The Best Fluffy Pancakes recipe you will fall in love with. Full of tips and tricks to help you make the best pancakes.
DGB S10-E02 is available on SAT1.de and you can find tasty morsels on YouTube
Opening credits this week promise lots of ganache and a few surprises. Let’s see!
Signature – The Bake Off cake! (2 hours)
Our bakers can choose any flavours but the end result needs to look like the cake in the credits.
To save you some time I’m only going to pick out the recipes that catch my eye…
Anje – Chocolate sponge with fresh goat cream cheese, fig jam, walnut crunch. This looks interesting, at least until she takes it out of the oven. It’s a little sunken and removing the top half shows us why. Anje describes it as a bit fluid but I’d say its’ raw! What a disaster! She opts to cut out the middle and uses the off-cuts from the top as landfill. The sponge has large air pockets and it must have taken a whole herd of goats to supply the cream that sandwiches this together. The end effect is something like a giant Oreo.
Raheem – chocolate (vertical) roulade with pistachio buttercream and raspberry puree. We saw this in the intro… As he unrolls the tea-towel we see the cake has cracked up, and then in assembly the sponge totally falls apart. He decides to bake again but “Take 2” goes in with just over half an hour left on the clock. Surely not enough time … and soon he’s panicking. Disaster looms! ChristianH suggests a change of design and suddenly Raheem is speed-baking a different cake.
Stefanie – Nut Brownie and raspberry jelly
ChristianS – Death by chocolate
Christa – Choco-almond cake with chocolate molding, raspberries and isomalt sculpture.
Dorte – Coffee biscuit with hazelnut biscuit base, coffee mousse and raspberry compot. Comes together nicely. She says it’s “perfekt”
Raiko – Chocolate with raspberry mascarpone cream and raspberry pistachio crunch. I like the way Raiko’s construction is coming together. The crunch looks delicious.
Nina – Sachertorte with raspberry jam, raspberry mirror, pistachio croquant. This is an ambitious choice in a 2 hour challenge.
Caterina – Chocolate sponge with raspberry cassis filling bitter-sweet ganache and almond croquant.
In the final stages of assembly Stefanie, Caterina, Christa and Raiko have everything under control. Christa has enough time to make a bullet proof plate out of isomalt. I think it’s going to crush the raspberries. Raheem is still rushing but he’s not the only one in trouble. Dorte struggles with her glaze, Nina’s Sachertorte is disintegrating and Christian’s glaze comes off on the plastic wrap.
The judging starts with Raiko, who clearly knows the legend of the missing raspberry. His ganache is a little bit dull and very thick. The light and very pink layers of raspberry mascarpone are pretty and the flavours please Christian.
Dorte, Oh! Dorte! It’s a squished mess sitting under an isolmalt tomb stone. Cutting into the cake we can see the bottom layers look perfect but the top is thick mousse which has slipped down inside the ganache giving the cake a lumpy mushroom shape. Enie loves the coffee flavour.
For some reason Stefanie has pelted her cake with sprinkles. It’s leaning slightly but otherwise looks fairly good. Once cut the slices look more like triffle than cake. The jelly layer is too thick for my liking and Christian says the cream is too soft before launching into a rapidly delivered tip – if you use white chocolate instead of gelatin it will set more quickly and have a firmer texture. Tastewise its a good combination.
Caterinas sweet temptation looks excellent but the judges seem a little underwhelmed by the flavours.
Christian’s Death by Chocolate looks great and whatever he sprayed on it has made it shine. The top layer of chocolate looks very thick. Not for me… but the judges love it.
Anje’s landfill gateau is bulging, leaning and crudely covered. What’s it like inside? Amazingly it looks ok and apparently the flavours are good. I can’t believe she got away with that!
Christa’s Summery Chocolate Bombe looks very professional, although the isomalt could have thinner and I would have preferred the sides of the cake to be covered. Inside it’s a lot less interesting, like a brownie.
Raheem is clearly upset as he introduces his heavenly raspberry cake. He’s been through hell to get something to present here. What he managed to do in 35 minutes is pretty impressive but the chocolate looks dull, the cake is leaning and it’s not fully covered. It’s very soft but looks delicious and Christian enthuses about the flavours. Full respect!
Nina’s Schokoholik has a beautiful Sachertorte glaze. It looks amazing! The slices look super-heavy and the top layer of ganache is rather thick but there is no doubt this is a triumph.
Aufgabe 2: Technische Prufung – Artistic rolls (2 hours)
Once again we have a visiting master baker, this time it’s Axel Schmitt. He gives our hobby bakers a short masterclass in artistic roll making. Oh this is going to be fun! They have to make birds, mini-epis, plaits and snails. I really want to do these mini-epis. Such a great challenge.
You can’t make these in 2 hours … unless the dough is already prepared, risen and delivered in tupperware so that it explodes on opening.
The full recipe is on DGB website: rezept. 
