Jeff is my favourite cryptid.

This recap is for Pato the Duck supremacy.

Ah, it’s good to be back. I didn’t recap last year because I was… let’s just say my mental health felt how Jeff’s loaf cake looked

so since my last go around the Bake Off roundabout there have been a number of changes – most notably the addition of Alison Hammond who could not have been a better choice

If not for the fact she oozes charisma like a Paul Hollywood oozes slightly menacing sleaze. Then it’s definitely because you don’t live in constant fear that you’re going to sprain your eyes rolling them at the 15th fart joke of the episode. SHE WOULD NEVER.

And of course we have our new batch of 12 bakers

God bless you all as you carry us through the most depressing time of year. You’re our only hopes.

A Matter of Loaf and Death

For their very first Signature Challenge, the bakers were having to make an elevated version of a loaf cake. And if for whatever reason you can’t quite work out what a “loaf cake” is, Prue has a handy linguistic explanation

thanks, Ferdinand de Saussure. I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.

Of course because they wanted an elevated and decorated version of a loaf cake, more than a few bakers were immediately caught in the sand trap of Trying Too Much™. Most notably John and Georgie who were in a head to head race to Macaron Doom

in classic Bake Off style, the two of them were both scuppered by the weather. Just not in the usual sense, Bake Off has finally given in to the pervasive climate emergency situation and accepted that it is completely impractical to expect anyone to Bake in a gazebo in the middle of July. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as an ambient tent. Thus we’ve over-corrected so now the tent is freezing which is why everyone looked like they were going on an Arctic exploration during the judging

the cold had a negative effect on the macaron batter but you’d think that the tent being The Honorary Roald Amundsen Training Room and everyone running the risk of hypothermia and frostbite (get well soon, Jeff. We love you.) it might’ve helped cool the cakes a little faster. Alas no – Georgie may have managed to bring her macarons screaming and shivering into existence BUT AT WHAT COST, GEORGIE? AT WHAT COST?

We’re all thinking it? I don’t have to say it, right? Please don’t make me say it. Let us move beyond this unusable gym sock of a cake, I don’t want to look at it anymore.

John made the decision to maroon his macarons and served his Black Forest Loaf without them

You can’t really go wrong with a Black Forest Gateau inspired bake on Bake Off, and John wasn’t the only one going incredibly classic. It was no real surprise that, much like everyone’s dad, Andy, the most dad-energy baker to ever set foot in the tent, was making a lemon drizzle cake – it’s just part of the paternal DNA

and it was a very pretty cake in the end if a touch overbaked

he wasn’t the only one going for a lemony loaf. His rival being Mike who was going for a more Lemon and Poppyseed approach but because he’s apparently from The Shire – it was Lemon and homegrown Linseed

and he was coping with the stress of the competition in the only way a hobbit knows how: by bringing in his emotional support shrubberies

I’m choosing to believe he was initially planning to serve his cake IN the tub of violas, but then his icing went the same was as Georgie’s so instead he chose to hide the cake under the violas

there’s only so much they can do to hide the fact it does look a bit like he’s covered the cake in scrambled egg but I’ll take the morose sadness of a cake looking like a funeral wreath left in the rain than any more prolonged eye contact with whatever Georgie’s was doing.

Hazel also got pulled up a bit on the presentation of her Raspberry Loaf being a little bit too clunky

I don’t think it’s that bad for someone who was trying her damndest to survive a nuclear winter

but sure, the size of the pink chocolate shards were a little bit big and did make it look a bit like a stegosaurus. And if you’re wondering what that stegosaurus looked like after the Late Cretaceous Period extinction event, here’s Jeff’s cake

I don’t think anyone on Bake Off has become as immediately as iconic as Jeff emerging from the bushes to take part in 1 challenge, hoot and holler with Alison like they’re the “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” Spiderman meme

then getting sick because they’re baking outside and Hazel was hoarding all the hot water bottles like a thermally challenged kangaroo thus having to sit out the rest of the episode.

