The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '24 - Week 10
Afternoon Tea
Well, Bake Off is over for another year. (Yes, alright, it was over last week, but I had to podcast and go on an adventure to Leeds, so I’m celebrating late.) It’s been a whirlwind of…well, mostly caramel. It was a delightful win for Georgie in the final, after a ridiculous showstopper challenge of ‘hanging cakes’. The show uses phrases like ‘hanging cakes’ and ‘biscuit puppet theatre’ as if they are normal things. They are not normal things. I am anxious that people might start to think these are normal things, and that does not bode well for the world.
But enough of my pessimism! The final Technical challenge was an afternoon tea - Sandwiches, tarts and cakes, all made completely from scratch. As challenges go, I liked this one! To watch, at least. Then I had to find three hours in my life to make it. Then the swearing began. Somehow, however, the whole thing came together, and I can complete my baking-related rants for another year. I can go back to privately filling my kitchen with profanity.
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.
Finale Week - Afternoon Tea
In deference to the challenge presented to the bakers, I have tried very hard to avoid planning this too much in advance. I have made some notes on the quantities I’ll be using in each item, but absolutely zero notes on the timings.
So, as the 3-hour clock begins, I first make a bullet-pointed list of exactly what order I’ll complete the many tasks ahead of me in. It proves to be wildly unhelpful in the long run. I start with the bread. Luckily, I’ve spent a good chunk of the last week tweaking my enriched-dough recipe for cinnamon rolls, so it’s fresh in my mind. I throw milk, butter and sugar in a pan to warm through, measure out my dry ingredients, realise I’ve forgotten to turn the hob on, and get the expletives going early.
Never mind! I declare. While I’m waiting on the wet ingredients, I can start combining butter, sugar and flour for my pastry! I get distracted, making the pastry. I remember the bread, and finally get it kneading in my stand mixer. I have guessed, based purely on appearance, that the bread needs some turmeric and, probably, some other spices in there. (Checking Prue’s recipe after the fact, I see I should’ve added curry powder.) I add turmeric. I add an egg. I forget the existence of any other spices and, instead, finish making the pastry. The bread is finally ready to start it’s first rise. 25 minutes have gone. I am, already, behind schedule.
Pastry chilling, bread rising, I make the most basic cake mix possible and shovel it into the tiny silicone moulds I bought last year and have never used. I knew they would come in handy one day. I just knew it. They all laughed at me, but I told them. (Sorry, I became a super villain for a moment there.)
I start my lemon curd in a bain-marie, and decide it’s fine to cook unattended while I attempt cutting the pastry and delicately draping it over an upside-down cupcake tin to make cases. With just under an hour down, my cakes are baked, my pastry is in and my lemon curd looks like it might thicken in the near future.
After ten minutes of irritable whisking, I have baked (and slightly burnt - luckily I made extra of everything.) pastry cases, a usable lemon curd, and bread dough that looks vaguely risen. With 1 hour 45 left, I start braiding miniature loaves of bread. At this point, I start to truly consider whether or not I could be doing something more productive with my life. Literally anything. Shaping the bread takes ten minutes. My existential crisis lingers for an extra five. I boil a couple of eggs.
Creme patissiere is next. One of those simple things I could do in my sleep. I take my eye off it to prepare the egg wash for the bread rolls and fuck it up. At this point, I’m definitely considering both my life choices, and my custard. Should I start again? Alas, I am out of eggs. I move on, put the bread in the oven, and whip mascarpone with sugar, cream and lemon zest. I make an egg sandwich filling, which lacks cress because it’s December, but does include mustard, cornichons and capers, because being pretentious is a year-round thing for me. While peeling the eggs, I suffer flashbacks to my traumatising years of making endless scotch eggs while working as a pub chef. MY bread guy never let me forget the time I had to ask him to wait for his cash because I was ‘up to my elbows in sausage’. Those were the days.
Suddenly, with 57 minutes to go and the bread out of the oven, I realise my components are complete, and all I have left is assembly.
