Stuck in a Book

Having gone through quite a weird ‘freefrom’ week, we’re back to service as normal with… pastry! And some rather nice pink shirt/blouse/flower matching going on between Mel and Sue. Almost enough to ignore their intro. Were these ever good? I’m starting to doubt it.

First off, thanks to those kind people who identified Mat’s accent for me! Not one I’ve heard before, it seems, though I’ve definitely been to BOTH the Sussexes.

Nadiya is still glowing from being Star Baker last week – though correctly summarises that it is another week. Tamal, my friend, would you like to be Star Baker this week?

In a shock turn of events, it seems he would.

So, #BlazerWatch. Erm, guys. The linedance pose is catching. This is the end of life as we know it.

They’re making frangipane tarts, which is an opportunity for Sue to ‘show off’ her Italian accent. Isn’t a frangipane tart just a Bakewell tart? Have Bakewell got litigious? While Paul mutters something about gluten, Mary knows what the public wants – and gives us the first ‘soggy bottom’ of the series. And doesn’t she look delighted to have done it?

Mel (in the voiceover) and the bakers (in the real world) all pretend that we might not know how to make shortcrust pastry, and earnestly tell us that it should resemble breadcrumbs. Well, quite. Mat leaps miles up in my estimation for scorning a mixer (and the other bakers for using them). He stumbles down a little for having two pineapples and… radishes? on his counter. It doesn’t bode well.

“You don’t want a sticky dough, at the end of the day,” says Paul-the-baker. If you’ve only got dough at the end of the day, Paul, sticky or otherwise, then you’ll probably have failed the challenge.

Alvin isn’t poaching his plums, he is fanning them. Mel gurns and winks and all that sort of thing, but he manfully ignores her. Paul is poaching his pears – is poaching the new proving drawer? – and is apparently making ‘my version of a Christmas frangipane’. Is there a generally-accepted version of a Christmas frangipane? I’ve been missing out.

“How’s it going to look when you’ve finished? What sort of look are we looking at?” says Paul H, not having had our advantages with Colouring Pencil Man (and apparently thus relapsing into gibberish). “The pears will be going in a circular motion,” says Paul-the-baker. An automaton?? This gets better and better.

Tamal is the first baker of the night to wave alcohol under Mary’s nose – he’s using mulled wine.

One of Ian’s guinea fowl started laying eggs. I mean, sure.

Nadiya is keen to tell both camera and judges that her tart will, basically, taste of nothing. Mat, on the other hand, is making a piña colada tart, trumping Tamal’s mulled wine with a massive mason jar of rum. Mary immediately lunges for it.

“It’s a forgiving pastry” – Ian. I’m starting to realise that I don’t need to add much commentary to today’s quotations. Instead, let me remind you of the time my friend and I made a quiche. Bear this in mind when I start mocking the simplicity of the task.

The tent are divided over whether or not to blind bake. Mat says he blind bakes “because he read somewhere once that people do”, or some such. When I make Bakewell tarts, I don’t blind bake, fyi. And I think Mary Berry’s recipe for Bakewell tart says not to.

At Home We Have An Aga and Paul come to blows over having trimmed her pastry before blind baking it; Mel and Mary rather adorably rush to her defence, and he panics and reverts to saying “Thank you very much”, as he does in every silence.

At Home We Have An Aga pre-empts being crowned the Frances of the series by acknowledging that she may care too much about the appearance of her bakes. Well, Frances won, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Someone who should be worried – yes, thank you, that segue was all my own – is Alvin, who is rather behind everyone else, and has a half-baked solution about not putting much frangipane in, or something.

Meanwhile, At Home We Have An Aga is making amaretti biscuits, despite not knowing yet whether or not she’s going to put them anywhere.

Mel starts using a million abbrevs (“ten mins on your frange, obvs”) which led to a flurry of friends texting me to point out the similarities between Mel and myself. Or the sims, if you will. (I assume you won’t.)

The tarts are looking delish. People are glazing, icing, and – yes – scattering amaretti biscuits all over the place. Alvin is… still staring into the oven. Oh dear.

Onto the judging. OH. Paul wants a blind bake. I don’t know what to believe any more. Ian does quite badly, and Nadiya has… a soggy bottom!

Over at Mat’s station – Mary can’t taste enough rum! Oh noooo! I think, Mary my love, that’s what they call immunity.

