BakeOff

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.

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…

Guys… it’s back!

In case you don’t know, for the past few years I’ve been writing recaps of the annual BBC reality show The Great British Bake Off, and people seem to enjoy them – if the (delightful) inundation with requests to recap this year’s episodes is anything to go by. I can’t promise recaps will be prompt this year BUT they will definitely happen. I’m not even going on holiday in the middle of the series this time. And it’s now with enormous pictures, because WordPress.

Things start precisely as you’d expect them to: with a pun. PUN KLAXON. And, guys, it’s a weak one. It’s based on ‘warrior’ and ‘worrier’ sounding alike. Things are off to a solid start.

As usual, at this stage there are literally dozens of bakers. There doesn’t seem to be any real way of keeping track of them, although some have cottoned onto the fact that an impactful first impression can be made by signature outfits (Hat McGee has nose rings and a hat, at all times – can his scalp have suffered from some industrial burning at some point? Can it?) or being very similar to previous contestants. More on those anon; you should know that I am cheering on Marie, because I drew her name in the office sweepstake.

Tamal – a ‘trainee anaethetist’, which sounds lethal – says it didn’t feel real until they saw the tent. At which point, this building looms into view. Since they haven’t for a moment explained where they are, this seems like an unnecessary waste of taxpayers’ money on a jolly in a helicopter.

Oh, no, wait – there the tent is. I take it all back.

Flora (her nickname will come later in this recap) wins my love by showing proper respect for Mary – albeit adding that she wants to “make Mary swallow a piece of my cake”, which couldn’t sound more menacing. But she is so like Martha from last series that I can’t help feel fond of her already.

Alvin says simply “Nervous. Really nervous.” which, judging by the promotional images of him that have been released, is simply his nickname. He looks constantly terrified. Sandy, on the other hand – who I’m pretty sure is simply Nancy from last series putting on a slightly different Northern accent – claims that she often inadvertently makes meat pies when trying to make cakes. Well, this bodes well.

The opening credits haven’t changed. The little girl in them must be in her late forties by now.

More panning. More helicopters. Apparently we’re in Berkshire; Mel and Sue are in hoodies. Have they eschewed blazers for this series?! Will Boden go bankrupt?

For the first challenge of the series, they’re making – Madeira cake. Call me foolish, but I didn’t think you could add lots of other flavours to this without making something completely different. I’m with those bakers who make a ‘classic’ Madeira. I.e. a Madeira.

Sandy informs us that her sister’s ‘last words’ were something convoluted and meandering about greasing tins. Well, I guess we may as well fill the moments before passing to a Better Place with sound kitchen advice.

There is something rather alarming about a trainee anaesthetist not being able to use scissors.

YAY! Home videos! The first to get this treatment is Ugne, who lives in Essex with (by happy coincidence) her partner and children. Sadly they couldn’t be in the same shot together, so these have been cobbled together clumsily in Photoshop.

Ian also has children; they bounce on trampolines. I was wearing the same jumper that Ian has on, while watching this episode. He waffles on about the rare, exotic ingredients he’s found while travelling in foreign climes – which turn out to be ginger and lime. But anybody who puts ginger, lime, and coconut together is a friend of mine. Oh, and let’s take a moment to welcome back the BBC Colouring Pencils Man.

Mat – in what I think might be the only ten seconds of screentime he gets this episode – says he’s making a gin and tonic Madeira cake. Mary’s eyes light up, as does the alarm bell in the producer’s office. Mary’s on the alcs.

My girl Marie bakes almost every day, we are told, ‘much to the delight of her five grandchildren’. Why doesn’t Voiceover Mel ever make any effort to do rudimentary counting?

Marie seems like a treasure, and I wholeheartedly applaud Marie, Dorret, and Flora for making classic Madeiras without bells, whistles, or – indeed – any metal at all. Speaking of metal (THIS IS WHAT WE IN THE BUSINESS CALL A SEGUE) Flora’s sister is inexplicably riding a unicycle in her home-life-shot. Which is taken by somebody leaning out of the attic, apparently.

Back in the tent: “My chunks are well-dispersed,” says Sandy, trying perhaps a little too hard to be the Nancy of Series 6. Sandy walks through deserted corridors for a living.

Her Madeira has apricots and almond liquor, which does sound rather nice. Maybe I was too hasty with my purist judgements about Madeira.

Flora forgot to set her oven, because (wait for it) ‘at home we have an Aga’. Congrats, m’lady, you have earned yourself a nickname for the WHOLE SERIES. (Couldn’t you have made it something quicker to type out, srsly?)

Paul (the baker) is apparently a prison governor in Swansea who likes making sugar flowers. This is all an elaborate cover-up for the fact that he’s a seldom-employed professional Paul Hollywood impersonator. If he is connected with prisons, he should probably have a word with Ugne, who turns menacingly to the camera and says “looking for crack”. Send in the sniffer dogs, pronto. (But, really, apparently having a single crack along the top of a Madeira cake is Essential, and this episode’s Probably Arbitrary But Somehow Crucial decider. And it’s not even the technical challenge, where these things usually emerge.)

“Famous in Leeds is the three-crack Madeira” confides Sandra, with an accent calculated to be incomprehensible to anybody not from the UK.

Tamal. Now, Tamal, I think you might be my favourite so far. Your showstopper (more on that anon) was fantastic; you seem charming; you don’t freeze rigid with fear whenever Mel or Sue hove into view. But… are you sure you’re allowed to steal medical equipment from work?

The aforementioned syringe (obj. 1 in an impending trial, no doubt) is for putting in a rosewater syrup. I am heartily anti rose as a flavour. I’ve got nothing against it as either a flower or a name. Or a past tense.

Confusing the Signature Challenge with the Showstopper Challenge (where prolonged staring at your bake is not only accepted but encouraged), Paul fixes his gaze on his Madeira. Which pretty much underlines how non-showstoppery this challenge is. I’m sure his bake is fabs, but it looks like he’s ogling a lump of clay.

We interrupt a montage of people spreading, rolling, and candying and (in the case of At Home We Have An Aga, apparently adding tomatoes) with a shot of Marie drying pans.

Since you’ve seen so few images of actual food so far in this recap – knock yourself out:

Mary does a candied fruit drop test. It’s glorious. She’s trolling the show now.

Faaaaar too many people to tell you what Mary and Paul said about them all, but Nadiya, Tamal, Marie, and At Home We Have An Aga do well, Ian and Stu do badly (‘wallpaper paste’ / ‘everything’s wrong’), everyone else fall somewhere in between. Marie, fyi, has a wonderful line in anxious shifty-eyes, which are impossible to show aptly here. Take my word for it. She also seems a complete sweetie.

No History of Cake, guys. Have we… have we learned everything there is to know about cake?

Straight onto the technical challenge – which is one from Mary’s mind. It’s a walnut cake. I’m liking the simplicity of today’s challenges; things that people might actually want to make at home. No fondant fancies here. I mean, yes, they’ve picked something entirely to say ‘nuts’ as often as possible, but swings and roundabouts.

“Where could they go wrong?” Paul queries. “They have to make a sponge mix,” starts Mary, somewhat underestimating the ability housed in the tent. She also sounds quite croaky in this scene, and I find myself wishing she were wearing a scarf and/or downing Strepsils by the packet. Then I remember: she’ll doubtless have a hipflask of whiskey within arm’s reach.

Have YOU ever wondered the correct size for a chopped walnut? Have you? No? Well, prepare yourself to fast-forward through a few minutes of in-depth discussion on the topic. Or pause on this shot, which Mat (or Ian?) proudly and unquestioning labels the perfect size.

The downside to a simple challenge is that there isn’t very much to say. We all know how to make a sponge cake. Even Mel’s breathless prognostications about the dangers of not knowing precisely how long to leave them in the oven leave this particular viewer in no state of distress. Crystallising sugar is the pinnacle of the difficulties. We pan from pan to pan (*bows* thank you – no, thank you) until we land on Alvin’s.

Stu goes off-piste with measurements for water, ignoring the fist-clenching alarums and discords from Mel, hovering over his shoulder. Has he seen the show before?

Alvin’s cake has slid to one side, for the prosaic reason that his shelf was at an angle. “Could you prop it up on some walnuts?” offers Mel, appearing from nowhere. Has she seen the show before? Alvin, being a nice man, simply pretends he hasn’t heard her. To her credit, she quickly acknowledges that the idea was ridiculous.

At Home We Have An Aga manages to concertina one of her layers, but the lack of attention paid to this by the cameraman is forewarning of greater disasters to befall the tent… in some episodes this would be given a ten minute montage from all angles, complete with interviews from all and sundry afterwards.

