Semi-final week in GBBO so it follows that chocolate week comes to the Great Bloggers Bake Off – how could I resist making something?!
This is a bit of a short post as I’m not sharing the recipe because I didn’t feel the one I used worked particularly well – the pastry was too crumbly and prone to holes and breakage, and the filling very nearly didn’t set at all! Still it went down very well at dinner – you can’t go far wrong with this much chocolate :-)
The pastry was an enriched dough, with sugar, cocoa powder and an egg yolk added to the normal butter-flour-water base.
I was pleased to get it all into the tin in one piece…
… but it didn’t come out quite as in tact!
I didn’t want the filling to leak out or ruin the crispness of the pastry, so used a thin coat of melted dark chocolate over the cooled pastry to create a tight seal.
Once this was set the filling was quite simple – a tin of Carnation caramel (much easier than making your own from a can of condensed milk), mixed with some melted dark chocolate, and layered up over some thinly sliced bananas. I think the issue with the caramel not setting was due to too much stirring to combined the chocolate. If I make this again I’ll boil it up a little with some more butter and sugar to make a thicker caramel that will set firmly.
To finish I used some simple chocolate icing (cocoa, icing sugar milk), drizzled in lines and feathered with a cocktail stick. Easy but effective!
I used the same chocolate icing to pipe some swirls around the exposed edge of the pastry case, which neatened up the final look (and hid the cracks where I’d patched the pastry together!)
As I say not one of my favorite recipes but it still went down well – with that much chocolate you can’t go wrong!
You can find out more about the Great Bloggers Bake Off by clicking on the link below.
