GBBO Translation: Tiramisu Sandwich Biscuits

I mentioned last time my new(ish) love of the Great British Baking Show, and I'm sure that a lot of you out there are familiar with this gem of a program. For those of you who aren't, here are the basics: over the course of ten or so weeks, amateur bakers compete in a series of baking challenges for the glory of being named Star Baker, and one contestant is eliminated each week. There are two judges who set the challenges and critique the creations and two hosts who provide comedy, moral support, and create a bridge between the bakers (who really know what they're doing) and the audience (who may not be familiar with all of the baking terms/techniques/etc.). But my favorite part is how kind everyone is. Even when you find yourself favoring a particular baker, you find yourself rooting for all of them, and everyone on the show is rooting for everyone else, too.

For the first seven seasons, GBBO featured hosts Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins and judges Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, but when the production changed networks, Mel, Sue, and Mary decided not to go with it. Like many of the show's loyal fans, I was heartbroken by this news. I had just finished binge-watching the three seasons that were on Netflix and hunted down and devoured the just-finished season on PBS, and I could not imagine what the show would be like without Mel and Sue offering the most perfect encouragement to stressed out bakers and sneaking in as many innuendos as possible or without Mary Berry's refined calm and quiet excitement for any boozy bake.

Then the new lineup was announced and I wasn't so worried. I was unfamiliar with the new judge, Prue Leith, and one of the hosts, Sandi Toksvig, but the other host was Noel Fielding, who made a few appearances in another of my favorite shows, The I.T. Crowd, and my worry was replaced with renewed excitement.

The eighth season of GBBO has not yet aired in the United States, and it is still unclear as to whether PBS is going to pick up the new series or air older seasons that have previously not been shown on this side of the pond (if anyone from PBS is reading this, get the new ones first, and then fill in with the old ones in off-season!). Even though I have as yet been unable to find the latest actual season, I have been able to track down the holiday special and the charity episodes benefiting Stand Up to Cancer, and they are great.

Today's recipe was the technical challenge from the third episode of the Stand Up to Cancer series, and the example looked so marvelous that I just had to try them and cross my fingers that they turned out better than the celebrity contestants' attempts.

So here's the original recipe, straight from the official Great British Bake Off website:

Prue's Tiramisu Sandwich Biscuits

Makes 8

For the biscuits

200g very soft unsalted butter

40g icing sugar

2 tbsp coffee liqueur

½ tsp instant espresso powder

180g plain flour

20g cornflour 

For the buttercream

125g unsalted butter, softened

250g icing sugar, sifted

2 tbsp coffee liqueur

½ tsp instant espresso powder 

For the decoration

100g plain chocolate, 70% cocoa solids

8 chocolate covered coffee beans

Step 1 – Preheat the oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment and draw 8 x 10cm lines, 2.5cm apart on each sheet. Turn the parchment over so the ink/pencil line is underneath but can be seen, to use as a template.

Step 2 – Measure the butter and icing sugar into a bowl and beat well until pale and fluffy. Add the coffee liqueur and espresso powder. Sieve in the flour and cornflour and beat well, until thoroughly mixed.

Step 3 – Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a medium star nozzle. Pipe the mixture in 16 straight lines along the lines on the baking parchment.

Step 4 – Bake in the centre of the oven for 13-15 minutes, until a pale golden-brown colour. Cool on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack to cool and harden.

Step 5 – For the buttercream, cut the butter into cubes and place in the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat on medium speed until the butter is very soft and creamy, scraping down the sides of the bowl occasionally.

Step 6 – Add the icing sugar, coffee liqueur and instant espresso powder and beat on low speed to avoid an explosion of icing sugar, then beat on medium speed until light and fluffy. Spoon ¾ of the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a ribbon nozzle and the remaining ¼ into a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle.

Step 7 – To decorate, melt the chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Pour the melted chocolate into a ramekin, then dip one end of 8 of the biscuits into the chocolate. Place on a wire rack, then chill in the fridge until the chocolate has set.

Step 8 – Pipe ribbons of buttercream along the flat edge of the remaining eight biscuits and sandwich together with the chocolate dipped biscuits.

Step 9 – Pipe a rosette of buttercream (using the star nozzle) on top of the dipped chocolate and top with a chocolate-coated coffee bean.