The oompah oompah Big Band are playing to their hearts’ content, and that must mean that the challenge is OVER. It’s a pretty impressive spread (though Stu’s caramelised walnuts became something more like brittle, and he was only able to dig one out). As always, the anonymity of the bakers is made a mockery of by their gurning and wincing while the judging takes place. Paul and Mary keep calling something ‘granular’, and I can’t work out whether they mean the icing or the sponge.

Anyway, some fairly uninspiring judging later, Nadiya and Stu are the bottom two – Marie, Alvin, and Ugne are our top three. Alvin looks very anxious about this. In the interview afterwards, he says “I’m pleased” in the tones of one undertaking a lie detector test with a penalty of death.

Back into the tent for the final challenge, and the establishing shot shows… this filthy sieve!

Paul and Mary talk about the fortunes of the bakers so far, while we see the bakers put on their aprons, seemingly over and over again. Paul – for avoidance of doubt – lets us know that walnuts should be cut in eighths, and no larger. He also entirely ignores everything Mel and Sue say to him, as per.

The Showstopper Challenge is a Black Forest Gateaux. Marie thinks wistfully of her youth, while At Home We Have An Aga says she hasn’t heard of it, but when she’ll ask for one when she turns 14 next birthday.

Tamal – and this is where he becomes my favourite – is planning to make this beauty. It also strikes me that the BBC Colouring Pencils Man’s approach feels a bit like that of a child who, worrying that people may not be able to identify his horse and cowboy from artistic merit alone, adds explanatory arrows to the side.

Hat McGee is making a Purple Forest Gateaux which, if anything, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Black Forest is.

Dorret – watch this space – is making two types of sponge, and a mousse. “It makes a very dense, rich sponge,” she says – dense being, of course, what everyone wants from a sponge.

Everything that everyone is making sounds delish. Nobody is trying a cardamom-based spin on it, nobody feels inspired to see what would happen if they used pineapple instead of cherry. The experimenting is minor, and I approve of it. Sandy talks of having recently made one that was “powerful”, whatever she might mean by that, and describes herself as “a bit random with a trendy twist”.

“I’m happy with the overall appearance,” says Alvin mournfully. Hat McGee has burnt his cakes a bit. And Marie staunchly ignores Mel comparing her with Rod Stewart. Who wants to be compared with Rod Stewart in this day and age? Not even Rod Stewart. Wisely, Marie is more concerned with Paul’s lack of enthusiasm for her envisaged cascading ganache.

One of my highlights is Paul (the Baker) and his complete lack of humour about security at the prison where he works. Sue reverses out of her joke so quickly that… if I knew more about cars I’d make a decent joke here.

Things aren’t going swimmingly over with Nadiya, whose cake looks like she accidentally baked a hamster into it.

And then we get to our annual explanation of what tempering chocolate is. I’d quite like to compare each year’s explanation, and see if they’re the same wording each time.

Lots of people are making trees. Ian is making… elephants. Sue’s quizzing on the topic doesn’t bring anything that could be considered a reason.

Alcohol is poured copiously, buttercream is piped, layers are… layered. And we linger for some time on Dorret putting her mousse in the fridge. Mel resiliently makes references to forests that are intended to be innuendos, but don’t quite mean anything at all, on any level. And then…

Guys – it’s genuinely heartbreaking. The camera lingers on Dorret’s face as she whispers “no”, and I want to reach into my TV and give her a hug. Luckily Sue is there in my stead, and comforts her. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to go home,” she says – which should be a barefaced lie, but… well, spoilers. I love that Sue is so nice to Dorret, rather than waving a bin towards her with HEADLINES gleaming in her eyes.

Judgement time! So many wonderful looking cakes; I will restrict myself to showing only three that I loved the look of. And… Dorret’s.

A mixed bag of critiques, as you might expect. Despite Mary’s assurances that Dorret’s will doubtless taste lovely, she is quickly overruled by Paul’s declaration that it is like rubber. Marie, Tamal, and At Home We Have An Aga do well. And so on and so forth. It’s getting late. The bakers wander around outside in the cold while Mary and Paul repeat the whole show in brief.

So! The winner is….

And going home is…

Somehow Dorret lives to fight another day, and Hat McGee takes his hat back to Hatshire.

It’s nice to be back, guys! Hope you enjoyed the recap, and I’ll see you next week.

Well, here we are! The final, and three wonderful bakers are left. It’s been a vintage year for likeability, and Norm is basically already a national trejz. (Btw, remember those Mary B Janus mask images I requested be turned into a GIF? Two of you lovely people obliged – and the BBC totally nabbed the idea!) In case you haven’t seen the episode yet, I shan’t reveal the winner until the end…

Mel and Sue end the series with a high, being – inexplicably – in a rowing boat.

This makes me proud to be British.

We get a hasty recap of the series to date, and it seems extraordinary that it has featured on Newsnight and every newspaper cover across Britain. And then we segue across to the garden, which is now filled with children and loved ones moving about in slow motion.

These steps prove, once again, that they are not up to the job of providing climactic shots. There is a wisp of undergrowth, for old times’ sake.

#BringBackTheBridge

The tent feels extremely empty. It’s been a few moments since we had a recap of the series to date, so Mel and Sue launch into another one, interspersed with the finalists saying nice, vague things about each other. The most unfortunate of these is Nancy saying “The brief this week is bold, in your face – and that is Luis.”

It’s ok, Luis, she said BOLD. With an ‘o’. (Simon… people in glass houses…)

The final episode means the final instalment of Blazer Watch (Bill Oddie is in talks to present this segment next year). Mary has gone full-on Cath Kidston, while the other three are recycling blazers from earlier in the series – grey, pink, and nothing, respectively.

And they’re forbidden from using the same hand postures as each other.

The final signature challenge is Viennoiserie – “croissanty things” to the rest of us – and all three bakers talk about how strange it is that this is the end. They have different ways of dealing with this. Nancy goes for “pretending they’re all behind me” (healthy), while Richard vows “never to do a signature again”, which is bad news for his autograph-hunting fans.

Luis is making – gloriously – a pain au… white chocolate, which makes me warm to him, as my French is equally hopeless. It’s a bit late in the day to be revealing those flaws that make viewers love you most, but better late than never. He keeps his food mixer going the entire time he’s talking to Paul and Mary. He’s keeping it cajz.

Our Nance, meanwhile, confides that she is using the mixer because she hasn’t got the strength any more, “then I just finish them off to make it look like I did it all them look smooth”. She wants an extra half an hour to make up for not having the males’ muscles. Where are Kate and her guns when you need them?

Kate could do this in half the time of the mixer.

Paul wanders up to Nance and announces “I’M YOUR MALE JUDGE”. He’s cottoned onto one joke during the series, and he’s not going to let it die. Not for him, the manipulation of humour into fresh and exciting new incarnations; as long as he can bellow the same two words over and over again, he’ll keep bellowin’. Nancy ignores him, and says she’s going to make an almond and raspberry croissant. It sounds delicious to me, but gets this Mary Berry Reaction Face:

“Almond AND raspberry? You… you maverick.”

I love Nancy so much. She agrees with Paul’s description of her other croissanty-thing as being a bit like a French tart in a Danish pastry (or something like that) and then raises her eyebrows as if to say “I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about”. She’s so relaxed. She is not intimidated by his steely blues. And he does seem to be getting his flirt on. It’s disturbing.

Richard “speaks French a bit London”. I love him too. He’s making pain au lait, and Paul says it’s too simple – dangerously simple. Er, I guess so?

Guess who’s back?

So we meet again, proving drawer.

Luis gives an in-depth instruction for making the croissant pastry, as though anybody at home would ever bother doing that. Richard has cheated and is painting his butter on, which gets mumbles of consternation from Perch Table Corner. Apparently it could be “too bready” for Paul, who notoriously hates bread.

Dangerously spready.

Richard also says that he wants to “make sure my layers don’t lose their layeriness”. That, word fans, is not a new word in Oxford Dictionaries.

Luis: “It’s not a good day to have a disaster.” (True)
Richard: “I must admit, pain au chocolat aren’t my speciality.” (Good…)
Nancy: “You’re trying to learn from me, aren’t you?” (Paul is not a man who likes to be teased, and I love that she doesn’t care at all.)

What a woman.

I’ve long doubted the honesty and capability of the proving drawer, and today I am proved right – as Richard has had to improvise a second drawer within it:

Prove this: you’re useless

There’s quite a lot of time to kill in this episode, so we get a montage of Nancy drinking water and Richard doing peculiar contortions, like he’s limbering up for a limbo.

I bet he’s thrilled that this got left in.

Luis puts his pastries in the oven saying “do or die”. I didn’t realise die was one of the options. This show just took a turn. And then he does a little body-pop, while Richard continues to create a showreel for his upcoming yoga DVD.

