Great British Bake Along: Wagon Wheels

So it is that time again when I, many might say foolishly, attempt to join in with Great British Bake Off and try my hand at the technical challenges from the series. Will I last beyond the first week? Will I ever find a love for baking bread? Will I manage to source the increasingly bizarre ingredients as the challenges progress? All will be revealed in the months ahead, but for now, wagon wheels.

Saturday morning came around, after a week of long shifts, a poorly child, and a general air of chaos and disorder hanging over the house, I obviously decided the best way to spend T's naptime would be making biscuits, jam, marshmallow and attempting to construct wagon wheels. Not my best idea in retrospect, or the atmosphere most conducive to some relaxed baking, but it wasn't a complete disaster.

It was a less than promising start. The Husband commented that he didn't really like wagon wheels, and I was inclined to agree with him. I also forgot lesson number of one Bake Off challenges, which is to be vaguely prepared, have a relatively tidy kitchen and to read the recipe. I didn't realise when I used the egg yolk that I would use the white later in the recipe so wasted it needlessly. I also had a distinct lack of clear work surfaces which made the whole process trickier.

However, the recipe was actually quite manageable. The biscuits were simple and tasted really good, and I was reminded of the simple joy of making jam too. The marshmallow was the most tense aspect, involving whisking egg white while also boiling sugar and adding gelatine. Having used a stand mixer to help I found that the whisks didn't reach deeply enough into the bowl to actually whisk the single egg white so I ended up dashing between the mixer and the pan trying to keep an eye on both. Despite the multi-tasking required the marshmallow, somewhat to my surprise, actually came together well.

With all the components made, next came the assembly, and this is where things went somewhat downhill. Firstly, a coughing fit meant that T needed a snuggle to settle him down back to sleep. Whilst the cuddle was a welcome break I returned back to the kitchen to find the marshmallow had morphed from a soft, glossy, swirl to a springy, solid mass. I then needed to enlist The Husband's help to locate my piping nozzles, which were apparently stored in the exact place that I swore adamantly I had looked at least three times already.

My slightly, ahem, informal approach to cutting the biscuits now became problematic, as they were not consistently round, which made pairing them up to be sandwiched together somewhat akin to a game of Tetris to find the ones that were most closely matched. Then the firmness of the marshmallow made it tricky to pipe, and it was so well set that as I tried to sandwich the biscuits together a few biscuits snapped as the marshmallow put up rather an excessive amount of resistance.

By this stage T was awake, well over two hours had passed, and my focus was on getting finished and trying to rescue the kitchen rather than delicately coating my biscuits. As you can tell from the pictures this part was particularly slapdash, and for some reason the chocolate marbled as it set. But, it did set, and they did look vaguely recognisable, so all in all I'm counting it as a success.

So what was the verdict for technical challenge number one? Well, the recipe was surprisingly easy to follow, with great results for all of the components. They were really tasty, although the dark chocolate made them very rich, and The Husband was not a fan as a result. T, however, adored them, and they got rave reviews from everyone else who tried one. We have now, also, taken to calling them wheelie wagons, after we repeated the phrase from the programme, T has adopted it as his own, and it was far too lovable to even think of correcting him. I did keep thinking how easy it would be to go and buy a packet if I really wanted the option of eating a wagon wheel, but actually the end result seemed to reflect the effort that had gone into it, and it felt like a special treat. I won't be writing out the recipes this time around but if you ever have a hankering to rustle up a homemade wagon wheel, you won't go far wrong giving this recipe a try.