Gloverly Cupcakes

Last night, was my last opportunity to try the technical GBBO challenge before this week’s bake off. So, I decided to give it a go. I read through the recipe a few times before I started and it didn’t seem that difficult, just quite time consuming. However, they turned out to be trickier than I thought, even with the full instructions (which seemed half complete to me so I don’t know what the contestants got given)!

These are very different to anything I’ve made before – for a start, I have never rolled dough inside a lump of butter… It’s messy! The recipe didn’t state what size to roll the first square out to so I just made one that looked reasonable – it was probably about 15cm x 15cm. The next problem was that it didn’t say what size to roll it out to after the first chill (or the next one) – I just tried to keep it at about 15-20cm wide and made it as long as I could. I decided to roll between cling film rather than on a floured surface as it suggested and it actually worked really well.

 I had one slight disaster – after I’d put the filling in and done a “book turn” I went to turn it around so that I could roll it to the right size and as I did half the cinnamon sugar fell out of one of the ends! Luckily though they still seem to have enough of a cinnamon flavour.
 I found that chilling for a couple of minutes after cutting each slice (in lots and lots of icing sugar!) helped – not something the recipes said to do but in a hot kitchen the “Swiss roll” heats up quickly making it hard to cut 1cm slices off it. We tried the ends last night and they were really good – I can confirm that they also go well with coffee for breakfast!

I’m looking forward to to seeking what the next challenge is…