Mary isn’t happy with the amaretti at At Home We Have An Aga – “just leave them out” and Mary and Paul argue about whether or not it’s bitter and burnt. But worse is to come over at Alvin Corner. His frangipane isn’t baked.

It’s rather heartbreaking. He keeps whispering “I’m so sorry” and I want to give him a hug. After that, Tamal does rather well – which apparently enrages Paul the baker (in a clip which, let’s face it, was probably filmed hours later).

So, quite a few people did surprisingly badly on a more or less simple bake – but the judging was very harsh. And, oh lord, Alvin is talking about the fact that his father was a general in the army and failure wasn’t an option, and I am getting vivid pictures of an eight year old Alvin being sent to his room in disgrace for not whittling the perfect flute or something.

So moving on, dear readers, apparently we can’t have any home videos, but we can have a story about someone who once almost died by falling into an eight-foot pie. Sue is given a brief – and, one assumes, entirely fictitious – history of the event by an out-of-work Bruce Springsteen impersonator.

All of this segment has to be a spoof. I’m starting to think the BBC has been hacked by trolls. The eyebrows of the gentleman in the supposedly genuinely old-timey video from Denby’s Baking Past are, by themselves, enough to suggest foul play.

Back in the tent, the bakers stare nervously around them, and the technical challenge is unveiled. If you thought things were traditional earlier, then… they’re doing flaounes. These are apparently big in Cyprus during Lent, so of course they make perfect sense for Britain in September. Mary hadn’t heard of them, and it’s more than likely that Paul has made the whole thing up. Though he wouldn’t be the first Paul to have a fondness for Cyprus. #BibleJokes

Oh, and they’re cheese-filled. Lent in Cyprus sounds fun. At Home We Have An Aga isn’t so sure. “It just feels wrong. The whole things feels wrong.”

Ian has put his cheese/sultana mix into the proving drawer. Things have gone too far.

Nobody seems to love mastick (or however you spell it), which is grainy and smells like pine trees and/or industrial cleaner. Flaounes are suddenly starting to sound a whole lot less tempting. They’ve also got yeast and everybody’s kneading it, which makes it seem like Paul has sneaked bread into pastry week. At Home We Have An Aga is certainly perplexed, but I’ve shown her perplexed face once already today, so you’re not getting it again.

Everybody is interpreting ‘fold in the corners’ differently, and Tamal informs the others that he hates them. Being, it seems, the anti-Ugne, it just sounds adorable.

The whole thing is over surprisingly quickly (presumably owing to the amount of time we saw Sue stand in a field where a pie was alleged to have been buried), and Paul and Mary come out to judge. They are judging based on qualities that the bakers couldn’t possibly have known needed to be there, like height or where the sesame seeds are. Since we’ve not seen any food pics for a bit, here’s some flaounes – as well as Nadiya’s excellent photocard face.

Mary clearly doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be looking for either, so throws in her usual comments about ‘lovely colour’ and ‘even’. I half expect her to start on the prettiness of the tablecloth. Tamal comes last, followed by Alvin and Paul. The top three are Ian, At Home We Have an Aga, and… Mat! Who looks incredibly surprised. And then salutes.

Tamal is quite witty about having seemed too cocky and being beaten down by the universe. Alvin, on the other hand, is completely dejected.

It’s raining and storming for the final challenge. Things aren’t looking good for Alvin. It’s the first time I can remember them not bothering to say more than one person in the ‘who’s in danger’ bit. Basically, he’s going. Can he make a miraculous comeback with vol-au-vents?

Spoilers: no, probably not.

They’re all making puff pastry, and this feels like a re-do of all the other puff pastry episodes we’ve had in the past – but with the added bonus of Nadiya smashing hers with a rolling pin in a violent frenzy, grimace on face.

Ian is making squid vol-au-vents, which is something that even Beverly Moss never thought of, and he suggests that jet black food is ‘a bit risqué’. I assume he means ‘risky’, right? Because otherwise I don’t know what to think or where to look. Paul is keen to get as ’70s as possible, and is including prawns. At Home We Have An Aga, on the other hand, is being daring and modern, with chocolate pastry. Oh, in the other one she’s got Parma ham. Order is restored.

‘Vol-au-vents’ is very amusing in Mat’s accent, by the way. It’s like one long glottal stop.

There’s a lot of meat and fish going on in the tent, and I always lose interest a bit when that happens. At least, with the vegetarian-friendly recipes, I can fool myself that I might make them one day. Also, this is veering suspiciously into ‘cooking’ territory, and that ain’t baking. No saucepans, please.

Tamal was inspired by an amazing sandwich. Bless him. Tamal for Prime Minister!

Nadiya’s face while rolling is an absolute joy. You lucky things, you get ANOTHER GIF.

She also seems to spend the whole of this section staring balefully at everyone else. It ain’t going so well for our Nadi. At some point she made a second pastry, but I seem to have been looking the other way when that happened. Mel comes over to whisper that she might want to put some filling somewhere (although it’s not really filling if it’s not filling anything, is it?)

Piping bags have been discarded; bakers are cramming filling in by hand. Nadiya has given up putting anything in at all. And I haven’t got a clue what’s going on here:

It’s all been pretty chaotic. Let the judging begin! I can’t say any of them look especially showstoppery, so just the one from At Home We Have An Aga in the Hall of Fame this week:

At the other end of the spectrum… deconstructed vol-au-vents from Nadiya.

But, bless her, they love the filling and she has a full-on cry.

Apparently egg yolk dripping down Mary’s hand is a good thing – though it sounds unsanitary to me – because our Mat is Star Baker.

Going home… well, it’s no surprise (even after Nadiya’s catastrophe), and it’s probably for the best for the sake of his nerves and, more to the point, mine. Your apologies broke my heart. We’ve loved having you, Alvin, you’re fab!

See you all next week :)

Is ‘freefrom’ week a first for Great British Bake Off? I think it might be. What’s not new is Sue and Mel talking nonsensically before the opening titles. A strange joke about rubbing someone down in silver foil, and we’re ready to go.

And what else is not new? The cameraman is still finding ever more inexplicable ways to obscure the contestants as they walk in.

Ian, apparently in the belief that pride comes before GOOD stuff, talks about how brilliant he is and, lols, the other bakers hate him.

All in good fun, we think, until, one-by-one, the other bakers confirm that they want Ian dead. Tamal starts off his day trip to the 1990s by saying he thinks Ian is making the other bakers ‘look a bit pants’ – the first time any of us have heard the word ‘pants’ used in this way since about 1998. And Nadiya turns her ever-exaggerated facial expressions to menacing.

Easily the least convincing is Alvin, who laughs nervously at the very thought of being menacing.

#BlazerWatch (yes I hashtagged it, what of it?) is a riot of springtime colours. I’m pretty sure Sue is recycling a jacket here, and Mel has gone eye-shriekingly yellow. Mary, as per usjz, comes out on top.

They’re making ‘sugarfree cakes’. I give that inverted commas because THESE ARE NOT SUGARFREE CAKES. I don’t understand whose dietary requirements these cakes could possibly suit. Loads of them are adding honey or syrup ‘instead’ of sugar. BUT HONEY AND SYRUP ARE MOSTLY SUGAR. There’s something about refined or unrefined sugar, which rather goes over my head, but what these cakes are NOT is sugarfree. ARGH.

Mary (in a lovely little garden – her giardino segreto, perhaps) tells us that sugar is an important ingredient in a cake. Whip out your notebooks, boys and girls, we’re doing some learnings.

Over with Paul, he’s saying that some of the bakers will use fruit – but that apples and pears should be avoided because (a) Cockneys will get confused, and (b) they don’t carry enough flavour. Instead, he suggests, they should use ‘something more robust, like an orange, like a lemon’. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he suggests sweetening their cakes with a lemon.

As though to spite him, our first baker – Ian – is using pear. He’s also throwing in carrots and honey. Mat, meanwhile, who looks ever increasingly like Postman Pat, is making a fairly traditional carrot cake, and doesn’t even seem to be adding any form of melted sugar as his sugarfree ingredient. Good on you, Mat.

I love me a carrot cake, and Paul’s sounds delish too – pecans and sultanas are also being added. More importantly – is Paul-the-baker the ghost of Paul-Hollywood-past? He seems to get paler every week.

“A good polenta cake is worth having,” says Mary to Tamal. Interestingly, WordPress thinks ‘polenta’ is a typo, and offers ‘tadpole’ as the only correction.

