No sass intended. The Great British Bake Off week 2 left us with the need to know, how tough is it to create 24 biscuits that all look the same? Could we do it? Can you do it? We had to find out…
Peanut Butter Sandwich Biscuits
24 uniform biscuits. It sounds so simple, but vaguely sinister too. I decided, this would be my next baking challenge. But could it be done in a busy weekend? Would I remember to buy a rolling pin? This was gunna be a tough baaaaake!…
So I went to buy my ingredients and some essential utensils that I’m missing (1 x sieve, 1 x rolling pin).
As you can see, I made it back with the ingredients, but forgot everything else. Like I said, it was a busy weekend!
I found Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe on the Guardian website, and pretty much followed it word for word. Peanut butter, chocolate, and ganache. The holy trinity of deliciousness. My thinking was that even if they’re not the same shape and size, I want to be able to eat them all.
*Baking Hack* Even though I was minus a sieve, I’ve got a colander. So my flour and cocoa powder were successfully sieved.
Next step was to mix peanut butter and butter, and then sugar together. Oh dear lord, save me from the calories! (Let me eat them first, then save me.)
Once you’ve finished mixing all the tasty stuff together, plus your egg, you add the flour/cocoa mix and combine until you’ve got a ball of dough. Wrap it in cling film and chill. *Tip* Put it in the freezer if you want to speed the process along.
When you and your dough are done chilling, it’s time to get serious about uniformity…
How easy actually is it to roll out 48 (double layers needed for sandwich biscuits, would this be my undoing, like it was for Candice?) round biscuit discs?
Luckily, I live with a chef, who is the kind of person to have round cut outs to hand (but not a sieve??), so I could guarantee all my biscuits would be circular. But like I said, I was a rolling pin down, so consistency of depth was going to be more tricky…
*Baking Hack Warning*
What do you do when you realise you don’t own a rolling pin? You remove a layer of cling-film, use the clean roll to smooth out the biscuit dough, and pretend that’s what you’d planned all along!
In all the palaver (I was cooking Sunday lunch at the same time), I forgot to use the £1 coin measuring tip I’d picked up from GBBO. So my discs were flat but definitely not even. Dammit!
While your biscuits are baking, you make the chocolate ganache.
*Warning* The chocoholic’s dream part is coming up…
Hold everything… And look at this chocolate:
The best bit about making these biscuits, is that the recipe calls for too much ganache. So you get to eat it straight out of the bowl. With a big spoon. It was amazing <3 <3
The big reveal:
They might not have been perfect. But there were 24 of them, and they were so delicious, and they ‘snapped’ (I think Paul would have been proud of the snap!).
I learnt that consistency is hard. But when there’s peanut butter and chocolate ganache up for grabs, nobody cares!
P.S. Here’s proof that there were 24!
If you’ve been baking, we’d love to see what you’ve made, or swap some recipe ideas. Get in touch in the comments, or via our social media pages!