‘Build Yourself Healthy’

In the back of the tent, Paul is practising his Blue Steel:

As the series goes on, Paul gets meaner and (presumably to offset it) Mary gets nicer – so we’ve got to the point where Paul complains about more or less everything, from the chalkiness of Luis’ cream cheese to the edges of Richard’s pain au lait, while Mary cries “You tried!”, “You’re a baker!”, or “It’s the final!” She often tells someone that she likes the flavour, if she’s got nothing particularly nice to say, as though they were in any way responsible for the flavour of chocolate.

After the first critique, it’s not looking good for our Richard.

Mel’s intro to the Technical Challenge incorporates the long-awaited mash-up of Jane Austen and The Only Way is Essex (“on it like a Jane Austen bonnet”), and Mary announces that “it’s a really nice one… good luck!” Fiendish.

It is a nice one – I like that it goes back to basics, and they’re making 12 mini Victoria sandwiches, 12 mini scones, and 12 mini tarte aux citrons. All those ‘minis’ make me think of Bridget Jones’ mum, but it’s good to get them to do something that people might actually want to make at home – and after last week’s terrible technical challenge, it’s a good’un. But… all that in two hours. Eek.

The instructions apparently just say ‘make these, innit’, but the uniformity in shape and size across everyone’s results, up to being judged on whether or not the tarts have ‘citron’ scrawled across them, rather belies this statement. As does the concentration with which Nancy is staring at her sheet. In fact… surely that’s more than one sheet?

I feel betrayed.

Mary says they want “sheer perfection; that’s all”. Paul says they’re after ‘bare basics’, but his accent makes it sound like ‘Burr basics’ – c’mon, Richard Burr, you can do it!

Nancy “I MAKE LOADS OF JAM” Birtwhistle is in her element. Yes, I know their surnames, what of it?

The only problem with this challenge, as a viewer, is that we have to sit through Mel, Sue, and the bakers earnestly telling us how to make a Vickie sponge and shortcrust pastry, which is hardly new information. Although I said that in the office today, and half of them said they didn’t know how to make a sponge cake. The youth of today. (Yes, somehow I am one of the oldest in the office.)

The biggest crisis is Richard putting too many eggs in his scone mix, but it is quickly rectified. Part of me longs for people from previous series, like Rob (who’d drop absolutely everything on the floor at least twice) or John (who’d compare the whole situation to platitudes with the complexity of Dolly Parton lyrics). These guys are pretty calm about the whole thing.

Oh, but wait. It’s the tarts that are causing the problems. In amongst Mary’s “they should know these like the back of their hands” and Luis’ “If you can’t do these, you shouldn’t be here”, Richard has whispered a confession that he’s not made them before. Neither have I, Rich, neither have I.

In other news: Richard wanders around the tent, staring at the back of his hands in perplexed bewilderment.

Oh dear, and his jam isn’t set well. “But,” he adds optimistically, “it’ll taste like jam!” He’s banking on Mary’s flavour comments, isn’t he? Almost knocking over his mixer with a piping bag doesn’t help especially.

How do they fare?

Luis: no glaze on his scones, Vic sponges “have an attempt at some piping work”, and the tarts don’t get a good reception.

Nancy: good feedback for all her bakes, but the scones are a little dry, and, in the cake, SHE HASN’T PIPED HER CREAM. “I think, when you’re trying to impress, you do pipe,” says Mary. It’s like she’s watching my every movement.

Richard: good scones, no piping in his cake like an animal, and his ‘tarte au colon’ (was Paul witty? What happened?) have curdled.

Richard seems out of the running now, coming third; Luis is second, and our Nance is first.

Also: her make-up is looking great this week, we agreed in my living room.

Richard is a little heartbreaking in his interview, about how he wishes he’d done better. Aw, Rich, we still love you.

What is the showstopper? Well, it seems to be the Windmill Challenge. It’s actually a pièce montée, which incorporates sponge, choux, petits-fours, and sugarwork. Lawks. We haven’t had many decorative/’scene’ things this year, so it’s nice that we get to finish with this sort of thing – although strange that all three bakers are basically obsessed with windmills, or towers in Poynton that look like windmills. The best moment, of course, is when Mel says that it “has to taste increds”.

“I’m trying not to think that it’s the final, and you could win at the moment” – could I, Luis? Could I? Why did nobody tell me? The pressure! The pressure!

Mary says “I think of the ones I’ve seen in 18th-century and 19th-century… pictures”, She’s making the age jokes too easy.

She doesn’t look a day over 204.

Richard is making something about Mill Hill – which, I believe, is where Our Vicar’s Wife is from. Is that right, Mum? Are you and Richard related? IS HE MY UNCLE?

He’s putting every ingredient under the sun into this cake, and it’s sounding fab. Although (spoilers) the colouring pencils man is being generous with the shade of green he uses in the picture.

Would that it had been that colour.

Look. I’m not saying that the BBC make all of their decisions based on my thoughts and opinions, but this series has been very light on History of Cake and, more damagingly to my recaps, light on Wow, They Live In Houses Just Like You! No recreational jogging; no ‘Beca is married to her husband’. I’m sort of sad, but pleased that we end the series with Remembrance of Things Past – such as Richard wearing a pair of mighty fine specs:

We also learn the previously-unknown fact that Richard is a Builder (why weren’t we told?) and get the sweetest ever interview with his wife Sarah, who says how proud she is of him. It is adorbs, and I shed a little tear.

And we cut to him saying “I am a ginger-lover – I did marry one!” Oh, you two.

Nancy – whilst saying “I’m just throwing it all in,” in her perfectionist way – manages to fling flour all over the place with her mixer.

National trejz.

She’s making the Moulin Rouge windmill, and tells Paul that he has to think of burlesque, at which he looks lost in reminiscence. Then Nancy adds that it’s ‘sinister’, unnervingly.

Nancy once took a dog to Crufts, we learn:

And was also once Princess Diana, apparently.

We are told that her eight grandchildren support her – while being shown a picture which only has five children in it – and then a couple of said grandchildren say adorable things. Luis – you’ve got a lot to live up to in your VT.

Luis is making a mining wheel, which is basically a windmill, isn’t it?

He’s in a ukulele club. And he once had black hair!

All the bakers’ families are lovely. I’m wondering what Colin would do if I were on this. “I don’t watch it, to be honest,” is what I’m imagining. This from the man who will be playing Paul H on the village stage come December. I’m angling for the role of Mary Berry, but have so far been repeatedly turned down for the part.

We see them make choux pastry which, again, isn’t very tricky – this challenge has lots of easy elements, so it’s the structure and the timing which is the hard thing. (I think – but am not sure – that Nancy pronounced ‘choux’ to sound like ‘chew’. I do hope she did.)

The people outside continue to do everything in slow motion – whether that be rolling down hills, playing a guitar, or talking about Brighton – and some exiled bakers say who they think will win. Except Chetters, who misunderstands the question, and just says “Who will win?!” And guess who’s back?

“This is all a bit fancy, if you ask me.”

Nancy’s husband has ‘made’ her something to curve her bake on. It’s an old bit of drainpipe.

Can we stop briefly to admire how brilliant Luis’ sugarwork is? Although… why is the word ‘sugar’ written backwards? Are you tricking us, BBC? Have you ordained that fancy camerawork is more important than artistic truthfulness?

IS ANYTHING REAL?

Mel and Sue wander around in the background, gorging on people’s offcuts, and everything looks to be going swimmingly for all the bakers. Their croquembouches are extraordinarily stable. But I do wonder if the luminous green icing Richard is using, and the vampire-red hat Nance is piping, are homemade… this strikes me as a shop-bought fondant interloper moment.

Sails are breaking, profiterole towers are snapping, and we don’t even have time to stop and panic – that’s how busy this episode is. All the tension musical instruments are playing at once, and it’s getting very tense, not to say hysterical. And… time is up. They’ve all done brilliantly.

Here are the final bakes, which – as per – the bakers are staring at like melancholy, overprotective parents.

Appearance-wise, Luis has this in the bag, I reckon.

There are so many elements to these creations that Paul and Mary have to eat, and comment on, dozens of things. There’s no real point in them commenting on whether or not people can make sponge cakes at this stage. And the critique is made interesting by the sound of marauding children in the far distance.

Nancy’s sponge cake, according to Paul, “reminds me of a birthday cake I had as a child, actually”. So… you once had a regular sponge cake? Memories, like the corners of my mind.

But, overall, there is nothing interesting to say about this section. Everybody has done well. They process out to the awaiting masses…

Although you can’t see them, you know they are cheering, each time someone brings out a cake.

