I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this on the blog, but I am a huge, huge fan of The Great British Bake Off (if you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard me talk about been/been made to watch an episode with me). So when I found this cookbook by the bakers of 2016, I thought it would be fun to get it.

So a quick note before we begin – I’m a really, really amateur baker (there’s amateur baker, and there’s GBBO amateur baker and I’m definitely the former) so I have stuck mainly to the simpler recipes here. It may not be the fairest review of the book, but here are the recipes I tried and their results:

• Fresh Mango Loaf Cake: This was easy and very very good. Like the recipe says, the sweetness for this comes from all the fruits inside (apart from mango, there are also bananas, coconut, and cranberries). My family really liked this one because it wasn’t too sweet. One thing to note about this recipe is that the cake does not keep well – the fruits will cause it to spoil very fast so this is best finished within one or two days.
• Very East Boule Loaf: As you can probably tell, I’m testing all the easy recipes here. This one only has four ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, and water, but the bread that was made was delicious, especially when toasted.

• Peanut Butter, Chocolate Chip and Oat Cookies: Another easy and delicious recipe. Peanut butter and chocolate chips are a great combination and I have made this twice. Once, I’ve substituted butterscotch chips for chocolate chips and the cookies were delicious! I found this to be a recipe that’s easy to tweak.

• Bitter Extremely Rich Chocolate Cookies: Possibly the hardest recipe that I’ve attempted – I failed twice before something vaguely successful was made. My last attempt yielded very chocolate-y and slightly chewy cookies. I suspect that I made another mistake here, but it was delicious enough that I didn’t feel the need to attempt again!
• Mallorca: This was the trickiest recipe I tried (though not the trickiest in the book!) and my main difficulty came in rolling the dough. I think the bread that resulted is bigger than it’s supposed to be (looking at the picture) but my family loved this! The buns are soft and slightly sweet, perfect as-is, with some cheese on top (my helper was saying this reminded her of ensaymada), or with curry. The recipe asks you to sift some icing sugar onto the buns, but I opted not to do that and it was still great.

Overall, I think the beginner recipes in this book are fairly approachable. If I could change something, I would have added more process photos or explanatory photos. While there are lots of beautiful images of the food here, some of the steps seem to assume that you’ll know how things are going to look.

When I’m a bit more confident in my baking, I’ll try some of the trickier bakes and will update this review on how it turns out! So far, I’d recommend this for intermediate to advanced bakers who already know what they’re doing and want more recipe inspiration.