So that's almost enough to make my little head spin. The most I remember about grams is that they weigh about the same as a paperclip, and I've never learned to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (or vice versa), so I've used some Google calculating magic for some of this. I am, though, going to still do most of this by weight for accuracy's sake. I have a small kitchen scale, and it really does help make better and more consistent bakes than measuring by volume. (Coincidentally, my scale has options to measure in pounds, ounces, or grams, but I have converted from grams to ounces for this recipe so that if your scale only uses one unit or the other, you can still look at whichever recipe has the units to mach your scale.) I've included some volumetric estimates, though, for those of you without a scale.  And, one final time, for clarity, this is not my own recipe. I've just taken Prue's and made it more American-friendly. 

For the biscuits

7 oz very soft unsalted butter (14 Tablespoons)

1.4 oz confectioner's sugar (1/3 cup)

2 Tbsp coffee liqueur

½ tsp instant espresso powder

6.4 oz all purpose flour (1 2/3 cups)

0.7 oz corn starch (2 Tablespoons + 2 teaspoons)

For the buttercream

4.4 oz unsalted butter, softened (9 Tablespoons)

8.8 oz confectioner's sugar, sifted (2 1/4 cups)

2 Tbsp coffee liqueur

½ tsp instant espresso powder

For the decoration

3.5 oz chocolate chips (1/2 cup)

8 chocolate covered coffee beans

1. Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit. Line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment and draw 8 10cm lines, 2.5cm apart on each sheet. Turn the parchment over so the ink/pencil line is underneath but can be seen, to use as a template.

2. Measure the butter and confectioner's sugar into a bowl and beat well until pale and fluffy. Add the coffee liqueur and espresso powder. Sieve in the flour and corn starch and beat well, until thoroughly mixed.

3. Spoon the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a medium star tip. Pipe the mixture in 16 straight lines along the lines on the baking parchment.

4. Bake in the center of the oven for 13-15 minutes, until a pale golden-brown color. Cool on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack to cool and harden.

5. For the buttercream, cut the butter into cubes and place in the bowl of a stand mixer. Beat on medium speed until the butter is very soft and creamy, scraping down the sides of the bowl occasionally.

6. Add the confectioner's sugar, coffee liqueur, and instant espresso powder and beat on low speed, gradually increasing speed to medium speed until light and fluffy. Spoon ¾ of the mixture into a piping bag fitted with a ribbon nozzle and the remaining ¼ into a piping bag fitted with a star nozzle.

7. To decorate, melt the chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Pour the melted chocolate into a ramekin, then dip one end of 8 of the biscuits into the chocolate. Place on a wire rack, then chill in the fridge until the chocolate has set.

8. Pipe ribbons of buttercream along the flat edge of the remaining eight biscuits and sandwich together with the chocolate dipped biscuits.

9. Pipe a rosette of buttercream (using the star tip) on top of the dipped chocolate and top with a chocolate-coated coffee bean.

Everything started out simply enough: once I found a ruler I was able to mark out my template lines on my parchment (and you'll see in a bit that I was not great with estimating the spacing, but it didn't really matter). And creaming together butter with a bit of powdered sugar and flavoring was pretty basic.

I noted with some satisfaction that the batter was a little stiff, but not so much as to seem dry. I recalled some of the contestants finding their batter too runny and the disastrous outcomes, so this seemed good. I fitted my piping bag with my large open star nozzle (Wilton 1M) and started piping out the biscuits.

With the batter being fairly stiff, it is a little hard to pipe. My hands did get tired. But I persevered. Also, I found myself wondering if Prue has trouble counting because I had enough batter to pipe not 16 individual biscuit sides, but 30! Nearly twice what the recipe said it would yield!

I piped my 16 on my marked parchment and stuck them into the oven and piped the rest onto a nonstick mat on a third sheet pan. By the time I had piped the rest of the batter, the original 16 were about half-baked (har-har), and I noticed that the definition of the ridges was melting. I stuck the back-ups in the fridge to see if that would help keep the ridges.

And you know, the chilled ones did keep the ridges slightly better. But they still looked more like weird flat worms that pretty tea biscuits. Which leads me to another insight: not all star tips are created equal. I think the best shape would have been achieved by using a star tip with more and shallower points (like Wilton 4B), and then chilling for 15-30 minutes before baking.