Alvin is making a pineapple upside-down cake. “It’s simple; classic,” he says, clearly already wracked with anxiety lest it be too boring. “It’s my go-too!” he confides to the camera, then laughs in a moment of unnerving hysteria.

Ugne has decided (possibly realising that these cakes aren’t free from anything at all) to make hers gluten free as well. We get a bizarre moment of Sue saying ‘hello?!’ in astonishment, practically waggling her glasses up and down Eric Morecambe-style. How does Mary Berry feel about it?

Ugne threatens to use purple icing.

At Home We Have An Aga (and, let me be clear, I’m very fond of her – the nickname is only in jest, but is too far gone now to be changed) has made at least four tiers to her cake, and joins the putting-in-oven montage that we’ve come to expect. If my oven had three shelves, it wouldn’t have taken five hours to make the Windtorte.

Nadiya is making no-cook blueberry jam for the centre of her cake, which doesn’t only seem to be no-cook but also no-blueberry. It apparently consists entirely of basil seeds (c.f. fig.1) and water.

Her sweetener is molasses. WHICH IS BASICALLY SUGAR.

At Home We Have An Aga is making madeleines to go around the outside of her cake. The takes me back. BA-DOOM-TISH. But, seriously, she always seems to go the extra mile, but still hasn’t made it to Star Baker contention territory.

It only feels like a moment since cakes-in montage, and we’re ready for cakes-out montage. Despite the tension-building drums, nothing of note happens here. Nothing, that is, except for the case for dismissal growing against medical larcenist Tamal.

He says it’s 50% one thing, 50% some other thing, and a bit of something else – sweetly corrects his 50%/50% statement, and sighs “Ahhh… maths”. Somewhere, Mr Simpson is eyebrows-raised, hoping for a mention. I’ve got your back, Mr S.

Most of the tent are making mascarpone icing (‘mascarpone’ being another word WordPress can’t cope with; ‘mascara’ this time). I do have a question about Tamal’s (and probably most people’s). Why do they insist on using a food mixer thingummy for EVERYTHING.

I said this last year, but I don’t own one of these. I can see where it would sometimes be useful, but bakers should be quite capable of making icing or a sponge mix by hand. Is there some sort of covert sponsorship deal going on? Am I going to bring down the BBC? Can I get a refund on the licence fee I paid last week?

Meanwhile, Alvin is spreading honey on his (to me) rather underwhelming-looking upside-down cake. And he’s done. He nervously asks Ian if his cake is too simple, a question which Ian wisely pretends not to hear.

I don’t think there’s any connection with Ugne saying “If we play it safe, it would be boring. We can do boring every day.” But the editing is undoubtedly unfortunate, pitting the tent’s scariest (though also lovely) baker against its most anxious. At least Alv is spending his time well:

And – OH NOOOS – Ugne’s cake starts to collapse. She blames it on the top layer breaking, but that doesn’t seem to explain why the whole thing is subsiding, oozing whatever bizarre purple concoction she has smothered it in, as well as the top layer of chocolate. She decides the best course of action is to stand in front of an open fridge, prodding it with a spatula.

The editor cruelly goes between the wonderful looking cakes (Ian’s with flowers embedded all around looks particularly impressive) to Ugne’s mess. She’s raided the garden for some decoration that she has decided (in a moment, we must sympathetically assume, of insanity) might distract from the apocakelypse.

Here are some prettier ones:

Tamal does well, as does Paul. Bizarrely, they think Ian’s might look too simple (?!) and ‘pear’s not going to bring anything to a party in a sugarfree cake’. Paul says Mat’s doesn’t look baked, but it turns out it is, and thus ends the shortest emotional rollercoaster in history.

Ugne’s checkerboard doesn’t come out quite as she’d hoped, and I hope this also serves as a warning to anybody who was considering browny-purple as an icing colour choice in future:

Brilliantly, Mel starts chomping on the accompanying flowers – only to be told that they’re not edible. She subtly spits them out.

They don’t seem to mind too much that Alvin’s cake is super dull; instead, he gets tidal waves of compliments from M & P. These are the same people who thought that Ian’s was too simple. Paul-the-baker nods appreciatively. And, in the aftermath-interviews, Ian is NOT CHUFFED.

Technical challenge time! And it might be the least appetising one to date. Gluten-free pittas. Nadiya is all of us:

Pittas join the pantheon of GBBO technical bakes that in no way reward the effort required. Just buy them from a shop, people. Even Paul’s array of pre-made pittas look soporifically dull.