Back in the tent, Mary and Paul do their usual recap of the previous five minutes, and – they are in agreement about the winner! Who could it be? Who will get the amazing prize of a glass cake stand that probably costs about £20 at John Lewis? At this stage, I felt pretty confident that I’d earned my monies from the office sweepstake.

Hordes of people – inexplicably wearing daisy chains in their hair – applaud as the finalists wander forward. Paul does his best to look manly while holding a bouquet of flowers. And the winner is…

It’s only bloomin’ Nance!

The best reaction is actually from Chetna, in the crowd, who flings her arms around in a delighted manner, shrieks “I knew it!”, and is generally lovely.

Mary says that Nancy is a perfectionist, which is hilarious, since she’s the living embodiment of “that’ll do” – but that’s why we love her so much. She is truly a great amateur baker.

She finishes the series with the wit, panache, and magnificence that she started it (remember how she was my fave in ep.1?), by ‘confessing’ that she’s been in love with Paul all along. I so desperately hope that she gets a baking show. It could be called The Female Baker.

We are treated to the usual What Have They Been Up To Since The Bake Off? slideshow – the answer invariably being “exactly and precisely what they were up to before it” – except for this wonderful piece of news:

And… it’s over! I got a triumphant “AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” text from my colleague Adam, who is £10 richer after the sweepstake pay-out, and somehow we’re going to have to find something else to talk about in the office.

It’s been fun, guys! Thanks for reading – and I’ll be back next year :) (and I’m only a little glad to get my Thursday evenings back…)

This post was delayed because I was preparing for Issue 3 of Shiny New Books (do go and check it out, thankyouverymuch!) But I’m here now…

The end is nigh, folks, and in case you don’t know what ‘semi-finals’ means, the bakers are on hand to help. Get ready to be told ad nauseum that the final is next week, that there is one more week before the final, and that next week will be the week after the week before the final.

It’s patisserie week, a term which is apparently broad enough to encompass anything that comes to Paul and Mary’s minds. Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t just ask them to knock together a chest of drawers, or give an engine a good oil check (if that is something one might do to engines): anything goes in patisserie week.

Mel and Sue have made it into the tent for this intro – revealing how flimsy the fabric of it is (and how pointless the odd bits of pastel furniture they’ve got lying around). Innocently, I had also presumed that this was part of the same tent but – lo – there is the main tent in the background.

Class segregation, if anything.

They’re back outside for the next shot, though, with their best cod French accents. I don’t think they’ve done an intro in their own accents since about episode two. It’s the joke that just keeps giving.

We get a recap of the semifinalists’ GBBO careers to date, which is apparently Luis’ ingenious designs, Chetna’s sensational flavours, Nancy’s precision and knowledge (by which I think they mean ‘she’s the oldest one left’), and Richard’s ‘natural flair for baking’, which sounds like the sort of meaningless thing somebody might write at the top of a covering letter with a job application. The little clips of the bakers reveal that Chetna is feeling confident, Richard talks about his ‘graft’, and Nancy would be quite happy to pop home and put her feet up. Luis restrains himself simply to acknowledging that it’s the semi-final. They’re all adorable.

Blazer-watch? We’ve got some bright colours on, which I’m enjoying. Sue’s T-shirt is… odd.

Mary is giving it definite side-eye.

The first challenge: baklava. This is pronounced many, many ways in the episode, so I’m grateful that I’m writing. I love baklava (and my colleague Adam made some for the office once: impressive) so I’m intrigued to see what they’ll make.

Richard says that, in London, “most shops have baklava”. This has not been my experience, and would be a major inconvenience when buying clothes, books, etc.

Outside, carefully matching the flora, Paul says that the baklava has to have good pastry, syrup, and filling. “If any of those ingredients are missing, for me it’s a no-go,” he confides. Yes, Paul. All three ingredients are pretty essential. If someone missed out pastry (say) it would just be a pile of soggy pistachios.

“I don’ts be wanting none of that.”

Mary breaks from her careful half-statement that filo pastry is “one of the most difficult pastries to make” to give an impromptu rap song ‘Smack My Kitchen Up’.

(Time for my first apology of the night. My first of many.)

All the bakers agree that nobody at home bothers making filo, and Chetna puts on a fairly convincing sales pitch for Just-Roll, while Richard marvels at the fixtures and fittings, doubtless intending to nab them for his next building project.

“Lovely job.”

Luis, as ever, gives us helpful and precise instructions about what he’s doing. C’mon, Luis. If you want to be our favourite, you have to speak in strange witticisms or convoluted platitudes. We’re not here to learn.

Paul tells Chetna that she shouldn’t trust her eyes (“sometimes your eyes kid you”) and she looks genuinely horrified, perhaps wondering whether or not she is actually in the tent at all. Before we have time for her to sink into a nihilistic meltdown, Mary (as is now her wont) tells her to ignore Paul. “Absolutely!” Chetna replies, with palpable relief. Then she whispers panic at the cameraman… before shrugging “oh well!” and getting on with it. The spirit of Nancy is spreading.

I can’t work out if Luis describes his flower baklava as ‘putting a slight slant on it’ or ‘putting a sly slant on it’. I desperately hope the latter. Also: colouring pencils man has apparently never seen a flower.

Send him a bunch; educate him.

“Get pulling!” says Mary.

He’s a married man, Mrs Berry.

But my favourite inexplicable moment has to be over at Our Nance’s baking station. Guess what she’s putting in her baklava? “Well, I make muesli anyway,” she shrugs, in the tone of one who might as well make a cuppa, since the kettle’s already boiling. Lord knows what would have happened if she’d been halfway through assembling a casserole when the challenge was announced. She decides she might as well fling some muesli into the mix. What’s the worst that could happen?

Oh.

To encourage us further, she throws around the word ‘inedible’. Mary and Paul wander over, and Mary conspiratorially leans in to say that she doesn’t think anyone makes filo pastry. Paul bridles. Nancy wisely skates over the muesli baklava, and announces of the other “this one I’m calling coffee and chocolate”. Guess what’s in it? It’s a Miranda’s Mum Moment.

And, while we’re guessing, guess which national treasures are back perched awkwardly on the table, muttering to themselves?

“And then I took up tightrope walking.”

“Everyone’s just got their heads down and trying to get on with it, to be honest,” confides Luis. I appreciate your honesty.

And what they’re getting down to is stretching pastry, which reminds me a lot of last week, when they stretched pastry.  Have I told you how much I love Richard? “I’m aiming to get this… flipping massive!” I love that bit so much. The Luises of this world will give us accurate instructions enabling us to bake at home, and do it excellently and charmingly – but it’s the Richards of this world that make GBBO such a riot.

Although I hope he demonstrates more precision in building. “How high are you building this wall?” “FLIPPING MASSIVE.”

Sue is apparently keen to put the pastry on her face. It’s difficult to know quite why.

I’m not going to show the clip where she does put some on her face because I don’t think she needs the encouragement.

Luis has spotted that Nancy is adding a bizarre ingredient into the mix, and thought ‘two can play THAT game – hand me a carrot’. When rose and pistachio is the most traditional filling in the tent, you know something has gone awry.

Quick question: wut?

The first batch comes out the oven. “They’re probably ok,” says Nancy, in a fit of enthusiasm. It gets worse with her second batch: “I think I’ve messed up ‘ere.”

“Ovens, luvvly ovens, get your ovens here.”

“My only saving grace is that they’ve got to be gooey anyway.” Oh, The Bright Side.

Paul looms around the tent in a manner that would have his mailbox full of restraining orders in any other situation. Sue lightens the mood by openly mocking him.

The soundtrack works itself up into full Fantasia mode, and the bakers are done. (“It lacks finesse,” is Nancy’s damning indictment of her own craft. It certainly doesn’t lack oil. The tray is awash with the stuff.)

But – she does well. “You’ve got what baklava is!” says Mary, damning with faint praise par excellence. Having said that, Luis doesn’t do so well, because – although his flowers are beautiful – they apparently aren’t baklava. Nance could give him a tip or two.

Even Frances would call these Fancy. Norm wouldn’t know where to look.

Incidentally, Paul always says ‘baklava’ while swallowing heavily, which he obviously fondly believes to sound authentic. Mary delights by saying ‘baklava’ entirely differently, immediately afterwards.

Richard gets praise; Chetna gets mixed comments. Outside, she starts to do the usual reality show waffle about being happy whatever happens – but, halfway through, realises that it isn’t true, and corrects herself. And it’s Chetters, so of course she laughs.

“Ha ha ha – you’ll have to pry me away with crowbars – ha ha ha!”

Richard, sweetly, says “I am all right at baking, aren’t I?” And a horse whinnies. Sure, why not?

Onto the technical challenge. It’s a Schichttorte. It seems monumentally pointless to me. Perhaps it is a big thing in Germany, I don’t know, but grilling twenty layers, one after another, to achieve what is essentially a sponge cake… ain’t nobody got time for that. I’d also be intrigued to know how it counts as patisserie.

Mary fakes excitement at the sample Paul unveils:

“Oh, you shouldn’t have.”

“What we’re testing them on is concentration skills,” says Paul, as though they were at dog-training class. What they certainly aren’t testing is ingenuity. They are just making a sponge cake mix. And then grilling the layers one by one. It’s all so dull. Poor choice of challenge, GBBO. You’ve let everyone down. *Shakes head* *Eats cake* *Remembers to shake head again*.

The best moment is Mel saying to Richard (at his dismally thin first layer) “Spread it out with the old spatch.” I love an abbrev, me, as my colleagues are all too well aware. My heartfelt “commiz”, should anyone be in strife of any sort, is well-known.

Otherwise it’s just a lengthy montage of people saying “light, dark, light, dark” and mumbling about how many layers 20 is. Realising that this makes for tedious viewing, only marginally lightened by seeing people synchronise their standing up and peering into ovens, The Powers That Be have hastily re-commissioned The History of Cake.

They’re made on spits. Spit-cakes. A bit like spit-takes, but cakier.

This History of Cake section is stranger than all the others put together. And – although we get a Princess who doesn’t speak, a reference to Ghost, and Mel saying “chocolate” like an addict on day release, we never actually see them cut into one to count its layers.

Meanwhile, the bakers have nearly finished – and Luis is apparently ‘listening to the voices in his head’. Richard fondly thinks they won’t notice whether or not there are 20 layers in his cake… oh, Richard. When it comes to judging, Mezza and Pezza essentially ignore absolutely everything except those twenty layers. Whoever gets closest to the correct answer wins! Luis comes top, Chetna comes bottom, and everyone laments for their wasted lives.

“Yes, Mary, I was right – I think it’s a cake.”

(At my house we wonder why Mel said ‘please bring your twenty layers up to the gingham’ rather than “bring ’em to the gingham”, which would have been both excellent and the name of a new spin-off gameshow on BBC3.)

Finally – the showstopper. And it’s actually patisserie, rather than an elaborately inept way of making an everyday baked good. Entremets it is. Paul is looking for precision and beauty, apparently, and has ‘seen patisserie chefs crumble, let alone the bakers in the tent’. The cameraman then gives us a sweeping shot of the tent, lest anybody be unclear what Paul is talking about.

Voila

Luis is using pomegranate and cherry – which is just as well, since the episode of sponsored by the colours purple and pink.

Nancy is also making jelly. I don’t think she’s ready for this jelly. And she even dares mention the word ‘freezer’. There are dozens of layers to what Nancy is making, and they all sound pretty delish – but Paul is cross because it’s being covered in white chocolate. You know how they love their distinct layers, Nancy. They’re obsessed. But perhaps it’s good for Mary and Paul to go cold turkey on distinct layers. It’s for their own good.

Having got the Pink Sponsorship Deal memo, Richard is making this:

I suspect he misheard the quantity of entremets needed, and thought he had to make 200 miniature entremets. He’s adding grapefruit – one of the words that Paul repeats in astonishment – and, for once, I’m with Paul. Not a fan of grapefruit. But he does say the words ‘crisp layers’, at which Mary practically jumps with glee. Richard – you’re feeding her habit. Chetna is giving her a binge, with six-layer thingummies:

But when NORM does it, apparently four thousand ingredients are too many.

Speaking of, have you noticed how nobody is using alcohol in their entremets? Surely this would have been a prime opportunity? Or has someone had a quiet word to give Mezza a week off, so she can indulge to the max for the final?

This challenge is the exact opposite of the previous one, which tested about half a skill. In this one, everyone is doing dozens of things, and there are so many things going on that it’s quite hard to keep track. All I got from the dizzying montage of piping bags, spatulas, and baking tins was Richard worrying that his sponge might be ‘monkey’. What?

“Cooling time is a luxury” – Nancy unveils her plans for a dystopian future.

Lest you wonder if these patisserie delights were essentially trips to a health spa, all rapped up in dotty sponge, we then see Chetna admitting that cream has been put in everything, and Richard flinging hunks of butter into his mix. Somehow putting them in by hand like this makes it seem much more unhealthy.

I call this artwork ‘Shades of Beige’.

Nancy grimaces at the idea that Luis is assembling his entremet (“nowhere near there”) then cheerfully opens up a tin of condensed milk, from which the label has been thoughtfully removed, to maintain BBC non-partisanship.

I mean, it’s obviously Carnation.

There are so many things going on. Let’s just look at one: Luis is bathing his jelly in a hot bath. He’s learnt from Voiceover Mel, and is warning that a moment too long and the jelly will turn to liquid; a single second too soon, and that jelly ain’t going anywhere. It’s tense.

Nancy, meanwhile, laments that chocolate is ‘going everywhere’ – it is, indeed, flooding her desk – but still continues merrily pouring. Correlation may not imply causation, Nance, but I think I can spot a pattern here.

Gravity is to blame, if anyone. THANKS NEWTON.

And then, recollecting that she is the baker with the predilection for instruments of capital punishment, she makes a cutthroat gesture. I think she’s supposed to be suggesting that she’s for the chop, but it’s equally possible that a terrified Mary is cowering at the side.

Let’s show entremets from everyone, shall we? They deserve it; everybody’s looks astonishingly good.

“It takes a lot of guts to show all the layers,” says Paul. ENOUGH WITH THE LAYERS. “I can see every layer, every flavour” says Mary. She’s clearly got synaesthesia now.  She also adds that she could ‘do with a little more flavour in the mousses’. She means alcohol, doesn’t she? But Richard gets a well-deserved thumbs up, in general.

Nancy’s critique is mixed – even her decoration of the white choc ones, which I think look amazing.

Luis gets good responses for appearance and flavour, and Paul likes the ‘richness of the chocolate married to the sourness of the cherry’. Richness married with sourness? This sounds like [insert celebrity couple here]! Amirite?!

In a moment of astonishing hypocrisy, from the judges who thought a twenty-layer sponge cake without any filling was a good idea, they criticise Chetters for not having enough variety in the layers of one entremet – although they like the other.

Then this lad:

“I’m ready for my close-up.”

Backstage, they do their thing of repeating everything, and pretending that it isn’t (sadly) obvious who will go home. Then again, it also seemed really obvious that Luis would win this week, and that didn’t happen. I love Richard, but this was Luis’ week. (In other news: I’ve discovered that only ten people have paid into the office sweepstake, so my potential win is only £10, rather than £15.)

Winner is Richard (and look how happy everyone is!)
Mary: “you can hardly believe those builder’s hands can produce such delicate results”. Calm yourself, Bezza.

And, sadly, going home is lovely Chetna. She smiles to the end.

Everyone gets a bit teary at the end – even our Nance – and I’m excited about the final.

While I’ve got your attention – another plug for Shiny New Books. Lots of recommendations for things to read that have come out in the past three months! Sorry to be so shameless, but it’s been a lot of work and I think you’ll enjoy it :)

And – see you for the final! Who will win?

(P.S. Helen – I’ve slipped two new OxfordDictionaries.com words in this week, to make up for forgetting last week!)

Many thanks again for filling in for me last week, Elaine! This week I’m back – and what a week it was. I could write the whole thing about Nancy… but I’ll try not to ignore everybody else…

It’s ‘advanced dough’ week (whatever that means; no History of Cake this week to fill us in) and we’re treated to a velociraptor impressions from Mel and Sue on the flimsiest of premises.

The bakers walk into the tent, and although we see a cursory shot from the undergrowth, the cameraman’s heart isn’t in it. He – or indeed she – needs fresh pastures and new adventures. He/she has apparently crammed their entire body and camera equipment into the corner of this shelf. It couldn’t be said that the shot is effective, but at least it’s confusing and unnecessary.

Unforeseen ramekins

Martha laughs cheerfully about having been haunted by eclairs, and hopes that this week things will be “more planned”. Surely you know whether or not you’ve planned, Marth?

“It’s important you go in and execute everything,” says Nancy, followed by the longest pause known to man, before weakly adding “…to perfection.” Remember her guillotine? Remember her passion for the paraphernalia of the death penalty? It’s all back in play.

Guns don’t kill people; bakers do

It wouldn’t be a GBBO recap without Blazer Watch, would it? Paul is letting the side down (but, as ever, is ready for a line-dance). Sue’s jacket looks like it’s appeared before, only now it has shrunk in the wash. Mary obviously ran out of clothes, so cut up the jacket of a fortnight ago, repurposing it as a top, and has created her blazer by cutting the back off Paul’s shirt.

The signature challenge is a sweet fruit loaf, using enriched dough. And it’s a no-tin challenge; they have to be free-form loaves. Because… why not? The initial reactions from the bakers give us our first mention of proving of the episode. Good grief, I’m sick of people talking about proving. The whole series seems to have been one long debate about proving. They might as well call it Fermat’s Great British Bake Off. Maths joke, y’all.

Chetters, of course, is running madly around the room.

Hurry! Ovens won’t stare at themselves.

Luis explains that he’ll be making a series of tear-off buns in the shape of a tree, and he gets an amazing couple of Mary Berry Reaction Faces. I would be thrilled if anybody could turn this sequence into a gif, because she switches from delighted grin into confused Pierrot so quickly that she seems to be modelling for a Janus theatre mask set.

We don’t see her face when Luis presents her with the cherry brandy he’ll be using, presumably because she was dribbling with anticipation. (Sorry Mary… love you.)

The King of Gilded Olives has discovered green cherries and is thrilled to pieces by it.

A product entirely wasted on the colour blind.

Chetna is inspired by a Croatian bread, which she tries – and repeatedly fails – to pronounce, while Mary looks on like a patient, albeit disappointed, grandmother.

“No threepenny bit for you, my girl.”

Amusingly, Sue’s voiceover immediately pronounces it entirely differently from Chetna’s efforts, and the coloured pencils man calls it quits and just writes ‘swirl bread’. It looks, let’s face it, like a pile of sausage rolls.

Nancy is making Lincolnshire Plum Braid – a clever pun, as she laboriously explains, upon Lincolnshire Plum Bread. She actually says “it’s a play on words” in case, lost in the intricacies of her accent, we miss the quip. Even before she was finished telling us this, you can see that she realises that she is sailing her ship of humour upon an unforgiving sea.

You’d think that this week’s show was announcing the dawn of the microwave. It is, apparently, the first time that our Nance has seen one (and now she’ll sell you a lovely one for £10, no questions asked). She gets over-excited, and is determined to microwave ALL THE THINGS. She has to be held back from flinging herself bodily into the thing. First of all, she decides to prove her dough in the microwave. Who knew that was a thing? And, Nancy, weren’t you aware that you had a PROVING DRAWER?

“I beg your what now.”

Since someone tried to prove their dough in a fridge a week or two ago, the microwave isn’t a terrible idea – but it comes as no surprise that Paul is pretty suspicious about it. “It’s a dangerous thing to do,” he says – the Bake Off equivalent of having the emergency services on stand by, and a full step up from “That’s brave”, which is alarming enough – but Nancy is entirely uncowed by him. “It is!” she bellows, clearly having the time of her life.

Paul is always delighted when people don’t do well at bread – the town isn’t big enough for two bread bakers – so I’m longing for Nancy’s controversial method to succeed. His comments are swiftly followed by two wonderful moments. One is Mary telling Paul that he has “learnt something today” – at which he is visibly angry – and the other is Mel spraying what she believes to be masala directly into her mouth, only to discover it is cooking oil. And, in Microwave Corner…

Luis is quick to witness the unprecedented act (calling her ‘our Nance’ in the process – love it). Meanwhile, Mezza and Paul are perched awkwardly on a table (blithely ignoring the dozens of chairs immediately available to them) while he explains that microwaves are death traps. If the show were broadcast in 1830 they couldn’t be more alarmed about the microwave.

“Tell me more about this electricity, Future Man.”

A clever bit of editing sees Paul’s warning segue straight into a bowl of fruit spontaneously collapsing. What can’t microwaves do??  Double bolt your doors tonight, readers.

Chetna defends her bread against Sue’s accusations of messiness, saying “It’s my bread!” I think she’s missed the point of the show. Martha, meanwhile, advertises her bread by saying “It’s like jam on toast, with the jam already inside!” The product nobody was asking for. Bless her heart.

And Luis? Well, he’s forgotten to add any fruit to his fruit loaf. It’s going well, folks.

We have a nice montage of people opening and shutting proving drawers – except Nance, of course; she’s over by the microwave (“This could be my death knell,” she announces, and it is to my lasting disappointment that the microwave didn’t ping at that point) – and Chetters is the first to put her loaf in the oven. “See you in 50 minutes,” she says, suggesting that she’s going to climb in there with it.  The camera pans away, so perhaps she did.

It’s been a while since we had an arbitrary shot of someone’s feet, hasn’t it?

Happy? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

Luis takes his beautiful bread tree out of the oven, and Paul starts his menacing amble (can an amble be menacing?) around the tent.

He;s quite rude. Basically he goes from station to station, prodding at finished loaves. Rude.

Sue says that Nancy’s loaf is the “size of a labrador”.

Richard says that “it’s looking a bit wrinkly on the outside”. That’s quite enough about Mary. A-ha-ha. (Oh, Mary, I love you lots. I should stop being mean.)

Aaaand – they’re done! Luis’ and Richard’s look amazing; Martha’s looks rather bizarre. Nancy’s is too big to look at in one go. Basically everyone does pretty well, particularly Richard. Mary confides to Chetna that she’s not fond of dates, “between you and me”. Does she realise that she’s being filmed? She also immediately contradicts almost all of Paul’s criticisms, for which I love her.

And what of Nancy’s labrador loaf? Paul struggles to find something to criticise, but it seems pretty good. “It’s not awful, is it?” Nancy squawks, and Paul has to admit that it is not.

What will the technical challenge be? First, Mel requests happy faces:

Remember Smiling Rob?

It’s… something unpronounceable. The same unpronounceable thing Chetna was unable to pronounce in the first challenge! Considering they have to get all their recipes approved far in advance, it’s a little surprising that they let this happen, but Chetna is giddy with excitement. Remember how much she shrieks with laughter at everyday non-events? Well, this coincidence has her waving her arms in the air, clutching her head, and generally putting on a three-act dumb show of delight.

“I’m really excited” she says, unnecessarily.

Richard says he will ‘learn by watching’, hastening to add that this is not the same as copying.

Mary, as usual, pretends to be amazed at what Paul says in the here’s-one-I-made-earlier segment. His example is pretty neat.

Also a bit hypnotic.

Guess what? It’s all about proving. OH, THE PROVING DECISIONS. Nance suggests she might turn to the microwave, in the manner of one discussing secret black market products.

They all stretch out their pastries, which would be my nightmare (since I’m disproportionately useless at the seemingly-simple task of rolling things). Nancy thinks “it probably needs to be the same size as this cloth”, although what she’s basing that on I can’t imagine. The instructions say “as big as you can”, not “as big as any arbitrarily-sized piece of fabric you happen to have on your person.”

They then spend quite some time experimenting with the best way to spread the walnut filling on the dough…

This dough is NOT the same size as her cloth.

Everybody is finding it pretty much impossible (and this is the point at which I would have a destroyed mess of pastry mixed with walnut mush.) Guess what Nancy’s solution is?

“The microwave is the only way forward.” – thing she says

She does have the bright thought of using an icing bag, which is immediately copied by Richard (and openly; “what’s she done, then?” he asks). Has he copied the microwaving too? We don’t know; the good people of GBBO don’t show us. More than one microwave shot per segment would raise the rating from PG to 15.

If I never see someone open a proving drawer again, it’ll be too soon.

Chetna bakes her dough long before everyone else, which startles Sue immensely. However, Chetna knows what’s up. People are too busy being beguiled by piping bags, and don’t copy her. Martha, instead, takes her coiled-up dough out of the tin and makes it longer. Ooooh dear.

Nancy, apropos of nothing, makes royal icing. Diana wanders across the background with a tray of pastry triangles.

They start to come out of the ovens. “It’s a funny looking thing,” says Nancy, and it’s hard to argue with her.

Yum.

Cue lots of fanning with baking sheets, and Nancy using her royal icing with some sense that it’s all gone horribly wrong for her.

And the results? Well, they’re all raw except for Chetna’s. Martha’s is the rawest of all, and she comes last. Chetna, of course, comes first. Mary calls Richard’s loaf drunk. Takes a beetle to know a beetle… The best thing, of course, is Nancy’s ecstatic reaction to coming third. Apparently, had she come last, she wouldn’t have admitted to it.

What a woman.

This, in turn, is nothing compared to Chetna’s adorable glee at coming first. She’s such a sweetie.

We move onto the final challenge, and it becomes clear that Martha and Nancy are in the bottom two. I don’t know how to cope with that. And the final challenge is… doughnuts! As with eclairs last week, this doesn’t seem super difficult. But I guess that gives more room for the showstopperiness to come through.

Paul brags about making 30,000 doughnuts in his life. If anything, it comes across as a little creepy.

Luis has grated hundreds of limes, but I have a theory that lime makes everything better. Test that theory if you dare. He tells Mary that he’s making cocktail doughnuts, and this is her instant reaction:

That lady loves her alcs.

