Author: StuckinaBook

It’s bread week, otherwise known as the week where Paul gets anxious that other people in the world can bake too, and so is relentlessly critical!

It kicks off, for some reason, with Mel and Sue pretending to… impersonating… no, I’ve got nothing. Not a clue why this happened.

We recap last week’s episode, then scatter in a few clips of contestants gurning nervously at the camera. And then we’re ready to watch them walk down this lacklustre row of steps. It always feels like these steps were something of a mistake. There’s barely a slope, and definitely no need to have these here. The grass is practically flat just off to the left. Was this added exclusively for GBBO?

You asked for Blazer Watch – you get Blazer Watch. (Full disclosure: nobody asked for Blazer Watch.) I’m not seeing much structure in these jackets. Mary’s rocking a lovely neckline and a fun yellow. Paul is in line dance mode, as per, and I can’t remember the last time I saw him don anything even distantly related to a blazer. For shame.

And they’re making – quick breads! Or quickbreads, perhaps, but I’ll stick to quick breads. Although nobody would ever say they were making breads. A full and frank investigation into baking pluralisation should happen asap.

A quick bread, it turns out, is made without yeast, and without a tin. I didn’t realise that bread could be made without yeast. Paul launches into a description of what the non-yeast raising agents do that sounds like somebody who read half a chemistry GCSE textbook once, and is spitting out all the words they can remember from it.

“I quite like rye flour with figs,” says At Home We Have An Aga, apparently rehearsing lines for playing a ninety year old woman in an off-Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and Mary croaks about texture. She sounds like needs a hot toddy, stat.

We get some fun facts and figures from At Home We Have An Aga about her flour-to-liquid ratio, which Paul concludes with “So, 100% liquid, then?” Erm, no, Paul, that’s very much not what she said.

Mat is doing a “smoked salt and Mexico cheddar soda bread”. Check out Mary Berry Reaction Face in profile, no less.

Paul quizzes him on the shape (round) and cut or slashed (slice) and the nation falls asleep in its TV dinners.

Nadiya talks about adding cumin and coriander, while the camera pans in on a shot of chopped red onion. Dorret’s uses Waldorf ingredients, which sounds great to me – I love Stilton and walnuts. Apparently forgetting that ‘dispersal’ was an Episode 1 term, she throws it in there too.

At this point, I should say how much I love bread. I basically live for it. I want to eat everything here (except, y’know, for those with meat). Alvin is putting meat in, and the shape of his bread (the architectural excitement that is ‘circular’) for some reason garners him a saucy wink from our Berry:

In case you’ve missed the discussion about flour-to-liquid ratio from 5 mins ago – it’s all back again. It also becomes increasingly clear that Paul (baker) and Paul (judge) know that the town ain’t big enough for the both of them, and the series will not end with them both alive. Paul (baker) has taken to staring in stony silence at Paul (judge) whenever he says anything.

Ugne, apparently deciding that the problem with her garish biscuit basket is that she hadn’t done enough, is making a chocolate quick bread with salted caramel sauce. Now, I love chocolate and salted caramel – I am, after all, a human person – but in bread? Nope nope nope.

Ian has brought wild garlic with him that he picked in the woods himself. Erm, isn’t that illegal? SEND IN THE SWAT TEAM.

Somebody obviously borrowed most of the BBC percussion for a production of The Nutcracker, so GBBO is left with a single kettle drum, which they deploy at 30-second intervals, while some hapless intern shakes a tin of dried lentils out of sheer desperation.

Sandy tells an entirely irrelevant story about having one run the 800 metres and waited for a friend to catch up.

Incidentally, I would argue that I’ve spent a solid 24 hours of my life so far watching GBBO put trays in ovens. I could have written a three-volume novel in that time. The bakers take them all out of the ovens again – SPOILERS! – and vouchsafe to the camera that they hope the bread is cooked. With that coup in the bag, we go to the judging.

Alvin gets “it’s a thing of beauty, my friend” from Paul, which is rather astonishing. Ian has used most of the wild garlic for a floral arrangement. Dorret gets ‘homely’ (ouch); Nadiya is congratulated on the original shape of her loaf (it seems to be… loaf-shaped) and the camera lingers on her face, hoping for extraordinary facial expressions. She often gives great ones, but here mostly looks up and down. Mat has her bested:

You know what’s guaranteed to bring in an international market? A quick play on Paul’s (frankly quite mild) Liverpudlian accent. Cue Mel: ‘overworked’. Bless Mel and Sue. I think their presence makes the show inestimably better, but any single joke or ‘bit’ on its own is undeniably awful.

