Hi all! I’m back and baking along to the Holiday Baking Championship again. This will be my 3rd time doing it. And why am I baking along? To challenge myself under time constraints and learn some new skills. So let’s get into it!
If you missed week one on Food Network, the preheat was to make a quick bread wreath in 2 hours. The six options of flavors were: chocolate orange, citrus ginger, cranberry orange, spiced pear, maple pecan, and apple cinnamon. Out of fairness, I randomly drew my flavor and got . . . cranberry orange!
I have a cranberry orange bread recipe that is my favorite. But I want to challenge myself with baking new things and not be so tied to a recipe, so I had the recipe out for a quick glance and threw a bunch of ingredients in the mixer to see what happened.
I was pleased to see that the bread came out of the oven looking well risen and smelling of spices and brown sugar. It took very little time to prepare and bake. While it baked, I made a cranberry jelly, melted some butterscotch chips, and made cranberry butterscotch “bells” for decoration. I took some green colored white modeling chocolate and made holly leaves. And I also whisked up an orange glaze.
My error in this preheat was to not cool the bread enough before decorating. The holly melted and I had to add some more before time was up.
Speaking of time, 2 hours was way too much. I spent half the time twiddling my thumbs and washing dishes. Overall, this really only took me about 70 minutes. I must admit that though the bread was good, it made me think of an upside down cake. And the “bells” were not good. I should have used the peanut butter chips and had pb&j bells.
For the main heat, 2.5 hours were allotted to make a winter hat cake. I don’t have any. So I looked on Amazon for inspiration. Found one!
My cold weather inspiration for this cake was from when I worked at the zoo over the holidays for Zoolights. This was almost 20 years ago. But there would be some chilly nights and I warmed up with vanilla chai tea lattes. So good! Therefore, I decided to bake a vanilla chai sponge cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream.
The cake and frosting used 10 eggs! I’m definitely going to have to keep my baking stock up this season. For the chai adaption, I emptied the leaves of a chai teabag into the batter. I also made a simple syrup and steeped another teabag in that.
While the cakes baked, I made the buttercream. I normally use American buttercream but I had egg whites left over from the cake and did Swiss meringue. After adding 3 sticks of butter to it, I decided to omit the last stick that the recipe called for. That’s why I normally don’t make this type of buttercream. So.Much.Butter!
The decoration started 90 minutes into the challenge. I filled some piping bags with white, red, and gray buttercream. I ran out of red food coloring (must get more), so it was more pink in color. Then I piped to try and resemble a knitted pattern. I had baked a cupcake for the top poof. With about 15 minutes left in the challenge, I piped my name on it for the embroidered name twist.
I was done. There was nothing more I wanted to do to it. I loved it. I had 10 minutes left on the timer.
So I think I did a very good job on week one. I managed to do both challenges with time leftover. I’m sure not every week will go this smoothly. But pumped up from these bakes, I’m looking forward to week two.
All Things Crafty 
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