Series 7, Episode 1, Jaffa Cakes
Series 7 was the last series of the Great British Bake off to be broadcast on the BBC and the last series with Mary Berry in, so I’ll only be making a few more of her recipes!
Here’s the one for Jaffa cakes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mary_berrys_jaffa_cakes_58695
To make the cake sponge (the clue is in the name, it’s a cake, not a biscuit), only required a very small amount of ingredients. The egg and sugar were beaten to incorporate some air and the flour folded in. Here’s the cake batter, which needed to be divided into 12:
The recipe suggested a dessert spoon full, which officially is 2 teaspoons, which is what I measured out. I struggled to get enough in the last couple of holes but just about managed to get a similar amount in each one:
Next I made the jelly. The amount of water on the packet was a pint in total (568 mL), but the recipe only said 150 mL so I was expecting some pretty thick jelly. I also ignored where it said “finely grated” about the orange zest so it was a bit stringy.
This took just under an hour to set in my fridge, but it turns out that the shelves in my fridge aren’t perfectly flat, meaning that the jelly wasn’t perfectly uniform. I couldn’t get the jelly out of the container so I just cut the circles out directly from where it was and took them out with a knife. The size of the cookie cutter recommended was 5 cm, which covered most of the cake rather than having a circle in the middle but I went with it anyway:
Next was the chocolate. I’m usually a big fan of melting chocolate in the microwave but I was feeling fancy so I did it over a pan of boiling water. I used slightly darker chocolate than in the recipe because I didn’t really read it properly when shopping for ingredients and just assumed it was dark chocolate like a real jaffa cake. I had to re-melt the chocolate a couple of times and it kept sliding off the jelly, but eventually I managed to get 12 covered with a criss-cross pattern on most of them. I used around 100g of chocolate rather than the 180g in the recipe, because I’ve made Mary Berry’s recipes before and I know how she thinks:
Here’s the inside of one so you can see how thick the jelly and chocolate are:
I’m someone who will usually dismantle her jaffa cake when eating it, either chocolate off first or if I’m feeling ambitious, cake off first. It was difficult to do that with these because they were falling apart a bit, also, the cake was much softer than a normal jaffa cake so not such a solid base. Overall they tasted fine, they weren’t a lot of effort if you feel like making them, but don’t expect them to taste like a McVitie’s.
Lily
