GBBO - Week 3

Bread week! I love bread week too. It's not my favourite week but it is up there and it's one of the daunting ones for me. I have never attempted to make bread although I have always wanted to. Previous bread weeks (I am talking about Paul's Lion last year) have been impressive so I was looking forward to this despite the biscuit show stopper disappointments.

The first bake for the contestants was a pleasant surprise. Chocolate bread. I have a very sweet tooth which is why I was excited about it. And then they baked. Only three of the bakers managed to bake their breads all the way through. Three! Andrew was the surprising winner of this one. He was one of the few (if not only) bakers who proved his bread only once. At first this appeared to be a mistake but then Paul congratulated him on the decision as it meant he cooked bake the bread properly in the time they had.

For the technical challenge the bakers had to make a German sweet bread called dampfnudel. This looks like the least appealing technical I have ever seen. Yet, it looked like both Mary and Paul enjoyed it stating it tasted like an iced bun without the icing. I am on the fence as to whether or not I am going to attempt this one. The bakers on the other hand didn't have a choice and most of them fared a little better than they did with the chocolate bread (still a few raw efforts). Well done to Val who won it by making dampfnudel almost as good as Paul's (which came from the man himself). If you want to have a go the recipe is on the Bake Off website.

For the show stopper the bakers had to make a savoury centre piece using three different types of flour. I could have shown you Val's attempt at a bread Noah's ark, or Andrew's basket but this is the one that caught my eye as well as the twittersphere. Tom baked Thor's hammer using chili and seaweed. Interesting shape there.

Despite the shape pre-bake Tom won star baker for his show stopper. He is been up near the top for the last few weeks and has been commended for his flavours so well done Tom.

It was Andrew's turn to leave this week. I was a little surprised that Candice wasn't the one to go as she had a pretty bad week. Andrew on the other hand has probably been the least memorable this week. Feel a little bad for saying that and maybe he should have had another chance to shine.

This week I enjoyed last weeks technical challenge while I watched. The biscuit was very light and quite fragile but melt in your mouth (if I do say so myself). It's been years since I made biscuits (cookies don't count) and I quite enjoyed it.

More importantly I made my very first jam and it actually turned out. It was actually quite easy to do and it tasted good too. Very proud of myself for that one.

Anyone else attempting the technical challenges?

As always only the last two images belong to me. The rest belong to the BBC and the Bake Off website.