It’s All About The Base

This weekend was dominated by one event – the family team effort into creating a winning entry for The 2021 Great Bloggers’ Bake Off. It was an epic event, full of drama, but we came up with a champion submission.

Over the next three days, I am going to share with you the details of how trusting a bizarrely wrong recipe almost cost us a winning dessert, but how we overcame all odds to produce a work of genius.

The recipe – the recipe that almost floored us – is on the BBC website:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chocolate-coconut-banoffee-pie

So as the recipe told us, we started to prepare the base. The first step was gently melting the 200g bar of Bart creamed coconut in a pan, stirring constantly until it is smooth and glossy. My little brother took on this task.

Meanwhile, I tried to load 400g of bourbon biscuits into the food processor and then realized that was not a good idea. So I took out half of them, blitzed the remainder, and then added the rest gradually.

The result was fine chocolate crumbs that we added to the now melty creamed coconut. We mixed it all up, and then spread it into a fluted pie tin.

I love how the recipe says this:

Press over the base and up the sides of a 22cm round loose-bottomed fluted tin. Chill.

It’s not just me who uses “chill” as a whole sentence. So chill we did….and at the same time we stuck the base into the fridge while we were having a brew.

If you look at the comments other people have left on the BBC webpage with the recipe we were following, you might notice some said that the base was too thick. My mum disagrees with that. She said having a thick base made it easy to transfer out of the tin onto a plate. So you can make it thin if you like, but good luck to you trying to get it onto your fancy cake stand!

So the base was now in the bag (or in the fridge) but there was more to come. Tomorrow I am going to tell you what happened next in the Nyamake family baking adventure.

In two weeks time, Caramel, Gary and Jeanne are hosting The 2021 Great Bloggers’ Bake Off Festival Of Love. Love is the theme. Do you have any baking photos you can send in to Caramel? Click the image below and it will take you to Caramel’s site where you can read more about the Bake Off: