Man makes plans and God laughs.

This recap is Pepperami flavoured.

Girls Just Wanna Have Buns

For their Bread Week Signature Challenge, the bakers were having to make a batch of 12 savoury buns using yeasted dough. Which sounds a deceptively easy task until you remember that they’ve got to do all this while the blue-eyed murder robot haunts the peripheries of the tent

they didn’t play up Paul Hollywood as The King of Bread nearly as much this year – perhaps because his mind was blown by the notion of Gochujang paste. This is absolutely not a clowning on Dylan’s buns, they looked phenomenal and I’ll take two dozen of them NOW

but I really can’t get over the fact Paul Hollywood, a man who has done a travelogue in East Asia and has ON NUMEROUS OCCASIONS talked about his fondness for East Asian cuisine has not heard of Gochujang as a flavour. TESCO SELLS THEIR OWN BRAND GOCHUJANG PASTE! (it’s horrible, but the point stands.) But hey, if Paul Hollywood’s no-knowledge palate means MY BOY! gets handshakes, I’ll take it

of course Dylan did look like he was in danger of falling over again

somebody get the emergency Dylan Crash Mat

Speaking of Hollywood Handshakes – Georgie was on the verge of Gamestopping the Handshake Economy again (I don’t know if that’s an accurate reference, it sounds correct but I won’t pretend to understand nearly half of what happens in the world of financial shorting)

the only thing stopping her getting the handshake was a sprinkling of parmesan cheese

if Georgie wasn’t so middle-class branded Nice™, I would have hoped she’d grab the parmesan grater and ask Paul to say when like the world’s most passive-aggressive ASK Italian waiter. I did find it a little bit funny that Paul’s favourite buns were Dylan’s introducing him to new flavours and Georgie’s which were basically Supermarket Bakery Pizza Rolls

they were perfectly baked though – especially for having quite a few very wet ingredients with the mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. Others bakers hadn’t faired quite so well with their choices of fillings. John had the biggest problem as he hadn’t given the steam created by his Feta and Pesto filling anywhere to escape through meaning he ended up with a sort of hollow Greek salad geode

and there’s only so many sins the emergency gold leafing can hide

AND IT’S NELLY WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!

there’s a lot about Bake Off that’s wonderfully camp but one of my favourites is gold leaf being applied to the world’s most basic looking bread rolls

it’s giving “I love her, she’s so crazy”

John wasn’t the only one going for a filled bun. Illiyin, Mike and Sumayah all opted for stuffed buns. The latter of which had stylised her chicken-curry filled buns to look like sunflowers

there were some that were definitely prettier than others and the bread was slightly underproved but both Paul and Prue really liked the flavour of her filling. Illiyin’s Jamaican brown chicken filling was also well received despite Prue’s hesitance over the mount of chillies that Illiyin had on her workbench

and even though her Coco Bread was a little bit short, it worked texturally in juxtaposition with the juicy filling. I imagine Paul and Prue were also being kind because we’re still working on the assumption that if you’re mean to Illiyin she goes down like a fainting goat

the world’s most perfect defense mechanism.

Mike’s filling was a little more divisive – Paul really liked it, however Prue thought there was a little too much Cumin for her liking

he had a similar problem to Illiyin with his bread but once again, it worked as an accompaniment to the filling and somewhere on the sidelines John seethes as he applies as much gold leaf as it takes to stop feeling feelings anymore.

John’s emotional support gilding wasn’t the only thing breaking the bank as Christiaan broke out the porcini mushrooms and truffle oil for his mushroom themed bread

I did enjoy the use of the muffin tin to give his buns a more mushroom-like shape, I thought that was a clever technique that both achieved the result and completely avoided the potential of accidentally creating a dozen breaded chodes

Prue had a few concerns about the combination of truffle and porcini – there’s only so much you want your food to taste like you’re eating money. She was pleasantly surprised though.

In complete juxtaposition to Christiaan going all out on luxury ingredients, Andy being a Man of the People™ was flavouring his bread with the plebians’ chorizo: Pepperami Sticks

my relationship with Andy is a chaotic pendulum. As a card carrying member of the Let’s Go to Big Tesco community, anyone who owns a white van activates my Flight or Fight Response. But he also dresses like a character from Recess

and made Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith eat Pepperami sticks and for some reason I think that’s the funniest thing anyone on this show has ever done

sure there’s “Oven!?”, “I can’t make Mary Berry eat carpet!”, Squirrel McBig-Balls and everything Norman ever did over the course of 5 episodes. But Paul Hollywood very seriously critiquing bread flavoured like a child’s over-processed meat snack is top tier for me

especially when you’ve got Mike with his organic home-grown lamb and Gill with an entire butcher’s window of meat going into her rolls

given that she was doing 1-to-1 ratios and she had 1kg of bread dough, I had hoped her buns would end up looking more comedically large than they actually did

I think they’re still legally classified as weapons and you’d struggle to get them onto a plane as carry-on luggage but Paul’s horror at her quantities made it sound like she was creating some sort of Black Pudding Godzilla.

