This weekend CootieGirl and I finally attempted our first “Great British Bake Off” challenge. We were so curious about the Schichttorte (original GBBO stock photo above) that we chose that as our first thing to try and replicate.
Sometime during the week leading up to our baking session, CG suggested that we each make our own and compare them. Little did I know the hassle that would be involved with this particular dessert. It requires two mixers to make just one, and since we only have two mixers, it meant that she made hers first and then I made mine. That led to a very long day of baking in the kitchen given the fact that this is not a “set it and forget it” type of dessert.
The Recipe:
We used the recipe straight from the GBBO website (linked above) but we had to make some modifications along the way since we are in the US, not England. I’ve list the full recipe, but added notes where our ingredients differed)
Ingredients
For the cake:
- 10 large free-range eggs, separated
- 100g (3½ oz) unsalted butter
- 150g (5½ oz) caster sugar (we made our own caster sugar and could never get the consistency we knew we needed)
- 1 large lemon, zest only
- 1 tsp vanilla bean paste (we used vanilla extract)
- 150g (5½ oz) plain flour, sifted
- 65g (2¼ oz) cornflour, sifted (in America this is cornstarch)
- oil, for greasing
- 6 tbsp apricot jam (we used strawberry jam)
For the chocolate glaze:
- 50g (1¾ oz) unsalted butter
- 1 tbsp golden syrup (we used light corn syrup since we could not find golden syrup)
- 1 tbsp rum
- 1 tsp vanilla bean paste
- 75g (2½ oz) plain chocolate (36% cocoa solids), finely chopped (CG used white chocolate while I used 32% chocolate)
For the vanilla glaze:
- 250g (9oz) icing sugar
- 1 tbsp rum
- ½ tsp vanilla bean paste
- 1-2 tbsp milk
Directions
- Whisk the egg yolks in the bowl of a freestanding mixer on a high speed for five minutes, until pale, thick and creamy.
- In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until pale and creamy. Add the lemon zest and vanilla paste and mix well. Add the whisked egg yolks and beat well. Add the flour and cornflour and mix.
- In a clean, grease-free bowl, whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form when the whisk is removed. Stir one-third of the egg whites into the batter to loosen the consistency. Then gently fold the remaining egg whites into the egg yolk mixture.
- Preheat the grill to high. (in America this would be the “broil” setting on most ovens)
- Grease a 20cm/8in round springform tin with oil and line the base with parchment paper. (we used an 8 1/2 inch round springform)
- Spoon some of the batter into the base of the cake tin and spread evenly across the bottom. Give the tin a gentle side-to-side shake to even out the top of the batter. Place on a shelf 10cm/4in below the grill and cook for two minutes, or until light golden-brown.
- Remove from the grill, add another spoonful of batter, spread out with a pastry brush, and place under the grill for three minutes, or until dark golden-brown. Continue layering and grilling until you have 20 layers alternating in colour from light golden-brown to dark golden-brown. (Or continue until you have used all the batter.)
- Remove from the grill and leave to cool in the tin for five minutes. Carefully release from the tin and turn out onto a wire rack to cool.
- Melt the apricot jam in a small pan over a low heat. Pass through a fine sieve, then brush the top and sides of the cake with jam. This will help the glaze stick to the cake.
- For the chocolate glaze, melt the butter in a small pan with the golden syrup, rum and vanilla paste and bring to the boil. Remove from the heat, allow to cool for five minutes. Stir in the chocolate until melted. Transfer to a bowl and allow to cool to a coating consistency.
- Place a large piece of greaseproof paper under the wire rack holding the cake. Pour the glaze evenly over the cake to cover completely. Any excess glaze will be caught on the greaseproof paper and can be reused to fill in any unglazed areas of the cake.
- For the vanilla glaze, sieve the icing sugar into a bowl. Add the rum, vanilla paste and milk, stirring until completely smooth. Drizzle over the chocolate glaze.
Our Progress:
CG is not much of a baker, and so a lot of things involved are completely foreign to her. Despite being almost 16 years old, she has trouble breaking eggs cleanly. Well, this recipe, which calls for 10 eggs, gave her an opportunity to work on that very basic skill. The good news? No shells ended up in her egg whites, and no yolks broke in the course of dividing the eggs. But it was hard to watch her breaking those eggs and not try to correct her method (which was rife for shells in egg whites and broken yolks).
Next challenge was the butter/sugar. Since I could not find caster sugar in our local stores, we had to try to make it. We threw the sugar in a food processor and pulsed it until it wasn’t quite as granulated as it originally was, but I doubt it was as fine as it needed to be. But we eventually gave up and just threw the sugar into the mixer with the butter.
