Series 6, Episode 8, Mokatines

Hello everyone, here’s a link to Mary Berry’s recipe for Mokatines from the Great British Bake off Series 6 https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mokatines_96500

This one started off with a genoise sponge. I usuallly struggle with folding things in so I usually either under mix it or over mix it. It looked fine when it came out of the oven, but then when I cut it in half horizontally, I realised that there was a little bit which was a bit squishy. I wasn’t sure whether that was because some of the melted butter had pooled there, I’d over mixed it or under baked it.

The coffee icing caused me a little bit of trouble. It wasn’t clear from the recipe what was required – the ingredients list said “1 tablespoon instant coffee” and the method said to stir in the coffee powder until dissolved. I just used coffee granules, but maybe that’s the same as powder, I don’t know, I prefer tea. They didn’t dissolve properly so I just sieved it to get out the lumpy coffee bits. I usually use twice as much icing sugar as butter when making buttercream, but for this it used four and a half times more! This is one of the reasons I thought maybe I should have put liquid coffee in instead. It said to set it aside to thicken but I didn’t really want it any thicker. Here’s a photo:

It was more like plasticine than icing, I had to squash it down onto the cake, here it is:

You can see one little lump of coffee that escaped the sieve. Next I put the other layer of cake on the top and cut it into 9 “equal” squares:

Close enough.

Spreading the apricot jam around the edge and putting the chopped almonds on was so easy that I nearly forgot to add this bit into my post. I don’t have a photo because you can see that on the final cakes.

The crème au beurre moka also went a bit wrong. The recipe says to use a small bowl, but also recommends a free standing mixer. I only have a big bowl for my free standing mixer and this one little egg yolk was managing to avoid the whisk. Making the syrup was fine, I just kept checking how stringy it was between spoons, but then when I came to add it to the yolk, it just hardened all over the whisk and the side of the bowl. I then mixed this with the butter but it looked like there wasn’t enough and just didn’t feel right. I used Camp chicory and coffee essence to flavour it. Here’s the icing made with the free-standing mixer:

I decided to make it again but whisked it by hand. This worked out much better, for the buttercream and for my biceps. I didn’t take a photo of the icing I actually used because I was tired and forgot. The recipe said to pipe tiny rosettes around the top edge of the cake and around the bottom edge, but there was nowhere near enough to do this, also, it doesn’t look like she’s done the bottom edge in her photo.

This was quite runny and I was worried it wouldn’t keep its shape if I piped it so I put it in the fridge for a bit. I don’t think this was a good idea, I ended up having to soften it quite a lot anyway to be able to pipe it. Next I argued with the piping bag and tip until deciding I didn’t want to pipe pretty rosettes, I wanted to do my own design. I only had enough for the top of the cakes.

For the fondant icing, I just threw the lot in the food processor with all of the water and pressed go. I didn’t have brown food colouring so I just combined a few until it looked the right colour. I should have added the water more slowly though because it was probably too runny and took a long time to set. It managed to stay within my crème au beurre moka border though.

Here’s a photo of the final cakes:

Just like in a patisserie window, right down to the blue plastic plate.

They tasted fine, I think even the squishy sponge was alright. I think I’d recommend making these if you like doing lots of washing up.

Lily

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