Apparently bread that ‘just crumbles when you touch it’ is a… good thing? Then again, so is orange that ‘comes up and hits me’, according to Mezza. Paul and Paul have a handshake, that should be a touching moment, but feels like a ceremonial exchange before a deathmatch joust or, y’know, something.

Technical challenge time – four crusty baguettes! I like this challenge. Everybody knows what a baguette is; nobody (except At Home We Have An Aga) would dream of making them. They’re simple and amazing.

In the here’s-one-I-made-earlier tent, Paul babbles about ‘turned bread’ and ‘little Ls’, to the mystification of all, then eats in a manner redolent of That Squirrel from Series 3.

“The recipe is kind of basic,” confides Ian, realising the rudiments of this challenge. Mat continues to be the Face Master:

He’s anxious about disregarding the measurements given in the recipe – as well he should be – but is confident that he can correctly identify a plastic box. He’s already done just as much as that which might garner a Deal or No Deal contestant £250,000. (Is Deal or No Deal still on? Is my joke topical? APPROVE AND VALIDATE ME.)

Guys, I’m sorry. We’re going to have to talk about proving drawers again. I’ve had a happy year, forgetting that they exist and are apparently considered essential to every Happy Home. Some bakers are going renegade, and using the ‘proving setting’ of the ovens. Good lord. I just use an airing cupboard. My oven – prepare to clutch your pearls – doesn’t have a proving setting.

Also… putting plastic in an oven? That feels so wrong.

I’m heartily cheering on Ugne, who points out that literally nobody has a proving drawer or proving setting, and leaves her dough (in its plastic container) on the counter.

“800 divided by 4” calculates Sandy aloud, while somewhere Mr Simpson From The Maths Department holds his head in his hand. She also shrieks with laughter at her ineptitude at French. I really can’t decide where I stand on the all-important Sandy Question.

“My heart is going boom-boom-boom,” says Tamal – and , bizarrely, the sound effects department do nothing with a trombone or tom-tom. Slacking.

The spirit of Chetna lives on:

“I’m not rushing,” says Ugne. Somehow everything she says sounds like a chilling threat to the families of a ransomed victim.

Much as I love baguettes, they don’t look very exciting, and nobody has baguettes that look particularly bad – I was hoping for a tray of liquid, or one inadvisedly smothered in chocolate, but was sorely disappointed. Paul finds mean things to say about plenty of them, of course, but it’s mostly nit-picky and/or incomprehensible. Paul’s nemesis Paul comes last, then Nadiya and Mat. The top three are Tamal (we haven’t seen much of him lately, have we?), At Home We Have An Aga, and Ian – who, I’m noticing, looks oddly like my undergraduate tutor.

At Home We Have An Aga comes up with a fab line about The Hollywood: “He was punching bread and shattering dreams.”

This was considered a necessary establishing shot by somebody who, I assume, has now been fired.

Then Mel and Sue do a ‘bit’ about roll models that makes me miss Bread: A Secret History.

Well, ain’t I in luck. We get to hear about Ukranian wedding bread, or something, from somebody dressed as that woman from the ‘We can do it!’ war posters.

With the mathematic ability of Marie counting her grandchildren, this gal claims that there are seven women helping knead this bread – though there are clearly only five. To be fair, it’s one of the more interesting History of Baking segments, but if you’re expecting it to be a segue into the showstopper, then you’ve obviously never seen this show before. They immediately pretend it hasn’t happened, and announce… 3D bread sculptures. They could have made that segue. They could have done.

Up to three types of dough; one of them needs to be filled (does the spectre of Jordan’s cheesecake brioche mean NOTHING to these people?). One of the trickiest challenges EVER, Paul claims backstage, adding that they have to ‘know their dough’ – which sound like the clumsily forced catchphrase to a 1990s gameshow. Mary asks whether or not the bakers can manage three types of dough – seeming genuinely to want to know the answer.

Tamal is planning to make a bread bicycle – “or breadcycle”, he adds, with the good grace to look ashamed of himself. I’m not sure it deserves the Mary Berry Reaction Face to end all Mary Berry Reactions Faces, but that is what it gets.

The wheels are Chelsea buns, and then I stopped listening, because it already sounds amazing and I want it.

Alvin is making a cornucopia – or what is essentially just a big pile of bread.

Paul’s bake is what we’re all talking about, of course. It’s this pretty phenomenal lion.

Mat is making ‘one of Britain’s most recognisable landmarks’, the Brighton Pavilion. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to pick the Brighton Pavilion out of a line-up (so long as the others in the line were also pavilions, of course). “Good gracious me,” says Mary, gloriously. He’s going to rely on gravity to hold the thing together – much like, he adds wittily, the Brighton Pavilion itself. Hey now, Mat, don’t steal my jokes before I make them. He also makes a rather fab DOUGHverload joke soon. My P45 is doubtless in the post.

