How do you do, fellow bakers?

If you’re looking for the Strictly Week 2 Recaps, I must sincerely apologise. I got bogged down with a cold and by the time I got to the point of writing about Toyah Willcox’s most undignified mounting of a high school gymnasium poorly disguised as a bull (IT’S NOT A BUCKING BRONCO IF IT DOESN’T BUCK, NEIL!) I was tasting colours and had to call it quits on the endeavour

I think it’s understandable that Nadiya’s clenched jaw could be heard by everyone within a 400 mile radius of Elstree as the judges all voted to save that mess instead of Hot Tom’s Moment of Self-cringe.

Where There’s a Whirl, There’s a Way

For the first time in Bake Off History, a full contingent of bakers were being put through Biscuit Week as Cryptid Jeff bravely returned and very much looked like he should probably have still been in bed

he looks like the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme suffering from a head cold

and in a moment of foreshadowed baking, the title he’d given his Viennese Whirls was “What’s The Matter, Are You Not Feeling Well?” which isn’t even a pun, it’s just… a question. The main flavour of his soothsaying whirls being coffee

both Paul and Prue did really like the strength of his coffee – he’d done the Bronx proud. But much like Jeff himself, they were looking a little pale and lacking in definition as they slowly faded into nothingness like Mothman fading into the night.

More often than not you can safely assume that the Signature Challenge will involve between a third and half of the bakers turning to coffee as a signature ingredient. It’s a bit like everyone’s dad thinking celery salt in their bolognese is an ancient family secret. However, this time the only other bakers going for coffee were Hazel and John. Or at least potentially Hazel – you can’t be 100% certain on which ingredients actually made it into her biscuits in the end. John however, was just using this as an excuse to get at the Baileys before noon

I appreciate the hustle.
His biscuits weren’t as bitter as Jeff’s due to Irish Cream Buttercream but it was a good balance of flavours.

Another trend being bucked was novelty biscuit shapes with everyone opting for the straightforward swirly rounds. The only baker having any fun was Nelly who had created a series of little Viennese puppies that, as Noel pointed out, did look like Ewoks

I am of the opinion that Nelly can do no wrong – she is absolutely phenomenal television and they better fenagle her to the final because I fear for the vibes without her. Between her ongoing liveaction self-insert Noel Fielding fanfics

her terrible puns and her asking Paul Hollywood to “feel the jam” like she was challenging him to a wrestling match

she is my champion no matter what. They might not have to do too much rigging either if at least 1 person loses the plot as hard as Hazel did at every step of her baking process

John realising that Hazel had just shoved double the amount of butter needed into her biscuits reminded me A LOT of Nadiya’s infamous “oven!?” moment after Mat revealed he had baked his royal icing

and because Hazel had used both her Plan A Butter and her Emergency Backup Butter, thus began the most frantic quest for butter since the Norwegian Butter Crisis of 2011

luckily (and rather unsurprisingly) nobody else had made the same mistake and Hazel was able to cobble together a second batch of her Coffee Whirls with the manic look of a Victorian woman who bakes people into pies

her biscuits were at least not 80% butter this time, however they were completely sugar-free

HAZEL. Baking has 3 fundamental ingredients: Flour, Butter and Sugar. HOW DID YOU MANAGE THIS?

Hazel wasn’t the only one to have issues with flavours. Andy had an uphill battle after realising that he was facing a wall of anti-peanut-butter-and-jam dissent

but everyone seemed pretty convinced by a PB&J sandwich in Viennese Whirl form

and if they didn’t, he could always just say it was Jeff that had actually made them considering Jeff was Single White Female-ing Andy

to be fair, Jeff and Andy are basically the same man in different fonts.

Also going for a slice of the USA was Dylan with his S’mores inspired whirls filled with torched meringue and dipped in chocolate

sure, they’re not whirly but they did taste really nice apparently! They also remind me a lot of a biscuit I used to get from Baker’s Inn when we drove home from my grandparents’ house in Zimbabwe so he gets +5 completely unbiased and irrelevant nostalgia points from me.

Georgie probably had the hardest time convincing anyone of her flavours. Mostly because in order to taste them you had to get past the oddly fleshy appearance of her freeze-dried rhubarb whirl

and judging by Paul’s facial expression as he ate them, it was not a pleasant experience

apparently it tasted better if you ate the rhubarb and the custard biscuits at the same time, but I feel like if 1 half of your biscuit makes everyone look a bit like you just lit a bonfire in their brain, it’s a fundamentally bad biscuit?

While Georgie committed chemical warfare through the medium of everyone’s least favourite classic flavour combination. Christiaan was once again swinging buckwild with his Tarragon, Lavender and Blueberry Whirls

the lavender being particularly dangerous because every time someone mentions lavender in front of Paul Hollywood he assumes the same facial expression he had while eating Georgie’s biscuits and experiences war flashbacks to being florally flashbanged by Norman’s lavender meringues

and having been burnt once, there was no chance that Paul or Prue were going to eat the halves of Christiaan’s whirls that came decorated with dried lavender

having successfully avoided the potpourri scented declaration of war, Paul and Prue were pleasantly surprised by Christiaan’s biscuits

but he wasn’t the only one embracing the unusual as Sumayah seemingly just chucked every single flavour at the wall to see what stuck

“Why’re they swans though?” I hear you ask. It’s to match the fear you feel when you see that series of ingredients listed in a biscuit

it’s perfected theming – the biscuits sound like something straight out of Great British Menu and what are swans but God playing professional chef with a snake, a goose and a sense of entitlement that defies all logic and reason?

I would be very curious to try them – purely because I don’t know if they were sweet or savoury? Nobody really elaborated on that but both Paul and Prue thoroughly enjoyed Sumayah’s continued exploration of waterfowl through the medium of baking.

Sumayah wasn’t the only one playing FrankenBaker. Gill was herself fusing two desserts together, inspired by pulling the classic move of bullying your partner into getting one of the two desserts you can’t decide between at a restaurant and then splitting the two

or as I call it “The Second Date Test” – I am extremely single for a reason. It turns out nobody likes being manipulated into ordering the weirdest sounding dessert on the menu. I didn’t think the Parma Violet Panna Cotta was going to be nice, but I needed to know for sure.

Gill’s choice of dessert body parts were a Key Lime Pie and a Passion Fruit Pavlova so essentially she was just making a Tropical Fruit Whirl but didn’t want to say “Tropical Fruit” because we’re 15 series into this franchise and that sounds too boring

the half and half approach was a really fun novelty and she had at least chosen two flavours that went together. I’m still struggling to remember Gill as a contestant and I’m not entirely convinced there isn’t going to be a mid-series Traitors twist revealing that she’s actually Mike’s mum

looking forward to Wake Bake Week

speaking of Mike, he was back with more homegrown ingredients for his malted brown butter and raspberry whirls

Prue was not a fan of the fact he’d decorated them like your mum trying to make something look spooky for Halloween by covering it in fake spiderwebs but they really loved the texture of his biscuits and the taste was subtle but intentionally so.

Lastly we have Illiyin who was going for a fairly safe flavour combination of Pistachio and Orange

sadly the pistachio got a little bit lost amongst the orange, but the orange at least had a real zing to it that was pleasant even if a little overpowering.

Mint Condition

For their Biscuit Week Technical, the bakers were taking on the incredibly vague concept of a Mint Cream Biscuit. I think it was lost on most of bakers, not least of all Dylan who for the first 20 minutes seemed to think he was making After Eights

but even if you were lucky enough to know what a Legally Distinct Lyon’s Viscount Mint Cream is, there was a high chance you probably hate mint chocolate

which put you at a slight disadvantage given the only instructions for the mint flavouring they were given was “to taste” – as evidenced by everyone cautiously putting in 1/4 teaspoons at a time while Nelly shrugged and dumped a huge glug of peppermint extract into her biscuit filling

somehow her Professor Utonium approach to scientific parametres

didn’t result in a biscuit that left you feeling like you were being waterboarded by the Colgate company for sharing industry secrets and in fact the flavour was the highest praised aspect of her biscuit given she’s struggled slightly with the tempering of the chocolate

The chocolate tempering was where just about all of the bakers came undone – their shortbread biscuits and mint cream fillings were all largely praised or completely inoffensive. However the moment Prue hinted at specific temperatures needed for tempering chocolate, Dylan just became the confused-maths-lady meme

and served up a batch of mint creams that looked like they’d been coated with chocolate via the gunge box that put Katy Perry’s brain through a rinse cycle

he did come dead last, by which I mean he came 11th because Jeff got halfway through the Technical Challenge and exited the entire competition clutching a cup of tea and unsteadily wandering towards a herd of giraffe sculptures with Alison on his arm while jaunty ukulele music played

if Cryptid Jeff was going to be eliminated (and he probably would’ve survived this episode considering Hazel existed) I do think the most fitting way was to just… disappear. I’ll find you one day, you Bronxite sasquatch that I’m only 70% sure actually exists.

I did feel really sorry for Andy because he seemed to know what he was doing with the chocolate tempering – or at least he was very confidently bluffing his way through it in that way only people with cockney accents can and then he accidentally left his chocolate on the heat so his hard work tempering it had gone to waste as his chocolate hadn’t cooled so it solidified and stuck to anything it touched

between Andy’s chocolate’s attachment issues and Dylan’s being harder than any man-made substance thus far invented

I think the two of them may revolutionise the construction world.

On the other end of the Biscuit Achievement Spectrum was Mike who managed to redeem himself from last week’s 11th placed Battenburg with 1st placed mint creams (just don’t look too hard at them)

just beating John and Sumayah who came second and third respectively.

Everybody Loves Gingerbread Puppets?

My biggest gripe with Biscuit Week will ALWAYS be the Showstopper Challenge which is almost invariably a task to build a random noun and/or vibe out of gingerbread – family holidays, your greatest fear, the ancient Greek philosopher that’s had the greatest influence on your modern day politics, your house. It’s… a little bit tired because there’s only so many ways you can flavour gingerbread or build your idyllic farmhouse cottage (Bake Off has a type.) I’m not sure what else they could do but… I NEED SOMETHING ELSE. There have to be other biscuits.

This year’s gingerbread call to arms was the creation of a Gingerbread Puppet Theatre. Although there was no specification for gingerbread, it’s just a generally understood concept that gingerbread is the affordable red brick of the baking world. Unless you’re Hazel, who was going for the bespoke internationally imported Norwegian sandstone that makes Kevin McCloud roll his eyes on Grand Designs because it delays the building process by 5 months

unsurprisingly her Punch and Judy Theatre built out of shortbread ended up looking… well, like it was made out of shortbread

granted, I think it looks a lot more put together than it deserved to and I’ve seen seaside town theatres in a worse state than this before. She does also owe the fact that any of it is actually being held together to Sumayah who came to the rescue with the world’s politest humble brag

I love her and it’s WILD that she had enough time to help Hazel considering the quality of her own Swan Lake theatre – I think we’re able to declare Sumayah’s relationship with British waterfowl a part of the Bake Off 2024 Drinking Game

she also got a few extra bonus points for the fact that the wheels allowed you to pull it along. But she wasn’t the only one to go for a mobile puppet show (technically everyone’s was mobile some were just… more mobile than others) as Christiaan had a revolving four background backdrop for his puppet theatre

and none of it was flavoured like a candle that someone in a crystal shop called Auras and Thingz claims cures cancer which he was rewarded for with a handshake

Christiaan wasn’t the only one weaponsing their BFA, Mike was basing his gingerbread theatre off of his own community theate

and it would feature his farmyard animals that if you spent more than 15 seconds in the peripheral vision of Mike, you would end up being shown a full family photo album of

it did result in a very cute dislay, although the red curtains made out of florentine biscuit unnerve me tremendously

I think it’s because it reminds me a lot of those millet seed sticks you can buy for budgies

and if you promise to not ask questions, they don’t taste nice.

I did feel really bad for Gill because they very quickly forgot about how impressive her revolving puppet theatre was after Christiaan’s showed up

it wasn’t quite the same level of engineering but I’d have felt a little bit like chopped liver. Christiaan’s was also a little more personal whereas Gill’s was just the story of The Gingerbread Man which involves a pair of childless parents baking a gingerbread child who comes to life and then get eaten by a fox. I won’t lie, for no fault on Gill’s part, it was a little bit…

considering things to come.

Both John and Georgie were taking us to Wales, the latter celebrating a… Nonspecific Welsh Festival

she came nowhere near finishing it, but much like Hazel’s Punch and Judy theatre that fell into disrepair because nobody *really* wants to laugh at thinly veiled domestic abuse in the year of our lord 2024, the hamfistedness of it does lend it a quaint small village vibe. I 100% believe there’s a village in Wales that has this exact stage set up every year and they’re extremely proud of the 95 year old who has painted the dragon on it every year for the last 70 years.

Georgie didn’t try to pass it off as authentic slapdashedness, however the three used car salesmen in a trenchcoat we call Andy, was going to do everything to schmooze his way out of potential disaster and a small part of me has to admire the gall

his puppet show told the story of… I don’t actually know – it involved a car repair and a pig on the M12 then it all got lost a bit in a tale about is family going on holiday to Tel Aviv. But they liked his biscuits and his theatre was standing and had puppets which more than you could say for Illiyin. In multiple senses of the statement

she got a bad case of the Jeffs once time was called, but she had managed to finish her puppet theatre so it could be judged with Noel Fielding playing the role of Illiyin (which isn’t quite as convincing as Andy playing the role of Jeff)

the problem is it’s not really a puppet show because she discarded her puppets at the last minute, so instead of it looking like a diorama of the last surviving members of the human race following The Great Strawberry Apocalypse, it just looked like The Great Strawberry Apocalypse.

John’s little Welsh holiday theatre was also lacking in a little detail

but he made up with it with his Honey and Chilli gingerbread backdrop. Dylan was also opting for more interesting flavours than most by choosing to incorporate a pair of large macarons – one flavoured with whisky & miso and the other with mint & yuzu

I think this was my personal favourite creation of the episode, I think it looks really good, especially for one he essentially had to make twice after his curtains went the same way as the fabled suicidal rabbit

and Dylan felt a little bit left out in all of this death defying base jumping as it’s been a while since he bit the dust

next week the ovens get fitted with rotary saws – Will Dylan hang on to his fingers? Come back for Bread Week and find out!

Lastly we have Nelly whose puppet theatre was inspired by her family and the journey they’ve gone on – with figures for herself, her husband and their two children as well as five stars to represent her 5 stillborn children

I really, really admired how candid she was about her experience with stillbirths and there’s nothing I can really say about the gingerbread theatre because it is well fortified with anti-snark plot armour.

With Jeff having bowed out after taking the bye in Cake Week, there was still an elimination to be had. But first, Star Baker went to Sumayah so last week’s robbery of Pato the Duck is now rectified

and seeing herself out with 100% more butter than she entered the tent with, was Hazel

I think she’s just happy she can be warm again.

And so, 10 go to Bread Week!