Gloverly Cupcakes

I was intrigued about this weeks technical challenge. It didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to anything I’d made in the past. It certainly wasn’t like any pastry recipes I’d tried. I can see why the bakers got confused – it felt like it belonged in bread week rather than pastry week!
To me, Flaounas appear to be cheesy rolls. You make 2 kinds of dough, one of which contains a lot of cheese – 750g in total. The other contains some random ingredients – mastic powder and mahlepi. Rather than buying these unusual spices I decided to add a bit of ground fennel and cardamom seeds to the “pastry” instead. So I’m not sure what they would actually taste like, but the filling (which I made as per the recipe) is  good – it’s a cheesy bread with a hint of mint and some sultanas for sweetness. The recipe is here is you want to give it a go. After taking a look at the first batch while they baked, it was clear that the pastry needed to be much thinner! I’d rolled it out to thinner than it suggested anyway but realised it needed to be even thinner. I’d go with 1-2mm thick rather than the 3mm that the recipe suggests. Like when you try to roll out pizza bases or naan bread, it springs back after you roll it out so I re-rolled them after they’d had their coating in sesame seeds to make sure they stayed thin. The only other change I made was to the sesame seeds – I only had 100g (half of what the recipe asked for) so that’s what I used and I still had quite a lot left at the end.

 Having made and tasted these I’m still not convinced that they belonged in pastry week. I also think it was harsh the way Ian was marked down for making them the wrong shape. The ones shown on the show, and those made by most of the contestants were square. However, the instructions given on the GBBO website tell you to make them as triangles – and a google image search shows a range of shapes. I’m glad I made them – squares or triangles, they’re still tasty!