While she kept an eye on the butter/sugar, I began whipping the egg yolks in their bowl until they were light yellow and thick. No lie – when they were done they looked like yellow cake batter. I showed the end result to my son and he ask if he could have a taste, thinking it was cake batter. I was so tempted to say yes but knew he’d never forgive me if he thought he was getting cake batter and got pure egg yolk instead.
The next test for us was whipping the egg whites to the right consistency and folding them into the sugar/butter/flour/yolk mixture. The instructions said to whip the whites until they had a soft peak. CG did hers first and her eggs looked decent. When I did mine, I thought I matched hers but once I dumped the egg whites into the batter I realized that they were not as whipped as they needed to be.
The second test on the egg whites was the notion of “folding” them into the batter. I’ve been baking for a very long time and this is one skill I have NEVER been able to master. I don’t know what my mental block is, but it’s severe. I can watch people on TV do it and think, “Oh, I can do that,” but then when I actually go to do it, it fails and I’m not able to keep the mixture light and aerated.
Once the egg whites were folded in, it was time to get our bake on. The recipe calls for an 8″ round springform pan, but the smallest we had was an 8-1/2″ springform pan. As a result I know we would not get to 20 layers, but figured anything more than 12 layers would be a success for us, if not an official schichttorte.
CG poured her first 1/2 cup of batter into the cake pan and we could not get it all the way to the edge to save our life. It ended up not wanting to bypass the parchment paper lining the bottom of the pan. But we put it in the broiler and baked it for about 2 minutes and brought it out – it had the nice dark brown top we were looking for:
So we continued on, adding layer after layer, broiling it to dark, light, dark, light, etc.
Finally, she ran out of batter and after letting it cool in the pan for a few minutes we turned it out onto a rack:
We both agreed it was kind of flat looking, but she ended up getting 16 or 17 layers out of her batter, so that was a great success in that regard. Her torte now done, it was time for me to make mine. The only adjustments I made – I whipped my egg yolks a bit longer, I grinded (ground?) my sugar a bit longer to make it a bit finer, I didn’t whip my egg whites enough, and I used more batter per layer and ended up with only 12 or 13 layers. But here’s what my final out-of-the-pan effort looked pretty much exactly like CG’s.
Once completely cooled we then coated both our cakes in the strawberry jam which was supposed to assist the chocolate glaze in sticking to the cake.
Then it was time for the chocolate glaze. CG wanted to do a white chocolate glaze since she does not like regular chocolate. We attempted to swap out the chocolates and the resulting glaze was very weird and never really blended together with the butter and corn syrup. We chucked that and I told her just to melt white chocolate in the microwave until it was pourable and we’d use that. Unfortunately, while I was outside supervising CootieBoy’s effort to mow the yard she burned the chocolate. Third times a charm, right? We melted the next batch of white chocolate (without burning it) and then poured in cream to make it a bit more pourable. It worked! Unfortunately, it didn’t make nearly enough, so when she drizzled it over the cake, she did not get full coverage so the strawberry jam was all still completely visible underneath:
I then started on my chocolate glaze, mixing 32% chocolate with the butter and corn syrup. I thought mine had the right consistency, but in the end the butter separated and it never got that wonderful glossy chocolate color, and never got to a true GLAZE consistency. And like CG I did not have nearly enough glaze to have full coverage. As such, mine looked atrocious:
At this point, we’d been working for 6 1/2 hours straight on these two schichttortes. Next up: cut test – would it look like it needed to?
Not bad. Not bad at all. You can see all the layers, but they are hard to count in the picture but in person we counted 16 for sure, although CG says she counted 17 when she baked it.
And mine?
You can only see 8 layers but I know I did at least 12. No idea where the other four got to when they were in the oven.
Last night three of us tried CG’s cake and we all agreed that despite the batter having a great lemon flavor, once baked all hint of flavor was completely gone and all that was left was a tasteless rubbery brick with a bit of white chocolate on top. It was awful. And that’s not because of anything that CG did wrong, because when I cut into mine at work today and took a slice, it was also a tasteless rubbery brick with a bit of chocolate on top.
Our Final Opinion and Comparison with the Show:
Only Paul Hollywood, Mary Berry or challenge winner Luis should be making this cake. After our at-home taste test we put on the episode (Season 1, Episode 9, “Patisserie”) and saw where we made mistakes (notably we did not beat our egg whites nearly as long as Luis did).
But anyone who isn’t Paul, Mary or a semi-finalist on GBBO should leave notes like the one I left in my office’s break room with my offering:
Here is the complete list of all Great British Bake Off technical challenges, which will be updated each time we bake something!