It’s the first of many times we’ll see Mary make a pocket in a pitta. If you thought her fixation on violets was ridiculous, wait til you discover how obsessed she is with wearing pittas as gloves.

They’ve all got packets of brown powder but, fear not, this isn’t more of Tamal stealing from work. It’s something that, mixed with water, takes the place of gluten, or something. When I’ve made gluten-free things, I’ve just used gluten-free flour. May I recommend it as a preferred method? Oh, and Tamal, not content with the patois of 1998, rewinds a few years more to describe the mixture as ‘rank’.

They all seem to be doing surprisingly well with the dough, though. It’s very soggy, but they’ve made admirable-looking doughs – as this shot, taken from under Ugne’s arm, demonstrates:

Oh, Tamal’s isn’t going so well. Poor old Alv has had pitta once in his life, and recalls it looking like ‘a triangle’. Sue blanches, but womanfully says nothing. Is he thinking of a samosa? Is he saying words at random?

This panning shot, rushing through the flowers, literally made me feel dizzy.

The bakers and voiceovers are mercifully brief on the topic of proving, and Alvin runs through every conceivable shape for his pitta, before openly copying those around him.

“Grey and dense” says Mat, popping his head up from behind the desk, and making my jokes too obvious. Also, where is his accent from? He sounds like somebody pretending to be Northern, while chewing toffee. And Ockham’s Razor suggests that that’s what he must be.

There is nothing interesting about these pittas, visually at least. We see them wrapped in tea towels (why?), plonked on boards, and eventually lined up on the gingham altar. A last minute blow on hers renders Ugne’s entirely unhygienic.

The judging? Well, friends, AT NO POINT TO MARY OR PAUL EAT ANY OF THEM. It’s so strange. Do they note their colour and shape? Yes. Do they wave them up and down? Yes. Do they shove their hands in them? Hell, yes. But they never taste them. Why? (Also: repetitive mentions of ‘envelope’ spark interest from Postman Mat.) My favourite moment is Mary saying “These are round, aren’t they?” in wonderment, and apparently needing confirmation from Paul’s expertise on this point.

The world’s dullest technical over, and Alvin comes last, followed by Tamal and Ugne. The top three are At Home We Have An Aga, Paul, and Nadiya. I think Nadiya is pleased.

You know what *I* miss, folks? Home videos. We haven’t had one in weeks. They’re really wasting having a fire fighter and an anaesthetist on the squad, not to mention a student. At Home We Have An Aga probably writes on the floor, or something, like Ruby. Ugne is a body-builder, for Heaven’s sake. What do you need, GBBO producers, before you’ll show us awkward three-second clips, filmed in the rain, of people presenting Victoria sponges to their assembled family and colleagues?

Back in the tent, it’s the showstopper challenge: dairy-free ice cream rolls. The very notion. Let’s be honest, they know that ice cream gave them their best ratings last year, and they’re hoping to recapture the magic. To do judges and presenters justice, #bingate is not mentioned, even covertly. Unless it was SO covert that I didn’t spot it.

The bakers are mostly using coconut milk, which comes in BBC-friendly non-brand tins.

It always seems like anything they’re thinking of making might turn out to be scrambled eggs if things go wrong. Every recipe is one false step away from being scrambled eggs. It’s a humbling thought.

Alvin is using a Filipino ingredient that Paul compares to suncream – and Mary, getting her own back for the hair-dye comment of last week, suggests it’s what he’s been using for years. That man does love a tan. Alvin’s looks unappealingly luminous in the BBC Colouring Pencils evocation of it.

Mel gets the green stuff on her tongue because of course she does. Bless her. Paul-the-baker is making a dessert island – geddit? Dessert/desert? Geddit? [wipes eyes]. A few people are going tropical, indeed, with pineapples and mangoes all over the place.

Oh, hark, they’ve found a xylophone.

Ugne is making a peanut butter ice cream *gag* with grape jam *gag* and the whole thing sounds revolting. Her ‘I need this to work today’ is followed by a laugh, but I think we can all still agree that it’s the horse’s-head-in-bed of comments.

Ian’s doing a… dessert island. It’s the joke that just keeps on giving.

