the bagels and then moved on to making the marshmallows while the bagels proved. We took copious tea breaks, then got around to poaching and baking the bagels. Once we were done with that, the marshmallow was ready to cut. We found out that seeds really don’t want to stick on bagels, but that marshmallows really do want to stick to everything!
We ate the bagels just out of the oven, and they were warm and chewy and wonderful, especially once we filled them with cream cheese and salmon. Then we had way too many of the yummy marshmallows and we had to have more tea to stave off the collective sugar rush.
After that we made my salted caramel cupcakes (recipe here) and realised that trying to do three recipes in one afternoon was a bit much. We finished off the evening with some actual food, Doctor Who and board games! I didn’t enjoy The Caretaker much, but playing 7 Wonders and Smallworld for the first time in forever made up for it!
It was a lovely day all round, and we’re already planning for a repeat! Next time we’ll be making scones and macarons, and we can have those with dainty little sandwiches to tie in with the rather extreme amounts of tea we’re sure to be drinking!