As I’m typing it’s a Friday afternoon here, the rain is tumbling down and I have cakes in the oven for tomorrow’s York Clandestine Cake Club event at the Hobbycraft store on the Monks’ Cross retail park. I’m trying to catch up on my blogging which is seriously behind. I’ve had a good excuse this week though as I have gone back to work in my day job as a teaching assistant after the summer break. I don’t usually work on a Friday though so today is my catch up day!
On Monday we started back at school with our staff training day. We usually have a shared lunch on training days if we are school based and I normally provide the pudding or the cake. I chose to make two bakes from the new Great British Bake Off recipe book The Great British Bake Off Everyday that wouldn’t be too rich and sickly sweet, yet I hoped would taste nice for my work colleagues!
First up was some delicious sounding Raspberry Crumble Shortbread Squares.
Note to self: when baking a recipe you have never baked before, please read the recipe carefully. As the recipe involved looking at another shortbread recipe, one for plain shortbread over on the previous page, baking it to a certain point in the recipe, then continuing with the raspberry one I got very confused and made up all the dough into one big ball. Instead I separated it afterwards , having a large and a small ball of dough. The small ball of dough was meant to stay as crumbs (or is this down to confusing recipes)? This meant that when I added the topping to the shortbread, it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the whole shortbread. The shortbread looked very rustic but with a few slivered almonds thrown on it wasn’t so bad.
This is one of the recipes which doesn’t have an accompanying picture to it which is frustrating. I would have had SOME idea about how my shortbread was MEANT to look instead of just guessing!
The book contains a recipe for Raspberry and Redcurrant Jam on the following page to the Raspberry Crumble Shortbread recipe. It is meant to be used as the filling for the shortbread or for scones but I did not have time to make my own jam as well. Instead I had a jar of raspberry jam which I had bought a few days previously and told everyone to keep off!
I was very pleased with the way the shortbread turned out in the end, although when it first came out of the oven I was a bit sceptical. It looked much better when cut up and I am pleased it went down at work. We had a slice at breaktime with our coffee and I brought the box back out at lunchtime as an alternative to the other cakes which were on offer.
I will definitely make this shortbread recipe again as my children wanted to try it as well.
Happy Baking!
Love Sam xx
