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introduction
Another bake off first with Italian week! I enjoyed it, it was good, but I felt pretty awful for the bakers. Surely there’s some A/C they can put on in the tent for them? Those temperatures just looked like torture.
I was pretty sad to see Yan go, she was so much better and more creative than some others, and Steven getting star baker, when his showstopper was burnt was a bit of an eye roll moment for me.
So many delicious cannoli flavours this week and I love a cannoli. Liam’s s’mores one just looked dreamy and lemon cheesecake, yes please! Did anyone else think the technical pizza challenge looked a bit sad? Where was all the cheese?! As for the showstopper, I’ve never heard of sfogliatella and it looked like a nightmare with that much rolling out until it was paper thin.
For Bake Off Bake Along this week, I opted to take on sfogliatella (the cheats way), purely because after frying churos last year, it took me days to get the fried oil smell out of the house and as for the technical, I just didn’t have enough time for pizza dough this weekend.
However one issue I had with sfogliatella was that I don’t have a pasta machine to roll it out super thin, which is why I cheated with bought puff pastry. I also made these at the end of a super crazy busy weekend spent up in Hertfordshire, so didn’t really have enough time to faff around with homemade pastry.
As for filling, I could have gone the typical ricotta route, but unfortunately didn’t. Not a lot of the people that I was planning to feed these to liked ricotta, so I chose to fill half with pastry cream and half with nutella, because they both sound like dreamy combos. The pastry cream recipe was this one from BBC, just your standard pastry cream, and this was added after baking and cooling.
The nutella ones turned out much much better, I think mainly because they were baked with the filling. The pastry cream ones were good, but filling after baking wasn’t as easy. So next time, I would definitely try and bake the pastry cream inside of them.
The layers aren’t so defined if you do it the cheats way but the effect is there. I think, if I did them again, I would just roll the pastry out thinner by hand before layering them and rolling. Because as they are now, they really are just like fancy looking pastries…
