The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '24 - Week 2
Peppermint Creams
There’s a moment in this week’s Bake Off that sums up the problem with the current version of the show. As the time limit came to an end on the showstopper challenge (A biscuit puppet theatre - definitely a completely normal thing to make) contestant Illiyin collapsed, just in time for the fifth or sixth advert break of the episode. The camera zoomed in on her, being put into the recovery position, as someone in the background shouts that she needs privacy.
This is an episode that also saw contestant Jeff leave due to illness, and contestant Dylan the hapless skateboarder briefly slip off his stool in a far less dramatic fall. Now, a lot of this seems coincidental. Jeff had to leave the tent early last week as well, and was possibly not well enough to be on the show in the first place. Dylan’s was the sort of slip I’m capable of doing on a daily basis, while sitting very still in a normal chair.
That lingering shot, after the request for privacy, however. Returning from the ad break to a shot of Illiyin in tears, being taken out of the tent by the medical team. It’s drama over decent content. It’s a problem. So is the concept of a biscuit puppet theatre.
Anyway! I’m not here to write about the Problem with Bake Off (I absolutely do, obviously, have a lot more to say and I’ll get to that.) I’m here to suffer through technical challenges as a sneaky device that allows me to discuss the Problem with Bake Off! So, this week - peppermint creams. A biscuit I have zero nostalgia for because I didn’t grow up experiencing biscuit tins full of biscuits. There were plenty of biscuit tins around me when I was growing up. They just didn’t contain biscuits. They were inevitably, and disappointingly, full of buttons and sewing supplies. As a result, I always get slightly peckish while buttoning my shirts.
The Rules:
I have to recreate, to the best of my ability, the Technical Challenge.
I will not be looking at any kind of recipe. Each week, I have to do this purely with some context from the show and my own store of baking knowledge.
The time limit: The maximum amount of time I’ll be allowing myself is the time given to the bakers. However, as I don’t want to be wasting food and I don’t have a vast team of producers and camera operators to eat my bakes, I will sometimes be scaling my bakes down. When that happens, I’ll be reducing my total time accordingly.
The judging: I do not have handy professionals available to judge me. I have, however, considered purchasing some fabric to make my own gingham altar. I will be judging myself, and I’m a raging bitch so I won’t be particularly lenient. My partner will be scoring as well, and probably his office mates if there’s too much cake for us to consume in one sitting.
The equipment: I like to think I’ve got the sort of decently-stocked kitchen any skilled home baker would have. If a technical challenge requires specialist equipment I don’t have, I won’t be buying anything for the occasion. I will be MacGyvering it, and adjusting my handicaps accordingly.
Biscuit Week - Peppermint Cream Biscuits
I should start by saying that I was not having a Good Day when I made these. It was a dropping things, typo-filled, catching-my-sleeve-in-door-handles sort of day. I should not have attempted baking. And yet, I did.
I set a timer for two hours. I try to begin. I realise I need to find the podcast I was listening to and reconnect to my bluetooth speaker. This kills the first two minutes. (Folklands - hosted by Tim Downie and Justin Chubb - for those interested.)
Shortbread then. Fine. I know how to do that. Two parts flour and 1 part each butter and sugar, with an egg to pull it together. Except, I’ve forgotten what constitutes a normal starting amount of flour. I use 300 grams. This is too much. I throw everything in the stand mixer, and even with the egg it refuses to come together, instead laughing at me in its dustiness. I add a second egg. Now the dough is sticky. I decide not to care. I roll it out between sheets of baking parchment and balance it in my fridge. Fifteen minutes gone.
I’ve never made peppermint cream for biscuits before, but based on the episode I’m just making buttercream and replacing some of the butter with white chocolate. I decide to replace half the butter. The white chocolate takes a long time to melt. I soldier on.
Butter, white chocolate and icing sugar go into the mixer. It’s too cold in my kitchen. This combination does not want to turn into buttercream. Normally, I’d add some milk to help things along, but the milk in the fridge appears to have gone. Gone far. It possibly formed its own civilisation. I have an hour and twenty-five minutes to go.
I resort to throwing more chunks of butter into the mixer and swearing. I have spilled icing sugar everywhere and dropped more than one rolling pin. I regret the life choices that brought me to this point. Existentialism swirls around me but finally, finally, I’ve got a useable buttercream. I add peppermint extract, a capful at a time, wary of the moment where the mixture goes from ‘not minty enough’ to ‘toothpaste.’ I think I’ve got away with it. More rolling out and cramming into the fridge. There is an hour and fifteen minutes to go.
I’m very conscious of the shortbread having enough time to cool down, and I’m desperate to get it in the oven. Because I’ve made far too much dough, I’ve rolled out two separate sheets of the stuff. I grab the first one. Try to cut it. It’s too sticky. I give up, consider giving up on the entire challenge, moving to Canada and living under an assumed name.
Then I just add some extra flour and voila! Slightly more than 12 biscuits! They go in the oven with an hour left on the timer.