While many of the bakers went for classic, fail-safe flavours – much to the eternal chagrin of Gill and her Biblically Accurate Terry’s Chocolate Orange Cake

Christiaan and his Technicolour Dream Accent were going for a risky Miso and Apple Loaf Cake which sounds exactly like the sort of thing Waitrose makes for 1 bonfire season and never repeats because of poor sales figures and a lot of Facebook complaints

Miso Caramel has always been the go-to for the Not Like Other The Girls™ of Bake Off, but the addition of the apple was apparently a step too far for Paul and Prue

leaving Christiaan to silently stare at his cake, contemplating how hard it would be for him to simply disappear into the Berkshire countryside like Cinnamon the Capybara

“I could do it. They’d never find me. I could be happy. I could be… free.”

I was intrigued by Christiaan’s cake, but the loaf that piqued my interest the most was very much Sumayah’s Halwa Carrot Cake

it looked and sounded absolutely incredible. She wasn’t the only one using a dessert as the inspiration for her cake. Dylan, who I can only hope bakes better than he skates because I may be slightly in love with him and desperately want him to keep all his limbs intact

was creating a Mango Sticky Rice Loaf inspired by his GAP YAH! around Thailand

it’s a very pretty looking cake (ignore the leaky hole…) but unfortunately he forgot to put the yogurt in his cake batter so once you cut into it it did look more solid than the average brick in the Pyramids of Giza

they could use this recipe to build at least 1 wall for the tent to try to keep Hazel warm and Jeff… in the tent for longer than 2 hours.

Nelly had the opposite problem to Dylan (in terms of Baking, I’m not sure what her Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 credentials are) in that her cake looked a bit like it crawled out of Fanny Craddock’s Necronomicon

but tasted absolutely sensational and getting the high praise of tasting so good, Paul could’ve eaten the whole thing like an anaconda going through a bad break-up

but it was Illiyin’s Cinnamon Roll Loaf that would be the most highly praised in the recovering economy of the Hollywood Handshake

she’d decided to do her cinnamon loaf because her sister’s favourite baked goods are cinnamon rolls. Illiyin’s got 6 other siblings so she can ride this gimmick out until the quarterfinals at least.

An Unofficial Signature Loaf Cake Ranking:
1. Halwa-bout That, A Robbed Queen Already
2. The Second Best Cinnamon This Week
3. Nelly’s Timewarp Loaf
4. John’s Macaronless Loaf
5. Andy’s Tulip Field
6. Hazel’s Big Pink Dinosaur
7. Mike’s Hobbit Loaf
8. The Biblically Accurate Terry’s Chocolate Orange
9. Macarons Can Only Hide So Much, Georgie
10. Dylan’s Ancient Building Material
11. Christiaan’s Miso Misadventure
12. The Trace Evidence of Jeff’s Existence

The-Mouse-with-the-Wings-enburgs

For the first Technical Challenge of the series, the show was trying something a little new. Instead of getting a recipe more vague than Geoguessr dumping you in an Kansan cornfield, they were given a miniature battenberg to taste, smell and dissect like Freud playing pin the genitals on the eel

I truly think I would’ve got to my 20th bollockless eel and determined my eel supplier was probably playing a strange practical joke. By the 50th I would have started to ask serious questions about my own mental health and what the slew of cleaved eels in my wake means for me on a fundamentally human level. Anyway, look out for my Freud biopic called Sexual Eeling. Timothee Chalamet plays Freud and Jenna Ortega voices every single eel.

Before their baking time began, the bakers did have to give their Battenbergs back (I would have inhaled mine before they could prize it from cold, frostbitten fingers)

I think they should’ve kept them in the tent and allowed the bakers to cheat as long as they could get away with it like the Pub Quiz Task on Taskmaster in which Rosie Jones and Emma Sidi immediately defaulted to throwing themselves on the floor and wailing as distractions

the bakers were having to make EVERYTHING from scratch including the apricot ham and the marzipan – the latter of which caused the most confusion because who in their right mind is making their own marzipan? Life’s too short.

On the whole, everyone did really well! It helped a lot that they were basically told “it’s a basic pound cake, recipe. Keep it simple.” which still only narrowly kept Dylan on the straight and narrow

but much like shouting “Check this out!” before trying a kickflip, Dylan was constantly setting himself up as a lightning rod of baking hubris

he wasn’t the only one that went a little overboard on the yellow food colouring – Illiyin had lulled Paul and Prue into a false sense of security with her pale marzipan

and then her actual sponge peeped out like the venomously yellow eyes of a snake

personally, PERSONALLY, I think all Battenburg Cakes should look like they glow in the dark – if you’re going to go to the lengths of constructing this silly block of baking heraldry, I better be able to see it from space.

If not picking the bakers apart for where their sponges and marzipan fell on the Pantone colour chart – it was for their shapes. Which you wouldn’t think would be that hard to go wrong on considering Battenbergs are a pretty one and done rectangular shape. However, Sumayah was pondering “What if a Battenberg but The Lament Configuration?”

she did end up in the bottom three, only beating both Hazel and Mike. The latter of whose cake was less of a battenberg and more of one of those colour blindness tests that are actually jumpscares

and Hazel’s marzipan was too loose which is very odd considering her jam looked sticky enough to keep even Slippery Jeff around for a few more hours

and on the other end of Battenberg success was Georgie topping out the leaderboard with a cake that was simply described as “decent”

she was judged first, Paul had no idea how the rest of them would go. I was mostly pleased that Christiaan had redeemed himself and landed in second place, just beating John.

Feelin a Little Illusion

For their introductory Cake Week Show Stopper the bakers were having to give the art of Illusion Cakes a go. Jeff was still out for the count so it was at least a little bit obvious they weren’t going to do an elimination, which is fortunate because all of the bakers actually did really well! Sure, a lot of them were in a race to see who could make the most fundamentally cake-shaped object in the tent. Despite there being a stack of books

a pair of perfectly folded jeans and a Doc Marten shoe on display, the squarest object of them all was somehow Illiyin’s vase

I almost have to admire the confidence in doing the barest minimum. It’s just a cake covered in fondant with a stenciled pattern and flower decorations that while pretty took maybe 15 minutes to make? Then again, perhaps slow and steady is for the best in the Bake Off tent considering the sneak peek

the edit for next week’s episode is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen? I’m very excited for the new Death Tent twist they’ve added to the format. Plummeting temperatures? Trip wires? The manic hunger to win in John’s eyes? RELEASE THE HOUNDS!

Chris was hoping to keep his single episode redemption arc going and it was looking pretty good what with Prue being really impressed with his fully threaded sewing machine cake

but he continues to be utterly absurd when it comes to flavours – this particular cake being chocolate orange, thyme and olive oil

I truly think Christiaan is just operating on an astral plane that is beyond the realms of Bake Off. In the words of the scholarly school of The Black Eyed Peas: “he’s so 3008, you’re so 2000 and late.”

Dylan was also going for a risky flavour profile, leaning in to the Egyptian inspiration of his Canopic Jar Cake with Tahini Buttercream

It was a much more successful outcome for him than Christiaan. And I think nothing quite sums up the sublime ridiculousness of this show than the trifecta of words that is “Canopic Jar Cake” – it’s either that or Georgie running around her very middle class garden screaming “FANNY SUBMIT!”

the whole introduction of Fanny the Intractable Chicken leading to its only natural conclusion:

there’s absolutely about 3 hours of deleted footage of people talking about how moist Fanny is or should be but they had to draw the line somewhere. And God knows how many hours of footage there is of Georgie bringing the mood of the tent down as she prophesized her own demise at the back of the tent like the Oracle of Delphi on a bad weekend

I know they showed so much of it because they needed to add tension from somewhere considering the world’s most obvious First Boot had pulled a Houdini but… They could have shown marginally less of it, especially because Fanny was rather fabulous

Does it look slightly like a West Highland Terrier wearing an unconvincing disguise? Yes. But that’s Fanny for you.

Fanny wasn’t the only illusory bird in the tent. BEHOLD! The pinnacle of anatine perfection: Pato the Duck, King of the Cute Teeny Tiny Babies that I Would Overthrow a Small to Medium-sized Nation For

he is perfect and can do no wrong so there was a lot of pressure on Sumayah to capture the essence of the Mona Lisa of the duck world. And my God did she absolutely knock this out of the park

I’m willing to declare this the best illusion cake we’ve seen on the show from a purely capturing-of-the-subject angle. She painted that duck and tree stump like she was Peeta Mellark in a life or death situation

somehow Peeta’s skill at hyper realistic face painting is the weirdest part of The Hunger Games. And yet, perhaps apparently not that farfetched, if you gave Sumayah a bag of Royal Icing, some food colouring and 2 hours; you’d never find her ever again.

Sumayah wasn’t the only one to really snap when it came to the details of their illusions – Andy’s leather bag was exceptionally well done, it was just a pity that his cake was very overbaked

I tried to resist Andy at first (he’s too 80s sitcom coded for me to trust outright) but by the end of this episode, I think I’m charmed by him? See, we can all grow?

Andy wasn’t the only one making a bag as Hazel proudly touted off her list of designer handbags that we didn’t get to see because they go to a different school, you wouldn’t know them

the big twist for her cake illusion would be that she would be able to carry it because she’d brought in…

OH. It’s a handle. Admittedly it was quite cool and a really good addition to the illusion theme, even if you did have to carry the bag in such a way that the TSA would stop you from a mile away

unfortunately for Hazel, if you say that you’re making a designer handbag there is going to be more of an expectation for finishing details than there is for Andy making the ol’ kitbag he’s had kicking around since 1985 and hers just didn’t *quite* live up to that.

Fashion was a fairly well-travelled road this challenge with Nelly creating an illusion cake of her dream shoe. Which, I won’t lie, I stereotypically started imagining a nice heel, an elegant evening shoe or anything from that era in time when Lady Gaga waged a war on the concept of ankles

and then she proudly presented them with a lone brothel creeper and she’s so real for that

my only qualm is that I wish she’d made a pair of them – Paul however wanted a little more raspberry jam because it kind of got lost amongst all of the chocolate.

Rounding out our sashay through Bake Off Fashion Week is John and his margarita flavoured jeans cake

I think the most impressive part of the cake to me personally was the fact he made the margarita flavour of the cake work so well. Because the actual designing of the cake is… fine? There’s a lot of nice little details and perhaps my anti-blue jeans agenda and that one (1) weekend I spent working in Primark folding the denims before quitting because the whole experience was too anxiety inducing (Primark employees are braver than the troops) is getting in the way of me being as on board with this as I probably should be.

Lastly we have Gill and her Bailey’s flavoured Bowls cake

I thought they looked amazing and really impressive given that it’s quite hard to do a spherical anything in baking. Prue however wanted that perfect orb

GIVE GILL A BREAK, PRUE! Paul however was more concerned about the flavour of Gill’s balls as she’d flavoured absolutely everything in the cake with Bailey’s. However the cake wasn’t as one-note as he’d feared!

An Unofficial Illusion Cake Ranking:
1. PATO THE DUCK. NO QUESTIONS. NO DEBATE.
2. John’s Perfectly Fitting Jeans
3. Georgie’s Flustered Fanny
4. The World’s Premier Canopic Jar Cake
5. Andy’s Old Bag [tone indicator: not misogyny]
6. There’s a Snake No Raspberry Jam In your Boot!
7. THEY WERE ROUND ENOUGH, PRUE!
8. Mike’s 1500 page Leather-bound Copy of Heartstopper (????)
9. Hazel’s Suspicious Luggage
10. Christiaan’s Ascended Mind Is Too Powerful
11. Illiyin’s Cake-shaped… Cake Illusion

As Jeff was on the loose and threatening the ecology of Berkshire, they had decided to not do an elimination this week. Instead biding their time to First Boot live and legally next week upon his return. So all there was to do this week was dish out Star Baker – which I really thought was going to Sumayah and perhaps I am glamoured by Pato. Instead it went to John

He did place significantly better than Sumayah in the Technical so I’ll allow it, but Pato is still 90% of my personality now.

And so, we’re still up to 12 Bakers!