Sandy is making a vase of flowers out of bread. Because when you think flowers you think ‘brown’. She even says they’re going to be poppies, even though I don’t think anything red is involved.

Dorret hasn’t practised her bake at all, and looks oddly proud of the fact. She’s also decided that Tracey Emin is a good role model for… anything. Do you think Mezza Bezza is impressed by her lack of practice?

Remember Ugne’s chocolate caramel everything bake before? This time she’s doing truffle-infused brioche bunnies, maple syrup, bacon, cinnamon, and something else. I’m pretty sure she’s required to use everything she nabbed in Dale’s Supermarket Sweep. She makes a haunting joke about blind bunnies.

Dorret’s is going into the oven. Usually disasters are surprises when they come OUT of the oven. This one… well, you could say that the writing was on the wall.

There are some seriously impressive bits of sculptures coming out of ovens. Nothing goes wrong, though, so it’s rather a lacklustre segment. The most excitement is Mat dropping a couple of rolls and then picking them up – which he does combine with a brilliant hair-flip. My highlight, though, is Mel coming up to Alvin’s stand and saying “I’ve never SEEN so much bread! You could open your own bread shop!” She’s not wrong. He’s basically interpreted the challenge as BAKE EVERYTHING.

A few minutes of assembling and panicking and assembling later, and… time’s up!

Even the worst bread sculptures this week are pretty impressive, I have to say. Lots to admire (appearancewise, at least):

Other highlights:
–Paul says that Tamal ‘almost’ used different techniques.
–Sue asks Alvin to bring up his ‘bakery’; Mel jokingly offers him help, which he immediately accepts. There is SO much of it.

–“Flower pots can be tricky things to bake in,” says Paul. Why would anyone know this?

Paul (the baker) gets a special commendation for his lion – well done! But star baker, for the second week in a row is…

And, going home, is…

Dorret did feel a bit like she was on borrowed time, and I’m rather relieved that she’s gone. Her expressive eyes always looked so deeply upset when she was criticised that I couldn’t cope with it.

Thanks for being patient with my latest ever GBBO recap! And… see you next time.

Sorry about the delay, guys – I’ve been hit with a trademark Simon cold, which has left me coughing, spluttering, and generally useless for a while. But better late than never, here are my thoughts on episode 2!

Last week we lost Hat McGee. We get a haunting recap of Ugne scouting for drugs, a reminder that Marie was star baker, and a preview of the show that suggests it will be equal parts people staring, nonplussed, at each other, and Tamal monologuing in the corner. It’s biscuit week!

And the first shots are already great. The bakers wander down the paltry steps (Bring Back the Bridge) and Mat (Ian? I will disentangle them at some point) is shrouded in the world’s biggest coat. Sandy, Dorret, et al are in fairly lightweight gear, so what are we to gather from this? What secret meaning could it have? So many questions.

Outside, Mel and Sue limp laboriously towards a ‘crackers’ pun; inside, they’re mayoresses of BlazerTown, while Mary has returned to her line in trendy bombers.

And the signature challenge is… biscotti! Which Mel pronounces with evident glee and no accuracy. Mary talks about the dangers of breaking one’s teeth on them – here’s a lady who speaks from experience; you will spend the episode with emergency dentists on speed dial – while Paul advises cranberry, hazelnut, and chocolate as ideal flavours. Remember those words, dear reader. And try to forget the grin that comes with them.

First up is Alvin, who calls Paul ‘sir’, and introduces Mary to jackfruit. “How are you going to combat the moisture?” says Paul.

Mat, in a brief Home Video, seems to be baking in a fire station. Call me a traditionalist, but shouldn’t he be, y’know, fighting fire? Not using fire’s helpful properties for baking. Perhaps he is making the best of a bad situation. “Yes, I know your house is burning down, but – cranberry-flavoured treat?”

Over with Ian, Mary is dubious about the use of rosemary in biscotti. The cameraman find the most awkward, stalkery position possible to show us what rosemary looks like.

Ian apparently lives here. It looks lovely, but that miniature version of his house is at no point explained. I’m assuming a hen house, but that is only the tiniest of steps towards an explanation.

Four or five bakers tell us that their biscotti should all be the same size. For variety, Marie says they should be uniform. Sandy makes a joke about her college’s maths department that alienates at least 99% of the show’s audience. At Home We Have An Aga winces in the background, but I’m sure Mr Simpson was merrily slapping his thigh throughout this (mercifully brief) anecdote.