Chocolate time. Tempered chocolate. The process of tempering involves heating chocolate to a certain temperature, then cooling it back down to a certain temperature. This makes the crystalline structures of the chocolate do something fancy. It is not meant to be done with cheap Tesco cooking chocolate, but I’m on a budget. (This is not me trying to promote a specific supermarket by the way. I’m not sponsored. I’d like to be. Please send money/buy my book.) It is meant to be done with a thermometer, as Prue says, but I don’t have one and it’s not really necessary tbh.
I go with the ‘seeding’ method. (I have read too much smutty fantasy recently to use the word seed without grimacing.) This involves melting the chocolate, then stirring in chopped up unmelted chocolate to bring the temperature back down. It works. I test the temperature by touching some melted chocolate to my bottom lip. It still feels slightly hot, meaning it needs to cool down more. Which is fine, because so do my biscuits.
I wait for things to cool. I pace. Fenulah, I think, for my assumed name. Or possibly Rupert. I remember Canada is very cold and, while I’m built of hearty peasant stock that looks able to survive harsh winters, I’d rather not if I don’t have to. I decide not to move to Canada. My biscuits seem cool enough.
I touch the melted chocolate to my bottom lip again. It feels like the same temperature. This is how you check it if you don’t want to buy a thermometer. I saw it on the telly once.
I start dipping the biscuits in chocolate. My hands get covered in chocolate. I hate it. I chuck them in the fridge in the hopes the chocolate on the bottom will set slightly. I cut out peppermint discs, finish assembling the biscuits without incident, pipe over the milk chocolate and I’m done, sort-of, with nine minutes to go.
I want the chocolate to set, obviously, before I try and plate the biscuits, so I put them, chocolate coated and sitting on the cooling rack, into the drive until 2 minutes are left on the timer, then take them out and plate them. This is a mistake - they’ve set just enough to stick to the cooling rack, but I manage it.
Thirty seconds to go. Done, and plated.
Now herein lies a question - doing these biscuits and actually setting the tempered chocolate in a two-hour time frame isn’t feasible - especially setting the chocolate at room temperature (the proper way to do it). The Bake Off contestants obviously get a break between plating their technical challenge and the actual judging - time in which the chocolate can set. I decide I can have one too, and allow half an hour before the tasting commences.
The Judging
My partner’s verdict: 10/10 on flavour, 8/10 on appearance. I don’t question it.
My verdict: 7/10. The chocolate wasn’t perfect, and that’s clearly what the Bake Off judges cared about. I’m blaming my ingredients though, and you can’t stop me. So there.
Was this a fair challenge? It was so close! It’s three components the bakers should know how to do! It’s a reasonable time frame! It’s not a ridiculous ask! I’d say this would have been a completely fair challenge if not for one thing. As the judges leave the tent before the challenge begins, Prue offers that little bit of advice. She tells the contestants they must use the thermometer they’ve been given.
Here’s the thing. Tempering chocolate is tricky. It’s tricky in controlled temperature conditions like the ones chocolatiers and pastry chefs work in. It’s even trickier in an unpredictable home kitchen, let alone a bloody tent. The bakers will have practised it, most likely. They probably know the temperatures it needs to be at. Some probably, like me, take short cuts rather than working to an exact temperature every time because keeping the chocolate at that temperature while coating the biscuits is going to add its own unique set of challenges. Most, if not all, for this challenge, would have used that thermometer unprompted.
But that little comment was enough, in a pressured environment like this, to set all of them on edge, desperate to get exactly the right temperatures for perfectly tempered chocolate. As a result, the contestants flapped, they panicked, and things went wrong. They were on the back foot, and put there on purpose.
Then, the bakers were kept on the back foot for the rest of the episode, with the request to make a ‘Biscuit Puppet Theatre’ as if that’s not a word salad conceived of by a mad man. Out of curiosity, I had a look at a few early Bake Off Biscuit Week showstopper challenges. Season 1: Petit Fours. Season 4: A Biscuit Tower. Season 5: A 3D Biscuit Scene. Look at how much room there is in those challenges for the contestants to be the creative ones - to come up with mad ideas like a theatre. That creativity is limited by ridiculous concepts.
It might seem silly, in a blog where I cock up cakes, to feel this passionately about a baking show being mean. What does it matter? It’s just telly!
But, as I’ve mentioned, I spent ten years working in the kitchen industry. I’ve seen the impact mean-spirited cooking television has. I’ve worked with chefs who idolised Gordon Ramsey and Kitchen Confidential-era Anthony Bourdain - who want to shout and swear and abuse. Bake Off was lauded, in its heyday, for being the antithesis of that, for being a celebration of home bakers, doing something they loved.
A show that forces bakers into positions that can only, over time, destroy their love for it, while being so over complicated that viewers at home wouldn’t want to so much as try, is not a show worth celebrating. It’s not a show worth watching at all.
Next week, bread!
Shameless self-promotion time - I’ve written a book! Friends and the Golden Age of the Sitcom is available now in all sorts of places, including signed copies on my website! (Please buy it so I can buy nicer ingredients.)