Even so, I thought to myself "I'm 'appy with that!" as I moved the biscuits to the cooling rack and started on the butter cream. Normally I would go distract myself with some non-baking pursuit while waiting for something to cool, but the biscuits were light enough and small enough, and my kitchen cool enough that by the time I had the buttercream ready, the biscuits were cool too. If your kitchen is warm (or if you just need a margarita break), this is a good time to take it.

The buttercream ingredients came together pretty easily, but I was initially skeptical about the "beat until light and fluffy" part. The Kahlua and the espresso powder both made the mixture quite a bit darker than what had been pictured, but I feared for nothing and with a few minutes, the mixture was actually fluffy and a nice creamy off-white. I did wait to divide and scoop into piping bags though.

While I was fluffetizing the buttercream, I decided to sort my 31 biscuits into pairs in an effort to try and make the sandwiches match up as well as possible. I had an extra and tasted it. I do not recommend tasting the biscuits without chocolate or buttercream. I mean, they won't (unless you've done something terribly wrong) kill you or anything, but they're a bit dry, and I found them to be a little bitter with the coffee flavor, since they aren't very sweet. They're probably a lot better with a sip of tea or coffee, but just nibbling on the extra my thought process was "Hey, that's not bad! Oh, that's not good... Oh it's nice." Just wait until they're done, trust me. 

So the next step is chocolate. And I cheated here a little. I didn't heat over warm water, I just microwaved. In this little ramekin, my chocolate chips took about 1:45 to be melted smooth, BUT they were frozen to start with and I stirred them every 30 seconds. If you choose to microwave, be careful not to scorch your chocolate. It's nasty. And unforgivable. You do want to get the chocolate thoroughly melted and smooth, though, and I do recommend using a spoon to help get the chocolate onto the biscuits because they and they break like a thirteen-year-old boy's voice. 

Once you've got them, dipped, however, put them in the fridge to firm up and go back to the other half to put the buttercream. Now, I didn't have the prescribed ribbon tip, but I used a medium round tip, and I thought the edges ended up looking pretty enough with that. Just make sure that the blobs are big enough that they come pretty close to each side so that they are visible. I probably could have made them a little bit bigger, but I didn't. 

And once they've all been buttercreamed, fetch your chocolate-dipped biscuits from the fridge and assemble the sandwiches. But here, another little wisdom nugget: it probably would work better to cool the chocolate biscuits on waxed paper as the chocolate conformed to the cooling rack and then hardened. I ended up breaking a few more of the biscuits just getting them off the cooling rack. As I assembled the sandwiches, I began to think that maybe the recipe's declaration that it "makes 8" really was secretly referring to the number you can hope to get that aren't broken.

After piping pretty little stars on the end, the recipe suggests adding a chocolate-covered coffee bean. I did this on a few of them, but I decided it wasn't really necessary. It made for a big bite at the one end and I thought the bean provided a bit of an unpleasant textural change. But if you feel the need to decorate a little more, go for it. I called it quits after three. I also think, though, that the coffee beans I found may have been a good deal larger than the ones in the sample picture provided by GBBO, so maybe if you can find smaller beans, it would be a little nicer.

All in all, though, these were pretty tasty once they were all done, especially with a cup of tea or coffee, and they weren't all that difficult.  Also, when I first saw these, I wondered how one could ever take a bite out of these without simply squishing all of the buttercream out of the middle, but the texture of the biscuits allows them to break off rather than smushing together, even when the buttercream is still reasonably soft. I was beautifully surprised! So if you're having a tea party or a brunch or just want something sweet to keep around the house, these are a great option, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I have done!

Update: I baked a second batch using what I learned from the first, and I thought I would share it with those of you who may be curious.  I used the other piping tip to pipe out the biscuits themselves, giving them more and shallower ridges, and the ridges did end up looking a lot better. I did also chill them, but probably not for a significant enough amount of time (only about 10 minutes) to make much of a difference. When I dipped the biscuits in chocolate, I got my chocolate just a little warmer (and therefore softer) and only broke one biscuit while dipping, and then cooled them on a silicone pad rather than a wire drying rack, and this worked much better. None of the dipped biscuits broke when I was picking them up and I ended up with 18 sandwich biscuits to share at work, where they were gobbled up with abundant yummy sounds.