Paul (baker) increasingly obviously hates Paul (judge), while Ugne is sucking up to Mary by flinging white wine around.

Colouring Pencils Man (Tom Hovey! Thanks for reminding me, Yvann) must find this challenge super boring. Let’s face it, all biscotti look the same.

“The first bake,” warns Sue, “must be perfectly timed.” One brief shot of rainy leaves later, and we are back in the tent to watch a few people stare into ovens. Then, somehow, we’re over the Nadiya and a biscotti that still seems to be at the raw ingredients stage. Are they messing with the timings here? Do they think we’re stupid? Nadiya tells us that desserts don’t exist in her culture, and Mary visibly blanches.

Tamal observes that his biscotti look like beautiful ciabatta – Mel suggests they are more like slippers – and then starts a sentence with the word ‘Fruitwise’. Which reminds me of a Trivial Pursuit question that started ‘Ceramically speaking…’ Tamal is also creating ‘his own take on praline’. Which is apparently frogspawn.

Oh, and Mel makes a wonderful ‘Golden Berry’ pun re: our Mary.

The latest montage of bakers opening and shutting oven doors includes Anxious Alvin staring at this timer. It feels a bit like he’s watching the bomb in a James Bond film. The timer going off can’t possibly come as a surprise to him.

For those who’ve forgotten in the five minutes since last mentioned: these biscotti should be identical. Marie’s aren’t going brilliantly, though she has the perfect plan of just eating the imperfect ones. Mr Hollywood looms over her, mug in hand, while she flutters about her eat-the-broken-ones plan. He doesn’t pay the very slightest bit of attention to him. She just keeps talking.

Have you ever thought that this show didn’t include enough shots of bakers staring into ovens and biting their nails? Well, ma’am or sir, you’re in luck.

Nadiya forgot to put fennel seed in, which would seem to me like an enormous blessing in a paper-thin disguise, but she’s determined to fling it on afterwards. Approaches to display vary. At Home We Have An Aga seems to favour a Stonehenge replica, Marie has found some Italian-themed ribbons, and most bakers have just put them in a row or a pile. “JENGA!” cries Sandra, contravening the BBC’s impartiality laws.

Mary and Paul struggle to find anything interesting to say – case in point: “Do I like it? Yeah.” – and wander from desk to desk, commenting mindlessly on the ‘crunch’ and the size. “I expected it to have more ingredients in it,” says Paul, with the expert vocabulary of the seasoned professional. I’ll wait a moment if you need to undergo an intensive course of culinary language to understand his point.

Most people do pretty well. “That’s a nice biscotti” is about as exciting as Paul’s comments get. And then… we’re back to Biscuits: What ARE They? 

It’s brief, and we barely have time to watch a blue tit wander through the river (where? why?) before the technical challenge is unveiled. It’s one of Paul’s, and it’s arlette – which may or may not be the plural; not sure. “I have over a hundred cookbooks,” says At Home We Have An Aga. “The majority of them are French, and I have never heard of this.”

They do look delish.

It’s all about the lamination, confides Paul. Have you missed GBBO lamination?

Tamal gets delightfully sassy about the lack of info in the recipe, while Marie chastisingly thinks it’s “a wee bit on the complicated side for a biscuit”.

Norm, somewhere – hopefully still writing his autobiography – nods in agreement, dunking a plain rich tea in a mug of boiled water.

The bakers wrap dough around butter, and Dorret asks the cameraman whether or not she’s doing it right. His/her reply is not vouchsafed to us. Sandy jumps the shark by pretending to swim on her stool.

Cinnamon has to be added at one of the turns. BUT WHICH? The dough must rolled. BUT WHICH WAY? It needs to be rolled thin. BUT HOW THIN? It’s all very tense. Paul (baker), demonstrating an admirable if unfounded optimism, thinks the snail-like appearance of his arlette might be sufficient to tick the ‘authentically French’ box of the challenge.

Somebody decided that this was a good shot to linger on.

Oh no! Marie’s oven was on the wrong setting or temperature or something (“Wasn’t on properly.” What does that mean?). Rather than adjust this, she stares helplessly at the cameraman, and practises a wide range of facial expressions.

The arlette are lined up. Marie has made the curious decision to present only four. I’d have thought that undercooked is better than… quite literally nothing.

Dorret’s look SO good. I want some arlette. Or arlettes.

If ‘crunch’ was the keyword for the first challenge, ‘crispy’ is this challenge’s mantra. The success with which they break is also apparently vital. “It’s sad that we don’t have even distribution of the cinnamon,” says Mary of Ugne’s arlette, in a curiously specific support of socialism.