It looked so simple when Axel did it but our bakers are struggling to remember the method. They look like they’re simultaneously loving and hating this.
They bake in 2 batches and the first results look pretty good. I can smell the poppy seed! Mmmm! They’re under time pressure for the second batch so we can expect a few to be underbaked. Still, I love the look of these rolls.
Enie and Christian set up Axel for a judging challenge. He has to eat 18 bread rolls. This is an endurance test.
A few bakers have underbaked the second batch (Raiko and Christian) and some of the designs are free-form (Stefanie and Dorte), but generally the rolls are pretty impressive.
Anje looks so worried but the verdict is good. Christa has managed a nearly perfect bake – great colour, good shapes and texture.
Aufgabe 3: In the Jungle (5 hours)
No pre-prepared decorations.
Anje – Tropical cocktail : Passion fruit oil-sponge, passion fruit buttercream and pineapple jelly. Hmmm I have my doubts about the flavour combos and the design doesnt offer much. Nina is cooking with rum which I always find tricky … one for the cake, one for chef?
Dorte is making Kia Ora cake which means “have life” or more simply “hello”. The design is spectacular with tree tops poking out the top of the cake. I wonder how she’s going to do that!
Raheem gets his inspiration from Jungle Book. He’s going bananas for “Bagheera”.
Christa stirs a bathtub full of chocolate sponge mix for her “Kunterbunte Vielfalt” while Caterina flies off to the Amazon to make waterfall and trees from lemon sponge, passion fruit and pistachio.
Raiko – Is making Be(a)st Camp with Kiwano!? What’s that?! Looks interesting!
There’s some lovely work going into the scultpures. I especially like the cute panther. Before long we’re into cake hacking/shaping. Dorte’s pistachio sponges look perfect. Oh! I get it now! The tree canopies are cuts of sponge. What a good idea!
Christa shows us how difficult it is to pipe with the worlds largest piping bag. Smaller bags are easier to control. Raiko uses a spirit level for his cake.
Raheem shows off his painter and decorator skills, using a sponge to dab the buttercream making a wood-chip effect and then an industrial paint spray gun to colour his construction. Christa and Raiko opt for a more delicate air-brush technique. Anje is soooo pleased with the icing effect which makes her cake look like a tree stump.
And so in the blink of an eye we come to the judging…
Christian – Good god what is in the frog cake? Good skills in buttercream, modelling fondant and paperwork. It’s certainly colourful but the mango flavour doesn’t come through.
Caterina – How much of this rock is edible? All of it! Christian is very enthusiastic.
Stephanie – Lovely palette knife decoration and her trademark flower but the over all effect is plain in comparison to the others. Inside looks so delicious! I’m drooling. It’s tip-top!
Dorte – Forest on a cake looks stunning! “Perfekt” Inside, the layers are beautiful and the flavour is a dream.
Raiko’s camp! Well of course he is but he’s a dab hand with an air brush too. The decoration is excellent although there aren’t many trees. It’s a well trimmed forest. The cream layers in the cake look a bit thick but Enie says it’s heavenly and fresh.
Nina’s Lemur has been punched in the face but over all the decoration on the cake is great. Layers maybe look a bit dry and uneven but there’s plenty of filling and Christian syas it tastes phenominal.
Raheem – Looks a bit simple compared with the others although Bagheera is really cute. The thick layers of sponge have good contrast. It’s fruity, mango and banana.Great!
Christa – It’s well-known that elephants can’t jump but they can climb trees. The decoration is good, Christian says “Fenominal”. The layers are a bit messy and there could be more cream.
Anje’s “Tropical cocktail” is neat but a bit simple and there are no trees. A jungle without trees??? What follows seems to be a light-hearted assassination. They home in on the noticeable agar jelly.
Round Up
There are so many great skills on show and it’s only week two. The standard is impressively high. I think the challenges so far have been quite tough but all of the bakers have shown incredible imagination and skill. I would choose between Christa and Nina as the top baker this week. At the other end of the scales it’s a tight contest between Anje, Raheem, Christian, Dorte and Raiko. They all had positives to take away – Raheem’s speed challenge, Anje’s technical, Dorte’s stunning show-stopper and Raiko was really only let down by a poor technical. I would actually have picked Christian for the chop but he didn’t make any serious mistakes.
Spoilers below…
I wrote last week that “Dorte and Anje look safe for a few weeks”. Well what do I know! They step forward this week as the bottom two. Dorte was let down by the disastrous Signature bake and the Technical wasn’t much better. Her show-stopper was stunning and for me the best bake. I though Anje had fooled the judges with her land-fill Signature bake but the points (12.5/20) put her equal last. She did very well in the technical but it wasn’t enough to offset the mistakes in the Show-stopper. Star baker went to Christa and that seems fair. Her Signature bake was my favourite, although the points put her second. She was best in the technical and the show-stopper was good.