Nadiya says of her mousse that she’s putting it in the freezer, because leaving it out will make it too runny. Could THIS be the #bingate reference I’ve been waiting for?

Apparently forgetting his – now, how to put this nicely – horrendous piping on the biscuit box, Paul-the-baker is making wobbly palm trees and… shuttlecocks?… to decorate his sponge roll.

My friend Adam plays a GBBO drinking game which includes drinking when bakers stare into ovens. He was in my house when this episode was on, and we didn’t happen to have any alcohol in, otherwise this montage would have left him unconscious.

Alvin is a bit fraught, and we get a shot of Paul-the-baker staring in consternation at him, in silence, before reluctantly saying “D’you want a hand, Alvin?” He looks and sounds precisely like Phil Mitchell at this point.

I’ve also skimmed (or at least semi-skimmed #hahaha #ohnohedidnt) over the final section of the challenge, as it’s mostly people taking things in and out of ovens, or in and out of freezers. It does include Sue pointing out the flaws in Ugne’s jam placement, suggesting that she’s picked up quite a bit in her years on the show.

The less said about Paul-the-baker’s fondant sunbather, the better. Let’s not sully ourselves, people.

Ian has a mini breakdown, and can’t remember the word ‘marzipan’. In this strange tent of savoury and sweet being entirely interchangeable, his suggestion of ‘parmesan’ wouldn’t actually be that scandalous. (And, oh, WordPress spellchecker, I do mean parmesan, and not partisan.)

And, just like that, we’re finished. Here are a couple of the beauties:

Highlights:

• Mary says she’d be proud if she’d managed to make Tamal’s.
• Mat didn’t realise that a Swiss roll and an ice cream roll were different things.
• Nadiya’s is undeniably wonderful, but it’s curious that Mary congratulated her chocolate ice cream for ‘masking’ the coconut.
• Alvin continues to call Paul ‘sir’. I don’t really like it.
• Ugne’s is a mess, but tastes good, and (bless her) she has a little cry.

Mary, Paul, Mel, and Sue debrief while the bakers loll about in deck chairs, each and every one of them looking grumpy – I know I would be after a day like that. Then we’re ready for them to unveil Star Baker…

Hearty cheers all round! Fans of the adorable will enjoy Nadiya talking about how her kids will be proud of her.

And going home…

She whispers something to Sue – could it be “I won’t forget this”? – and definitely looks like she’s strangling her… but, I jest, she was a sweetie really.

See you next week!

Welcome to desserts week, everyone! It’s one of those times when we all pretend that ‘desserts’ isn’t being spread out to cover four different episodes. The definition is so loose that even Diana’s pastry triangles might make the grade.

The ‘here’s what will happen in this episode’ makes the classic tiers/tears joke, so we’re off to a good start. Other than that, we just get Mel and Sue – standing in Sue-and-Mel order to confuse my friend Hannah – under umbrellas in the rain. While this is at least played for comic effect, you’ll see the poor bakers in similarly damp conditions throughout the rest of the episode, with no obvious reason why they couldn’t simply do the interviews indoors.

Some lovely folk got in touch to confirm that they do, indeed, value and appreciate Blazer Watch. And… here they are! Mary outdoes herself; Mel and Sue return to form; Paul – even in the rain – refuses to don a blazer.

The first challenge is making creme brulee, which seems custom-designed to wreak havoc with my finding-accents-on-my-computer. Well, GBBO bosses, you underestimated how lazy I am. So we’re going to get ‘creme brulee’ throughout this segment, and you can imagine the correct French. Just borrow one of At Home We Have An Aga’s cookbooks, if necessary.

The bakers get out bowls, break eggs, and look important – while, baffingly, Mat wags his finger at the floor.

Incidentally, my biggest surprise this series is how little they’re making of the fact that Mat is a fireman EVEN in a week where fire is mentioned plenty. Could it be because he looks a little like Postman Pat? Could it?

Paul and Mary tell us about creme brulees outside – where it has miraculously stopped raining – and Mary declares that there weren’t such things as blow torches when she has a wee lass. As several people have pointed out, blow torches go back to 1791, so… yup, this adds up.

As with Madeira cake, I’m off the traditionalist opinion that creme brulees should be creme brulee flavoured, and there’s no need to mess around with other additions. That being said, I’m a sucker for coconut and lime at any time.

Then again, I really love liquorice, but the idea of putting it in a creme brulee is anathema to me.

