The Best Fluffy Pancakes recipe you will fall in love with. Full of tips and tricks to help you make the best pancakes.
Yes, It’s still cake week! It’s always cake week in Germany!
Das große Backen is available on SAT1.de and snippets can be seen on Youtube
Aufgabe 1: Schokoriegel zum Jubilaum – Anniversary chocolate bar (2.5 hours)
Present 8 chocolate bars, 4 wrapped and 4 unwrapped. One component must be baked.
An identical challenge was done in LMP S9-E04 with some variable results. The most common mistake was to make the bars way too big. Let’s see what happens here…
Stefanie – Aussie power – Macadamia nuts and white chocolate
Nina – Layover – Peanut, nougat and shortbread and milk chocolate
Dorte – Aztec bar – toffee, pomegranate jelly
Christian – Frankenriechl – Apricot wine jelly, cheesecake, almond crunch & dark chocolate.
Christa – Saure Ruby – Shortbread, almonds, strawberries and pink chocolate
Caterina – Jogubee – yogurt, wild berries, pistachio crunch and milk chocolate
Raheem – Protein pumper – protein base?, peanut butter, crunch & milk chocolate
There’s not much for the viewer to appreciate in this challenge. One bar looks pretty much like another. There’s not much baking either, with typically only a small amount of shortbread or crunch included in the bars. Plus any mistakes will be hidden under cream, caramel and chocolate. The challenge is to find good flavour combinations and show off sugar and chocolate skills.
Dorte seems to be making Italian meringue but the has the whisk set to “helicopter take-off” speed and she’s adding the sugar syrup one tablespoon at a time. The result is that the syrup has been splattered on the sides of the bowl and not mixed into the meringue. Christian steps in for this week’s helpful tip. First, turn down the speed and then pour the syrup directly from the saucepan onto the edge of the bowl near the eggwhites. This is quicker and less of a splatterfest.
The presentations are nothing special but there is a big variation in the size and quality of bars. Those who used molds for their chocolate bars achieved better results. Pouring cholocate over a bar is very difficult and judging the size is also tricky. Dorte and Nina demonstrate this for us…
Aufgabe 2: Technische Prufung Kaiserschmarren-Kasekuchen – Pancake cheesecake (2.5 hours)
OK, I had never heard of Kaiserschmarrn before. Apparently its an Austrian scrambled pancake. Christian combines this with a classic German cheesecake to create a curious Technical challenge, that I doubt I’ll be trying. Not least because it seems to require ruining a spoon so you can compact the cheesecake base!
The Dr Oetker placement is also curious but maybe worth trying… A gourmet vanilla grinder.
Making pancakes is pretty strightforward but these are huge monsters. Tossing them is a challenge in itself and while some bakers find clever ways to flip them Christian turns his into a burnt omelette. “Oh! my holy ****!”
Oh! the beauty of the English language!
You would learn a whole new vocabulary if you heard my reaction to the judging! After all of that mess, how on Earth did Christian get 2nd place???
Full marks for Christa!
Aufgabe 3: Deko Surprise:Motto-Party (5 hours!)
Guest Baker is Rebecca Mir, Next Top Model and Promibackerin
And now Dr Oetker is really spoiling us! Did they sponsor this by any chance? Bakers can choose anything from a table full of sparkly, glittery things, molds, colours, icing nozzles and who knows what else.
This is a decoration challenge but my interest is piqued by the inclusion of Advocaat in 2 recipes. I don’t think ever ever seen it in one before. Is there a new trend I don’t know about?
Christa is making an enormous bucket full of cement and Enie reminds her it’s a Bake Off and not a Build Off. Even when baked the colour is very industrial.
After an hour and a half we’re seeing cakes going into the oven. That doesn’t seem like a lot of progress. Yes, it’s a 5 hour challenge so in theory there’s plenty of time but the point of this is to create amazing decorations for which you surely need a cake.
As they take the sponges out of the oven and start to assemble we can see all of these cakes are enormous!
Interesting as the assembly and finishing stage is I’m going to have to skip to the presentation because there’s a lot to get through.
Dorte’s 20th Golden looks classy, a bit like a chocolate French Legionaires cap with a dead fish sticking out. The details are a bit lacking and I’m disappointed that the feathers are made from paper. The cake inside looks lovely, although I’m not a great fan of jelly.
Stefanie’s rainbow cake is exactly the kind of thing you see in YouTube for a children’s party show-stopper cake. It’s great fun and well presented. It mixes some of the popular themes of unicorns, rainbows and drip cake decorations.
Caterina’s Gender Reveal is also very much a classic children’s (surprise) cake but the decorations miss the mark. There’s a bear and huge lump of white fondant on top and I’m not sure what it’s meant to be. It lacks finesse. The surprise inside turns out to be blue slug pellets. This is definitely a childrens cake.
Christian’s flower power cake is a little bit lop-sided. The palette knife decorations and the CND symbol look a bit crude. Using real flowers to decorate has definitely helped the presentation but I would like to see some more skill. The slices look rather dry. The guest judge, Rebecca, thinks there is too muh alcohol. What does she know!
Christa’s Engagement Party cake looks the business. Very classy! Gold lace decorating a black base cake and a beautiful 2nd tier made of marble. On top she presents a genuine engagement ring which she got from a Christmas cracker. The cake filling also looks like layers of black, white and gold. I really love the look of this one. It definitely goes on my to-do list.
Maybe it’s just the contrast with what came before but I’m not that wowed by Raheem’s Beach party cake. It seems a bit plane. That said, the sand, seashells and sea horses are very good. The judges don’t seem impressed with the flavours.
Nina’s Pretty in Pink cake looks good and it shows off a few technical skills, such as isomalt crystals and drips on the side of the cake. But if you took those 2 things away the outside would be nothing special. (Maybe I was too harsh with Raheem.) Inside looks like a much more balanced cake. Actually, it looks delicious. The judges absolutely love it.
Round Up
Not one of my favourite episodes because the Signature and Technical challenges dind’t really grab me. The show-stopper had some great bakes and I’m really impressed Christa’s engagement cake. There were a few recipes I’d be tempted to try out and also a couple of the extras such as the unicorn decoration or gold lace.
As I commented last week, we can see the limits of the baker’s abilities now. Dorte, Stefanie and Christa look like possible finalists. Raheem seems to have peaked. Christian has been on the ropes for a while. Nina could rise or fall to the challenge.
Spoilers below…
Star Baker this week goes to Christa, which was no suprise. She totally deserved it after a perfect Technical and spectacular Show-stopper. Congratulations! At the other end of the scale I was a bit surprised that Christian was the baker leaving the tent. Although he has been in danger for a couple of weeks I thought he did just enough to survive this time . Actually, I had to delve into the scores and rewatch the judging to make any sense of it. He was harshly judged in the Signature, getting only 12 points. Surely Nina’s absurdly large and ill-tempered chocolate bricks deserved fewer points but apparently not. He was (somehow) 2nd in Technical, so no problems there. Then in the show-stopper, he gained only 8.5 points. The next lowest was Raheem with 15. I don’t think there was such a large difference between the two. Honestly, I think he was robbed.
