Mini Bake Off

We already make a treat every week, but we thought we'd pull out our Great British Baking recipe book and pick a recipe at random. And since Grandma Dargan had a week off from work, we decided to do a mini Bake Off. It wasn't a competition so much as an opportunity to try a new recipe. 

Like I said, it was random, so we ended up choosing a treat called Chocolate Terrine with Pistachio Praline. It looks interesting. Think we can make something that looks similar?

I typed out the recipe since Mom's GBB recipe book is still packed somewhere. But it is nice to type it out since I have to convert all the measurements from English to American.

Here are the baker's on our end. (Something to notice: This recipe took some time to make, so you'll see at least three outfit changes)

And here is our lovely photographer.

 This recipe is super healthy, as you can see by the amount of chocolate and butter in it. 

The girls are so efficient in the kitchen. I can give them almost any task and they are on it. It's pretty easy to all work together.

I'm getting pretty good at separating egg yolks and whites.

We don't have a double boiler, but we use this particular bowl all the time and it does the trick. I also love how the burner looks pink.

The girls had to leave for an activity, so that left me to finish up the first part of the process by myself. 

Grandma was actually slightly ahead of me on the process. She already whipped up her cream and her egg whites. 

Look how pretty when you start folding it in. (I also love Grandma's purple bowls. I gave them to her. ;)

I've done my fair share of folding recently. Mousse, Terrine, and Souffle (next week) all have folding in of whipped something. We need to branch out and try something new. After everything is incorporated, you put it all in a loaf pan, wrap it up and in the fridge it goes for four hours or overnight.

We opted for overnight. The first part is finished. (Fast forward to the next day.) Now to make the Pistachio Praline. This is definitely something new I haven't tried before.

We had just been swimming (outfit change number one).

To make the praline, you melt sugar on the stove. That's it. You get a pan with a nice thick bottom and then hope your sugar won't burn too much. It's a little tricky, since the sugar doesn't seem to cook at the same rate. In this picture, it's starting to turn dark on the bottom, but there is still some sugar that hasn't even dissolved.

We did the best we could, added our nuts and then poured it on our mat.

It actually didn't look too bad. It was very sticky and hard to spread out and somehow I thought there would be more of it.

Grandma also struggled with this step. She tried twice and both times, her sugar turned too dark. I think this has gone past browning to burnt. It was not easy.

Now you remove the terrine from the fridge. It's basically a chocolate brick now.

I broke up my pistachio brittle and shoved some pieces in the top. Ha ha. Not too bad. (And another outfit change)

What do you think? It seems pretty close to the picture. Almost.

It actually cut very nicely. It tasted like a giant truffle. The praline was actually my favorite part. I kept pulling off pieces and eating those separately. I actually liked the chocolate more with strawberries cut up on top. It seemed to need fruit in my opinion.

It was an adventure for sure and kudos to both Grandma and us for trying something new. I believe Grandma threw away her brittle and they just ate the chocolate. (That's fair.) There was no official judging, but we all ate some and no one hated it. I'm not sure I'd ever make it again, but I always like experimenting.