by Anne Stjern

Created on: November 11, 2010

Like its host, Rachel Allen’s Bake! is lighthearted and welcoming and does not scrimp on either education or entertainment. Professional chef Rachel Allen combines her love of great food, talent for teaching and interest in learning new techniques and tastes into a fun and informative cooking show.

Allen completed her culinary studies at the Ballymaloe Cooking School in Shanagarry, County Cork, Ireland where she now teaches her own classes. For the past few years, she has been busy perfecting luscious bakery bits such as moist, satisfying carrot cake and savory offerings like Quiche Lorraine. A well-known celebrity chef in the UK and Ireland, American audiences are just getting to know Rachel through her show Bake! on Cooking Channel.

Each episode of Rachel Allen's Bake! is broken into segments of cooking instruction and visits to places of culinary interest. First, she guides her viewers through a recipe or two, complete with tips and shortcuts. Then her students file in for instruction in creating the same dishes. As amazing a baker as Ms. Allen is, it is during the teaching segment that she really shines. Calm, confident, and hands on, Rachel helps her students overcome the stumbling blocks of cracked custard and improperly separated eggs.

During an episode entitled "Quiche & Meringues," to bring home the importance of stiffly peaked whipped egg whites when creating the perfect meringue, after her students finished whipping their egg whites, she laughingly turned the bowl of whip upside down over their head. One student had not quite gotten the hang of separating eggs and a bit of yellow had slipped in, rendering the whip too soft to use. Rachel showed cheerful sympathy and instead of dumping the eggy mess on the student's head, simply helped her to start again. It was a light-hearted and instructional moment for both the students at hand and those tuning in from home.

Rachel’s field trips to kitchens and shops around the UK, set her show apart from other cooking programs. Of the more fascinating visits was her trip to watch a master chef prepare a unique German cake called Baumkuchen. The dessert is baked in thin layers of batter that are brushed or ladled onto a roller suspended over heat, much like cooking on a spit.

In addition to Rachel Allen: Bake! on Cooking Channel, the accomplished chef has several popular cooking programs currently running on the BBC's Good Food Channel. She is the author of five cookbooks to date, teaches class at the Ballymaloe Cooking School, which was founded by her mother-in-law Darina Allen, and writes extensively for food related publications including the Sunday Tribune magazine.

Best Rachel Allen Tip: When blind baking crust for pies or tarts, place a plastic wrapped pouch of dry beans on top of the crust after arranging it in the tin. The plastic wrap will not melt and the beans will provide enough weight to keep the dough in shape as it bakes.

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