At this point Our Vicar’s Wife, previously worried that I would be sued for slander, emails me to say that I can get away with my teasing. She’s so excited about cocktail-themed doughnuts. I am a bit, too.

Nancy: “I’ve learned that if you say something’s in something, you’ve got to be able to taste it.” I have been annoyed time and again by Paul saying that he thinks orange (for instance) would be horrible in a baked product, and then complaining when he can’t taste the orange. But that’s what you wanted in the first place, Paul. Make up your doughnut-addled mind.


Chetna has apparently exhausted the world’s supply of mangos, and is now putting potatoes (could it really have been potatoes??) in her doughnuts. And one of her doughnuts is braided. So not even doughnut-shaped.

Martha is making a cronut, but obviously isn’t allowed to call it that.

And, inevitably, return of the flipping proving drawers.

Richard is making fair-inspired doughnuts: toffee apple (sure) and rhubarb-and-custard (what? Does Richard imagine that fairs are replete with people chomping on rhubarb? We all know fairs are filled with candy floss and crying children. Make crying children doughnuts, Rich, if anything.) He’s making heart-shaped doughnuts, and says his wife loves them. Awwwwww. Shout out to Sarah Burr, who has been a very kind supporter of these recaps!

Also, general applause for ‘doughnuts’ rather than the insidious ‘donuts’.

Nancy – as if she were not already queen of my heart – is making a bunch of doughnuts with Paul’s face on. She talks about piercing blue eyes &c. &c. and he staunchly refuses to engage at all. He does reference her ‘male judge’ comment but, Paul, we’ve all moved on since then. And, lord knows, this programme would never repeat a joke. It’s not in its nature.

Mel takes away the empties from Mary’s coffee break.

Nancy tries to teach us the name for making the doughnuts into balls – ‘key’, apparently – but loses heart halfway through. She knows that her role is not bothering about anything. Like moments later when she’s picking up her dough and saying “very very delicate” as the dough collapses out of any recognisable shape.

Richard (were you aware?) is a builder. Builders love doughnuts, apparently.

Marth has OVER-PROVED. She’s pretty distraught. Mel gives the dubious advice just to put more filling in, and hope they get bigger that way.

“Mary will probably hate it,” says Luis, of his Irish-cream-filled straws. Has he met this woman?

Nancy starts icing her Paul faces.

Uncanny, no? Also: horrible flashbacks to Death Becomes Her.

Aaaand… it’s over! Surprisingly little to say about this whole process. Only a bizarre close-up of a vocal duck separates us from the judging.

My favourites end up being almost all of them…

Richard does pretty well, and they certainly love the flavours – although not so much the presentation.

Nancy’s doughnuts are a bit too dry and overdone, but otherwise ok – and Paul, again, refuses to acknowledge that his face is all over the tree. “They look all right to me,” she says. Love her.

Martha’s haven’t risen, as she knew. Paul congratulates her chocolate icing for not falling off – as the chocolate shatters and falls.

Chetna’s are complimented, except for having “more of a ganache than a mousse”. The horrors.

Luis’ gets this wonderful moment, when Mary takes a sip from the straw and realises that they’re choc full of alcohol. “Oh-hoh!” she cries.

“How naughty!”

“Why are we bothering with the doughnuts?” she says, going in for more. And she likes them more than Paul does… quelle surprise.

Star baker could have been almost anybody, really, and I was a bit surprised that it was someone who came fourth in the technical challenge – but also delighted that it’s my favourite, Richard!

But going home is…

Very sad to see Martha go, but I’d have been even more heartbroken if Nancy had gone. Still, I thought Martha would win. As Sue says, “You are 17, and you are brilliant. You are going to rule the world, my darling.”

See you next week for the semi-finals! I can’t wait to see what Nancy does with patisserie. I can only presume she’ll just throw all the ingredients in the microwave and hope for the best.

Hey everyone – are you ready for a week where maps of Europe are thrown out the window, Mary delivers her most difficult technical challenge to date, and Nancy steals my coveted spot for Best Moment of the Series?  I hope so…

Intro: Mel and Sue enter our screens, agree that an analogy has gone too far when it has reached only the foothills of their usual mountainous punnery, and the bakers stride across the lawn while the cameraman still lurks in the undergrowth. Plus ça change.

I don’t know how much of the introduction will make sense to transatlantic viewers, but it’s an absolute delight to people like me who avidly watch the Eurovision Song Contest. Quick run-down: every country around Europe (and several which have little-to-no claim to be part of Europe) send some singer given to costumes and histrionics off to a big tent in the middle of nowhere, where they caterwaul and strobe-light their way through a song consisting half of ‘la-la-la’ and half of vague encouragements towards world peace. It’s glorious. It’s my second favourite big-tent-in-the-middle-of-nowhere event of the year.

Equally glorious is the way Mel and Sue re-enact the infuriating time-lag and presenter-waffle of the voting section of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Nancy leans against a fence and brags about all the holidays she’s been on; Richard says he’s aiming for mediocrity; Martha babbles about nerves. We’re good to go. And the first challenge is… yeast cakes. I love bread and I love cake, but I can’t help but feel that this combination is a terrible mistake. Still, the rest of Europe apparently live for the things, so let’s see what happens. (Incidentally, this show – like almost everyone I know in the UK – uses the word ‘Europe’ to mean ‘all of Europe except us’.)

Blazer-watch? Nothing exceptional here – but Mel and Sue should maybe have discussed shades of yellow before getting dressed this week.

Paul remains resolutely in line-dance mode.

Paul steals a march on History of Cake by telling us when baking powder was invented – in protest, I don’t listen  – and uses the appetising sentence ‘these cakes have been around an awfully long time, and they’re all embedded right the way throughout Europe’. Mary nabs the first “Not too long or too short in the oven” of the episode, while seemingly perched on a bird table.

Luis isn’t gilding any olives this week, but does have an amazing tin, which gives fancy ridges and the like. Chetna is making a ‘mainly orange-flavoured’ (mainly?) savarin which gets a very sweet Mary Berry Reaction Face:

#adorbs

Mel has a field day with pronouncing ‘savarin’ – rolling the r so much she could be mistaken for a rolling pin – and also with the tin looking like a piles cushion. Never having seen said object, I couldn’t say.

I do, however, want this natty food mixer; it would match my toaster and kettle.

A shade that Argos lovingly describe as ‘bubblegum blue’.

Nancy – who, in this episode, I think has become my favourite – tells us that she is making “what is called a sponge”, which is either astonishingly patronising, or ‘sponge’ is different from what I think it is.

Richard is making a guglhupf (bless you) with lots of fruit and things, and (he emphasises) rum. He knows what Boozehound Bezza is after. But Paul is disgusted to hear that Richard is going to ‘wing’ his decoration; he rephrases to ‘go with his heart’, pointing somewhere in the region of his liver, but saves this when adding that his heart is in his stomach. Quick thinking, Richard. Nice work.

‘Renegade baker, Nancy’ (as she is introduced) is doing a Diana and entirely ignoring the theme of the challenge. Rather than make something from Europe, she’s opted for something Caribbean. Apparently Bez is fine with that, so long as rum is involved.

Sadly those decorations are depicted all too accurately.

I can’t bring myself to talk about the proving dilemmas again. Rise once? Rise twice? Who cares. But I do love Martha’s reasoning for adding margarine to her recipe ‘to make it a bit more cakey’ and less like bread. That’s definitely what I’d do. She’s also in on the soak-it-in-booze tactic (almond liqueur) but with the difference that she can’t actually buy it herself legally. (Maybe she gets her alcohol from… Martha’s Vineyard. Now, where did I leave that klaxon…)

She also confesses to Kate (who appears to be taking a moment to microwave some popcorn) that she doesn’t know what a savarin is.

You and me both, love. This link will tell all.

Kate cheerfully confesses that hers also isn’t European – excellent work, guys! – and, moments after I say that Israel (the country that inspired her bake) is in the Eurovision Song Contest, she uses the same defence. (Azerbaijan Roll, anyone?) She also adds that, having lived in Israel, she didn’t actually like their cakes. What a triumph this is turning out to be.

Incidentally, I’d have loved to see what Norman would do in this challenge. But at least he could have used the defence that the UK is in Europe, and flung a Viccie sponge on the table.

Chetna, as always, is kneeling on the ground and pressing furiously at a timer.

I’d argue that this could be done equally well standing.

There are lots of shots of people pulling out proving drawers, making sauces, and – inexplicably – gasping at nothing quite a lot. And then we turn to Richard talking us through some white gunk he might (but ultimately does not) put on top. I’m more interested in whatever curious activities are going on in the background. Are they casting some sort of spell on the dough?

