All good things must come to end – and this week was sadly the last in the series of The Great British Bake Off. As much as the finalists creations looked fab, sadly I had neither time nor occasion to make a 3-tier wedding cake this week! Instead I opted for pretzels, using Paul Hollywood’s recipe, adding my own chocolate finish.
Paul’s pretzel recipe was simple and easy to follow. I halved it to make my batch of size, substituting brown sugar for the malt extract. However many tutorials I read on the throw-in-the-air-twist-and-flip pretzel shaping, it was never going to work. Fortunately it’s just as easy to create the right shape with the dough laid out on a work surface.
Throwing the carefully shaped dough into the boiling water seemed a bit counter-intuitive, but very necessary to create that golden chewy outer. It was actually quite satisfying to see the dough float up to the surface after its 5-second dip!
Baking the pretzels was very easy – adding a few salt flakes whilst they were still wet before putting straight into the oven. They came out a lovely golden brown colour, but absolutely welded to the baking sheet! Paul Hollywood has yet to reply to my tweet on how to avoid this problem, so I spent a good 15 minutes carefully peeling the paper off the bottoms…
The finished pretzels as per Paul’s recipe – pretty tasty at this point, a lovely chewy texture…
… but of course I wasn’t finished! Once cooled I dipped the rounded ends of the pretzels into rich dark and white chocolate:
- before finishing with a final sprinkle of rock salt flakes.
The finished dark chocolate pretzels – a contrast between the salty chewy dough and the rich cocoa of the chocolate.
And the white chocolate – salty versus sweet, a smooth silky outer and chewy bread inner. My personal favourite!
Needless to say I’ve hugely enjoyed taking part in the Great Bloggers Bake Off – thank you to Jenny and Helen for organising! These pretzels were a particular favourite, so easy to make, very tasty, and incredibly versatile. My brain is already whirring away thinking cheese pretzels, maybe cinnamon and raisin…
