Bake Off with the Bake Off 2015 - Week 2 - Biscuits!

After my performance with the Brandy Snaps last year, watching the show last week, I was dreading my challenge for Biscuits. I was concerned that I was going to be given the biscuits in a box made out of biscuits, thankfully Gav did not bestow that little challenge on me this week!

Week 2 - Biscuits!
The Challenge
Arlettes

It's fairly safe to say that before last week's show I had never heard of Arlettes but being a big fan of Cinnamon, I absolutely wanted to eat some! Luckily for me, so did Gav, hence this challenge!

Ingredients:
170g Strong White Bread Flour
170g Plain Flour
2tsp Salt
330g Butter
100ml Cold Water
50g Granulated Sugar
2tsp Ground Cinnamon
Icing Sugar

I started off by incorporating 120g of both the bread flour and the plain flour, along with 80g of butter (melted) and all of the water. 

Once nicely mixed in, it looked like this

 I then kneaded the dough for roughly 5 minutes, until it was lovely and smooth

With my hands, I shaped the dough into a square, covered it in cling film and started what will be a very long process of chilling and folding. This first chill, I placed it in the freezer for 25 minutes.

Whilst my dough was chilling sufficiently, I took the rest of the flours and creamed in the rest of the butter. This formed the butter layer.

I spread the butter and flour mix onto a sheet of cling film, covered the top with another sheet of cling film and rolled it out into a rectangle, twice as long as my dough square, then chilled in the fridge for 25 minutes.

After my dough was nice and cold, I removed it from the freezer and placed my now chilled butter rectangle underneath it and wrapped my dough square up in the butter layer. I then rolled it out into a rectangle.

I then folded both ends of the rectangle into the middle to form the first part of the book fold

I then folded that in the middle, to finish the book fold off. I wrapped it back up in the cling film and chilled for another 25 minutes.

Again, after chilling time, I removed it, rolled it a little, and made another book turn. I then wrapped it up and chilled it again for another 25 minutes. 

Towards the end of this chill time, I mixed the granulated sugar and the cinnamon together for the filling. Once the dough was chilled enough, I rolled it out and added the filling.

Then another book turn was made to ensure that the filling was incorporated. I then rolled out the dough to a rectangle, ensuring that it was 1cm thick.

From the short end, I rolled up the dough to form a swiss roll, wrapped it in cling film and chilled it for yet another 25 minutes. Finally after this last chill, I cut the swiss roll into 16 slices, trimming the ends to make sure that the slices were nice and straight and around 1cm thick.

Covering the work surface in icing sugar, I took each slice and rolled them out thinly

I then placed them into the oven at 200C for 4 minutes, turned them over and baked for another 5 minutes, removed from the oven and I was finally finished!

I was fairly happy with how they turned out, they were delicious, crispy all the way through and I had defined rings. My only 2 downfalls were that they were not overly neat and they were not all constant (looks wise) throughout the batch, I earned 3 out of 5 for this one. I'm still pleased. I would say that I will try them again, but more time needs to pass before I feel like subjecting myself to all those turns and chills again!

Also, a random side note, I made the self saucing chocolate puddings again at the weekend and I just wanted to share with you that I totally nailed it, they were perfect. That is all.