In all likelihood, no.

I want to talk about how much I enjoyed Mel and Sue’s accents throughout, but have no way of transcribing them. All I will say is that they’re back on top form.

Luis continues to treat GBBO like his own baking show (actually giving good advice, while Nancy – presumably – falls off her stool in the background), Mel continues to utter dire voiceover warnings about baking-caused world disaster, and the cameraman continues to have a curious obsession with shots of footwear.

I guess he has to get his kicks somewhere. Geddit, KICKS. It’s funny because the word has two meanings.

Luis’ money is on Nancy to win the whole series; “defo” he adds. (Don’t forget that my money is on YOU, Luis. Adam’s money is on Nancy, fans of my office’s sweepstake will be pleased to learn.) Some lovely editing leads us straight to a shot of Nancy’s cake looking rather a mess.

:-(

“Looks more like a Yorkshire pudding,” she says, “It would probably do it a favour if I dropped it on the floor.” If she’d said “throw it in the bin,” she might have won my moment of the series. Still, she has the Cockney Barrowgirl’s sense of perspective, and womanfully carries on – and by ‘carries on’ I, of course, mean ‘douses in alcohol’. And… well, let’s wait and see her decorations.

They all look pretty impressive (except for Chetna’s, which is rather bland) but – although I can take or leave cooked apple – I have to say that Luis’ steals the show, appearance-wise.

“When you chew it there’s no chew to it at all” – this paradox from Paul is, apparently, a compliment.

Mary gets quite waspish over Nancy’s decorations. Let’s have a little look at them. “I don’t think they add anything,” says Mary.

Would that were true.

“Even as I put them on,” says Nancy, “I thought they looked a bit naff.” That presumably means that, in the shop, on the morning of the bake, and at every moment before she put them on, she was under the impression that green tinsel and a fake flamingo would spell ‘classy’ to the casual observer.

Cake: As Time Goes By is just an excuse for Sue to gorge at the Danish Embassy.

CAKE!

“Scandinavia is very popular at the moment,” says Mel, “with ABBA and The Killing.” As Sue points out, ABBA’s heyday is rather behind us – but, more importantly, this sounds like either a tawdry tabloid headline or the title to a lost Enid Blyton mystery.

The technical bake is a Swedish ‘princess cake’. It sounds bizarrely, and deliciously, complicated – creme pat, cream, sponge, jam, marzipan, etc. 26 separate ingredients, apparently. Like the alphabet. “I’ve never heard of it, never seen it, never eaten it,” says Martha – the last of these probably didn’t need saying, unless she’s given to eating anonymous food, blindfolded.

The sample that Mary and Paul have laid out before them doesn’t have the DEFINED LAYERS that they so ardently (and arbitrarily) demand, but it does look delish.

Those layers couldn’t be less defined if they were a word yet to be added to the dictionary.

Paul giggles like a supervillain.

Nancy, taking inspiration from Norman, becomes the jam expert of the tent, and talks about how she makes ‘tons of jam’.

“I make SO MUCH JAM.”

How green should marzipan be? That question, and others, covered in a baking montage.

And Chetters – gasp – decides to start again, because her sponge hasn’t risen enough. From this moment until the end of the challenge she looks frantic and terrified, several stages behind everyone else.

[Note to self: insert swannee-whistle sound effect]

Martha, in a moment unlikely to still any qualms her parents might have about her maths A level results, is entirely stumped at dividing 5 by 3. She then seems uncertain what shape a circle might be.

Nancy: “I didn’t know if I was Arthur or Martha, first thing.”

If you thought that was good, wait for what comes next…

“What did the male judge say?”

They play it like she’s avoiding Paul’s name out of crossness at his critique, but… she clearly had just forgotten it for a bit. I love how unbothered she is by it all. It’s so wonderful.

Also wonderful is:

Wonderful but unsanitary.

Everything is looking pretty impressive all round, until they start piping their chocolate – at which point almost everybody seems to lose any sense of style or precision. And… Chetters finished hers! She does this across the tent to Sue, and it’s adorable.

Mary is fixated on the dome shape and the distinct layers, neither of which would bother me at all. Paul thinks the piped cream around the cakes looks awful on almost all of them, which I can’t see. They’re quite critical considering how difficult the challenge was. Kate comes last, and Nancy comes first. Chetna comes second, even with her rushed effort. How do you think she would react?

Artist’s impression.

Richard’s pencil has SWAPPED EARS. This is NOT a drill. Repeat, this is NOT a drill.

Mel cheerfully enquires whether there is, or is not, a curse for the Star Baker. Paul responds by pointing out that Star Bakers have done quite badly the week after they win – which is obviously what Mel was saying already. Avoiding the question, hmm? Just what a CURSE MASTER might do.

Is it just me, or is the effort to British-theme the table rather cursory?

The showstopper this week is ‘a contemporary version of the Hungarian dobos torte’ – i.e. a cake with more than one tier and an emphasis on sugarwork. I loves me some caramel, and I’m basically salivating throughout the rest of the programme.

Luis is making a structure based on a local landmark – one, I note, that he carefully avoids naming, presumably so that nobody can question the resemblance.

He’s taken the same approach to British-theming, it seems.

Being a graphic designer he has, of course, drawn up plans on paper. Mary Berry Reaction Face says she’s pretty impressed.

Cor.

And, moments later, she’s stunned by Richard saying he’s going to make 20 layers.

Either that or she’s trying to catch one of Chetna’s grapes in her mouth.

And who could have thrown it?

J’ACCUSE!

I hear the words ‘salted caramel’ too often, seeing as I don’t have any in front of me. No fair. Everything sounds entirely amazing.

Mathematician of the Year Martha announces that 24 is ‘a lot’.

Sue feels like nobody has mentioned that Richard is a builder for quite a while, and takes it upon herself. He doesn’t help himself by bringing in modelling clay.

Alex/Kate is making a three-tier cake “because I think two-tier cakes look like hats”. Oh right, she’s mad. (But still great.) As my friend Andrew pointed out, while we were watching it, it looks like Kerplunk.

And, now I look closely, a hat with a cake on top of it.

Mel is her usual helpful self:

Oh good lord, Kate is wearing a sheriff badge. Amazing.

Should those layers be clearly defined? Yes, they should. Who’d have guessed?

Nancy continues her streak of being entirely unflappable by saying that, although her chocolate has gone grainy and wrong, she’ll ‘scrape it off and start again’. During this pronouncement Chetna has been wandering into shot, and it ends with her giving a wonderfully shocked look in our Nance’s direction. She is the Starting Again Queen this week, so it should come as no great surprise.

Also – doesn’t Chetna have her own sink?

Sue makes a ‘more tiers than an English penalty shoot-out’ joke. Topical.

Luis’ caramel skillz are crazy good. I don’t understand how he’s built this and kept everything the same colour – did he make lots of batches of caramel, or build it super quickly, or what? He’s even finished before everyone else. While Chetters is still dipping grapes in sugar (sure, why not?) he starts cleaning up the workspace, cleaning spray and all. What a man.

And… time is up! I want to eat all of them. But first, the bakers must stare at their creations while the cameraman pans around them.

Here are my favourite (and it was the pick of an incredible bunch):

Nancy gets a good critique in general, and calls Paul ‘lovely’.
Richard’s is ‘a bit sad’, but he has got a lot of caramel elements.
Luis’ is praised for appearance, and Mary tries her hand at a pun (“monumental!”) and adds, in Miranda’s-Mum-mode “It’s what I call a showstopper” – but the flavour is lacking.
Kate’s is criticised for not having enough caramel – which is apparently a worse crime than pretending that Israel borders France.
Chetna’s grape construction is praised. To my mind it looks a bit mad, but each to their own. Mary says that ‘everybody will be copying that at home’, showing a sweet. albeit misplaced, optimism.
Martha’s is disappointingly messy considering it was a great idea. Would it have been so hard to flatten out the surfaces? And – shock! horror! – she used a bought mould for her chess pieces. Where was the modelling clay?

Chetna! Who saw that coming? Nothing in the episode up to this point seemed to be heading this way, but she’s a sweetie, so I’m happy.

Who will go home out of Rich and Kate? Mary and Paul waffle on for hours, recapping the whole episode for anybody who tuned in a little early for the next programme (including Paul saying to Alex/Kate “you never did enough caramel” – a life-indictment), and eventually (eventually) tell us that… neither of them are going home! Absolutely nobody is surprised by this point, but it’s still lovely to keep them both for another week.

Kate takes it in her stride.

Hurrah!

I’m afraid there probably won’t be a recap next week, as I’ll be away – so I’ll see you when I see you!

Hope you’ve enjoyed European week. Au revoir! (And, Helen… which is the ODO update word?)