Four or five different bakers tell us that the cream/eggs mixture shouldn’t be too hot, and we’re treated to shots with this finesse:

That’s Ugne’s hair, by the way. She is using some fermented fruit from Africa that is basically Bailey’s, and Mezza immediately threatens to get off her face on it. Anxious Alvin, meanwhile, has been trialling his creme brulees on hospital staff – who have been merrily criticising it, apparently. Colouring Pencils Man gets a bit off with perspective, and it looks like Alvin will be serving his with some red fungi.

He’s also apparently left some edible pansies on the train, and is waiting for them to arrive. How? Is some poor production skivvy been sent off in a taxi to hound the good people of First Great Western until a box of crystallized flowers rematerializes? Or did some bright spark, knowing how often edible pansies would appear in this episode, thoughtfully fling them out a window?

Nadiya is making something she’s tried before “without success”, and then says it was “fun”, with this expression on her face:

The cameraman has borrowed Tamal’s shaking hands, and we get an aptly wobbily shot of him pouring custard into ramikins. The shaking does make it feel like we’re stalkers peering through somebody’s kitchen window – which, given the camera’s propensity to linger behind shrubs, is at least consistent.

“It’s all down to the poaching,” says Paul. Is it? Poaching surely something different you do with eggs? Am I missing something?

Meanwhile, Mary is finding more alcohol to down.

Apparently a bain-marie is used to stop the custard being heated at more than 100 degrees (as that, of course, is as hot as water can get). Wouldn’t putting the oven at 100 degrees have the same effect? I don’t know.

Much talk of made of ‘wobble’, and there are desperate attempts to make this sound euphemistic – most awkwardly in an exchange between Mat and Ugne which, thankfully, Ugne doesn’t seem to hear. She just says “hot hot hot”.

Sue gets Sandy to demonstrate the perfect wobble, and my heart just wishes Nancy were in this clip instead.

The camera pans jerkily towards Mat drinking a cup of tea; Nadiya makes helpful comments to Paul-the-baker (“are they meant to crack?”); At Home We Have An Aga has decided to make tuilles as well as creme brulees, for no clear reason. With dim memories of Hula Hoops presumably in mind, Mel mocks up tuille cuffs – and is sternly chastised by Paul and Mary.

We see various bakers sprinkle sugar on their brulees. While Alvin does this, a background shot makes the eventual judging make much more sense.

In Ugne’s long line of creepy things to say to camera, she turns and says simply “burning flesh!”

Sandy does an impression of David Attenborough that sounds, as always, exactly like Victoria Wood.

Despite my reservations regarding creme brulees having unusual flavours, the spread does look very impressive. Some people have scrambled eggs; some people have runny custard; some are heartily congratulated on their consistency. Tamal does a little victory fist shake that he instantly thinks better of, and it forms a perfect three-second portrayal of embarrassment and regret. Guys… I made an animated GIF! The future is now.

Paul tells Ian that he has issues with his pomegranate – somebody’s been reading their Greek myths – but the harshest criticism is reserved for Sandy. She insists that her runny creme brulees were in the oven for the right length of time. “Was it on?” replies Paul, in the closest thing to wit that he’s ever achieved.

Once Paul has had a couple of hours to lie down, to recover from his Wildean parry, we’re ready for the technical challenge. Mary advises them all to read the recipe carefully and visualise what they should be creating, and Sue sends M & P off to an inter-generational foam party in Woking – which, against my better judgement, does make me snigger. Not so much their puns on ‘wind’ – they’re making Spanish Wind Torte. They’re really running low on actual real things to bake, aren’t they?

It has Italian meringue and French meringue, I think. In conversation with my bestie Mel about this, we wondered whether every country had its own meringue. “Is there a British meringue, and a Spanish meringue?” queried Mel. “Merengue is the Spanish meringue,” quoth I, wittily.

This is apparently what it should look like. Pay attention to those violets; they will become the only aspect that Mary gives a damn about.

“Have you ever seen a violet?” Sue asks Alvin.
“I think it’s a flower,” he responds. Good luck, matey.

Paul-the-baker, meanwhile, just says “violet violet violet violet” over and over to himself. You might call that speech ultra-violet. Thankyouverymuch.