Poor Marie comes last, followed by Paul and Nadiya. Marie is heartbreakingly apologetic.

At Home We Have An Aga is second, while Dorret – bless her – is first. Told you hers looked delish.

The string section of the Bake Off Orchestra get into action, which must mean that the bakers are wandering into the tent and putting on aprons. Paul reminds us of the standing of the bakers, repeating the positions they were given about two minutes of TV screentime ago.

The bakers need to make 36 biscuits in a biscuit box – such fun!

Also an opportunity for Colouring Pencils Man to get something more exciting to do. Paul (baker), for instance, is making a memory box filled with pink macarons – which apparently count as biscuits now. They’re pink because Paul’s wife loves pink. What a vivid portrait of her he paints.

I would love to put every single Colouring Pencils image in now, but let’s wait til some of them appear in the flesh (as it were). I will just say that his depiction of Alvin’s proposed box doesn’t match the eventful outcome…

Nadiya is (a) putting spice in her biscuit box – who on earth wants a ‘kick’ from a biscuit? – and (b) making fortune cookies. Does anyone like fortune cookies? I mean, really?

Tamal is making ‘a gingerbread without ginger in it’. So… bread?

At Home We Have An Aga AND Mat are making teabag-shaped biscuits. There is an amicable rivalry between them over this idea, but… didn’t they both steal it from Frances of a couple series ago?

Ian has constructed some sort of torture device.

While Sandy’s colleagues have helped her ‘perfect’ cutting a small slot in her biscuit dough. “Gonna put Bradford on the map, is this box.” An excellent line, I can’t lie.

Marie seems to be making shortbread biscuits inside a shortbread box. Could I be right in thinking that Mary puts on a Scottish accent in their conversation? Ugne, on the other hand, is making “something with wine in it”. She’s got a one-track mind, and that track is ALCOHOL. And contract killing, of course. For some reason, she thinks a headless baby on the side of her biscuit box will be a pleasing touch and, ugly as this Coloured Pencils depiction looks, it’s actually extremely flattering. Just wait til you see what she eventually produces.

Dorret is compiling a box of frogs (lulz) and using a cut out for the frogs. Apparently this is deeply concerning: Paul considers it too much a short-cut. Yes, Paul, but it’s a short-cut to green, frog-shaped biscuits.

There’s a mini crisis when Nadiya puts her beautifully-shaped biscuit bowl in the oven, and flattens it, but other than that all is fairly unremarkable. “It’s like going into battle,” comes Sandy’s voice – without the lady in question being on the screen or, apparently, referring to anything that is happening – but there’s no obvious conflict. Unless it’s with this man, wandering across the back of shot. Who IS he?

We cut from Paul (baker) telling us that accuracy is everything to Tamal’s surprisingly shoddy biscuit cutting. Then we see huge amounts of neon icing going onto biscuit boxes. Only those using white icing (or trying to make their boxes look like a fire engine) escape looking garish. “Perfect,” says Ugne, though the camera wisely doesn’t pan down at this point. Our retinas can only take so much. “I am making fondant baby legs,” she adds, apparently not hearing herself.

Alvin makes the bold decision not to bother making a box after all.

Sue – sadly not on camera – breaks Nadiya’s second biscuit bowl attempt. Nadiya, so far as I can tell, issues a death threat in response.

Accidents aside, there are some seriously brilliant looking biscuits and boxes in this challenge. I love it when they do these sorts of challenges, because their creativity is pretty special. Here is a run-down of some of my favourites, appearance-wise…

Alvin’s – not so great; sorry sir. I know deconstructed food is all the rage (is it still?) but a box this is not.

He is quite emotional about it, bless him, but (oddly enough) needn’t have worried. He’s not even mentioned in the trio of potential losers in the debrief later. This is the second week in a row where not presenting a proper final product apparently doesn’t much matter. (Nadiya makes delightfully pointed remarks about giving a lid to her box, while the camera dwells on Alvin.)

And… I warned you about Ugne’s biscuit box. Here it is.

Despite these mishaps, it is our Marie who ends up going home. From Star Baker to leaving in one week! You were a sweetie, Marie, I’ll miss you.

In the backstage debrief, Paul says that choosing Star Baker will be straightforward – but the producer obviously makes panicked guillotine-to-nick gestures, as he then rattles off half a dozen potential winners. But Star Baker this week, somewhat out of nowhere, is…

Apparently (wonderfully) he’s yet to win best male baker in this 400-strong village. Surely there’s somebody else living there who should be in the tent?

Hope you enjoyed biscuit week! See you next week…