Now, here is where I make a confession. I had decided not to make strawberry tarts, on the basis that strawberries are horrendously expensive at this time of year. I’ve chosen raspberries instead. This does mean that I have freed myself from the tedium of arranging strawberry slices, and taken out the apricot glaze component. Really, if I was doing this properly, I would have had one more task to complete. I am sorry, but in my defence making the glaze wasn’t shown on telly, and in deference to my own rules I only inspected the Prue’s official recipes on the Bake-Off site after completing the challenge. So, I beg forgiveness from my audience. I am simply human. (Also bugger off, I still made an entire afternoon tea in under three hours. You try it.)
With 50 minutes to go, I start assembling. The cakes come together uneventfully. The molds are tiny, so I’ve prepared six. The piping doesn’t go horribly wrong, and I wonder for a second if I’m actually good at this. I do not decorate the cakes with edible flowers, because I am a normal person (and edible flowers are expensive).
The tarts, similarly, come together with very little drama, although my custard isn’t quite thick enough and one of the unburnt cases has a tiny hole in the bottom. Still, they’re pretty, and there’s room for all sorts of jokes.
I pace a bit while I wait for the bread to cool down a bit more, listing off better ways to spend my time. Working on my current book, for example (fiction is coming), or doing the washing-up, or taking up weaving. If I only had space for a loom.
It’s time. I grab my bread and start to fill my sandwiches. I realise that my bread rolls are colossal, in comparison to the other afternoon tea items. This is the sort of thing I should mark myself down for, but quite frankly making braided loaves and cutting them like hot dog buns to serve up egg sandwiches is a ridiculous notion to begin with. I might cut myself some slack.
I plate the sandwiches. There are 18 minutes left on the timer, and I appear to be done. Hurrah.
The Judging.
I asked my partner, who kindly guest-starred in this write-up as a makeshift cake stand, to judge each component individually.
The sandwiches get 10/10 for flavour, but 9/10 for appearance. I lose a point for the bread being yellow, but not tasting yellow. Personally, I’m giving the sandwiches a 7/10. It’s lovely bread but it really doesn’t taste yellow, and the sandwiches do look slightly gargantuan compared to everything else.
My partner gives the tarts 8/10 for flavour, but 10/10 for appearance. I’ll take it. Although, I can only give them a 6/10. It’s terrible custard, and they are too simple - it’s the finale, after all.
Finally, the cakes get a 10/10 for both flavour and appearance from my partner. There’s some biased judging here - lemon cakes are his favourite. He’s much like Sansa Stark in that, and a few other ways. He does, however, admit to finding mascarpone confusing. I cannot help him with this.
Personally, I’m giving the cakes an 8/10. They look great, but need more lemon.
Overall, this was a fun challenge, and it felt like a fair one. None of the individual components were overly taxing, so it really came down to a challenge of planning and timing. Sounds boring, but I like that stuff.
Was this a fair season of Bake Off? I mean, it was fine. It was just fine. Bake Off has successfully stopped bullying its competitors with impossible technical challenges. It’s gone back to basics enough that those criticisms no longer seem fair. I do feel though, that the show can still be criticised. There were multiple close-ups on breakdowns this season that felt hard to watch. There was some incredibly blatant favouritism. There’s a middle-aged man judging, who is far less qualified than his female counterpart, who seems to consider himself the sole authority on almost everything.
It might seem stupid to care about how ‘fair’ a television show is. It’s a competition, yes, but it’s primarily supposed to be entertainment. The thing is, these shows are, for their competitors, steps towards dream careers. For the viewers, they’re comfort, and fantasy, and reminders of what might be possible, even if what might be possible is just buying and consuming an entire pack of custard creams in one sitting. At times like this, when the world feels not-great, shows like this are important. They give people something frivolous and unnecessary to bond over, and post about, and care about. It matters that this show is fair because it matters that there’s a space on television that doesn’t pressure people and exploit their reactions for the sake of entertainment. For a lot of people, myself included, Bake Off matters. Let’s hope it stays fair.
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