“It’s the most feminine version of plastering you can imagine, isn’t it?” says At Home We Have An Aga – and, somewhere, Richard from Series Five is yelling “I’M A BUILDER!” at his TV screen.

This dimly reminds me of that awful 100-layer pancake-cake from last year, only it looks a darn sight more appealing. The structural integrity of all the tortes is impressing me. Everybody seems to have made nice meringue layers and sturdy towers. Yes, Sandy put her cake stand in the oven, but what of it? Why wouldn’t she put her cake stand in the oven? Think of it that way.

She’s also decided that the best way to make a disc is to break it in half. I didn’t catch the beginning of this process on my first watch, and thought it had cracked by accident – but, no, she has deliberately sabotaged her own torte.

She doesn’t even give a good reason for it. “It should be slightly… shppsh,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. And then she rams it into the oven tray, like so:

This time it’s apparently not deliberate, but the line between the things she does deliberately and the things she does by accident is so blurred as to be non-existent.

The same could be said of Sue, who gives Alvin an aggressive massage that can’t possibly be pleasant.

Mel makes an awesome “Meringue, m’lord?” joke; Sue points out to Sandy that discs tend to be flat; the whole brass section of the orchestra pomp pomp to their hearts’ content, and the line-up of tortes are ready for inspection.

For some reason, Sandy’s cracked disc doesn’t bother Paul and Mary at all – “interesting lid” is all the comment it gets – and then we spend the next few minutes hearing Mary obsess about the shape, size, and delicacy of the violets, to the exclusion of all other criteria. The word ‘violet’ lost all meaning for me in the middle of this segment. (Incidentally, where did the fondant come for these? Could it have been… shop bought?!) Alvin comes last, followed by Nadiya and Mat. The top three are At Home We Have An Aga, Ugne, and Paul. Even Paul only gets “a good attempt at the flowers” from Mary. She really cares about those flowers. Like, time-to-call-an-intervention cares.

The usual anybody-could-be-in-danger interview with Paul and Mary, and we’re onto a three-tier cheesecake challenge for the showstoppers. They should be sweet, not savoury, says Sue – which is (a) something that should be taken as read, and (b) quickly disregarded by the bakers. For instance, Ian is making ‘spicy and herby’ cheesecakes. NO. NO. NO. This madness must stop.

Rosemary does not belong in a cheesecake, to clarify. Tamal is also going the rosemary route – the FOOL – and has apparently kept some violets from earlier.

Alvin knows what’s up. He’s using lemon, berries, and other cheesecake flavours. Good man. Nadiya has made her flavours from boiled-down fizzy drinks, which is… good, I guess? Paul has stopped listening to people at this stage, and just says “good luck” automatically to every baker when the people around him have stopped talking for a bit.

Paul-the-baker is adding brandy and vodka. Mary dribbles at the thought.

Apparently Sue, Paul, and Mary have never heard the word ‘ombre’, which is baffling. Ugne explains that it is often found in relation to hair dye; Paul makes a joke about Mary’s, and she responds simply with ‘careful’. It’s glorious. She can be stern when she needs to be.

At Home We Have An Aga is making three elderflower cheesecakes – unlike everybody else, as they’re using as many flavours as humanly possible. Being At Home We Have An Aga, she decides to whip together some macarons to enhance her bake. Apparently those ingredients are just lying around.

We haven’t had a lot of Mary Berry Reaction Faces this episode, but she gives a good’un when Mat explains that he wants his cheesecake to ‘explode a little bit’.

We get a montage of bakers taking cheesecakes out of tins, which culminates in Alvin apparently taking an invisible cheesecake out of his.

Cheesecakes are piled on top of one another, some with pernicious bits of plastic wedged in between layers. Sandy opts for covering one in silver foil (why?) and leaving one on the side. Tamal does her best to help her, but…

There are some impressive looking cheesecakes, folks. Ian’s and Tamal’s look lovely. but I refuse to condone the herby/spicy approach to cheesecakes. Not on my watch. And one of Tamal’s layers looks curiously like it’s made of tuna.

Paul gets to his ignore-them-and-they’ll-go-away peak during the backstage pre-elimination discussion.

Star baker – well, it looked like it should be Tamal, to me, but it’s…

And, going home, not very surprisingly after a pretty shoddy week, is…

I will never have the opportunity to decide whether or not she is a Nancy-impersonator.

Hope you’ve enjoyed dessert week – see you next time!

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.