Lastly, but never leastly, we have Nelly with her fusion of a Pakistani curry filling and a Slovakian dough inspired but her and her husband

Paul was weirdly sceptical of triangular shaped buns – I don’t quite know why, he gleefully smiled and nodded as Sumayah explained hers were going to look like sunflowers but GOD FORBID A WOMAN DABBLE IN GEOMETRY

but she showed him

he did think they lacked a certain degree of kick, at which point Nelly just told him he should’ve tried the chutney and then laughed at him when he only tried the smallest amount of it

I’m beginning to understand why he may not have known what Gochujang was.

A Filled Roll Ranking:
1. Paul Hollywood Discovers Gochujang
2. A Grating of Parmesan Short of Greatness
3. Nelly’s Adventures in Geometry
4. At Last! Non-phallic Mushrooms!
5. Stealth Pepperami
6. PLEASE DON’T FAINT ILLIYIN, THIS IS A GOOD PLACEMENT.
7. Gill’s Black Pudding Kaiju
8. Mike Because I forgot What He Did After 3 Minutes
9. Sumayah is 9th But The Distance Between her and John is Immeasurable
10. John’s Greek Salad Geodes with *jazz hands* Gold Leaf

Wreathing in Pain _{(it’s a French pun)}

In this nouveau resetting of the Bake Off Vibe, they were once again trying something a little different for their Bread Week Technical Challenge. Much like their Dissection of a Battenburg Challenge, the bakers once again found themselves completely instructionless

Instead it was reading glasses at dawn as they were being given a demonstration on how to make a 7 stranded plaited wreath by Paul himself

Or if you’re Dylan, it’s a “Watch and Make”

he’s young and still in that university mindset of trying to hit an essay word count – why use 1 word when you can use 3?

There weren’t all that many specifications for this challenge – it just had to be round with a hole in the middle, some nice definition on the outside and be thoroughly smoochable

Prue Leith has been banned from every bakery in Kent. She’s a danger to white bread everywhere.

Dylan’s enthusiasm for the challenge and Bread Week as a concept would come to a crashing halt as he very quickly forgot most of Paul’s instructions and ended up with a 7-stranded hernia

and by the end of the challenge had fallen out so badly with Bread Week that he could only dejectedly inspect his herniating loaf of bread and ponder if it would be better to just serve Paul and Prue his Christmas clingfilm craft project

he did end up plummeting from a handshake in the Signature to last place for this technical – inside of you are two wolves and both of them are Dylan trying to bake bread. But John wasn’t far behind as he and bread continued to be mortal enemies. His big bread sin being that he’d lost the hole and just made a cottage loaf

it was also slightly underproved, an issue that held a few of the bakers back. Somehow Andy had managed to overcome that issue despite having had to start his dough mixture again because he’d just read the list of ingredients and heaped them all into a bowl, not really stopping to fully contemplate “Why am I putting a whole egg into this dough?”

I do kind of wish that he’d pressed onwards with the eggy dough purely because I want to know what that would’ve looked like. But he had started again and still managed a podium placement, getting third for a pretty good wreath!

he only lost out to Sumayah in second and Nelly pursuing 1st place with the same unquenchable desire for finesse as an Olympic gymnastics coach

if she’d had the time that loaf of bread would’ve come out doing a handspring while wearing a bedazzled leotard. Instead she’d just had to settle with giving it a little mini-plait to hide the join between the two ends of her plait

I for one would die for the tiny breaded friendship bracelet.

HornHub

For their last go at Red Bread Redemption, the bakers were having to make elaborate bread centerpieces consisting of a cornucopia filled with at least 2 different kinds of bread. Given the meaning of the Cornucopia (you know, before Suzanne Collins made it about child-on-child murder) there was a sort of unofficial Thanksgiving theme where it was themed around something the bakers were grateful for. As was to be expected there was a lot of “Friends and Family” – Illiyin choosing to represent this through every single one of her breads being in some way plaited

there was a sort of Cypriot theme to her flavours with her use of halloumi, olives and sun-dried tomatoes which of course had Paul riding high on his high horse

this has very similar energy to your dad saying “just a pinch of celery salt, trust me!” when he gives you a bolognese recipe that he doesn’t know came from Delia Smith in 1986.

With four and a half hours to do the challenge in and £10 in her pocket, she did manage to bribe a member of production to nip to the nearest supermarket to get her some dried mint so Paul was full of compliments for her flavours

that or she cornered Mike and shook him until enough organic homegrown mint fell out of his pockets. As or Mike’s own cornucopia, he’d gone for a Cornucopia inspired by Zeus

they never allowed him to explain why, so allow me to don my Greek Mythology Kid Hat! As a baby, Zeus was hidden in a cave and cared for by a foster mother, Amaltheia, because his dad wanted to eat him. Amaltheia also happened to be a goat (this is D-tier weirdness in the grand scheme of Greek Myth.) Super-strong baby Zeus accidentally broke off one of Amaltheia’s horns which turned out to have the ability to provide unending food and nourishment and thus gave Amaltheia’s equally bountiful nipples a break from the baby’s unquenchable thirst.
I’m sure that the only reason they didn’t show him explaining it is because there’s at least a 30 minute tangent in his explanation in which he recites The Iliad, so the only fully usable footage of Mike was him giving the most middle class soundbite you’ve ever heard

but while Mike will braid anything that sits still for long enough, Dylan had been bitten once by a French braid and was now twice shy

his cornucopia was inspired by the two cats he is incredibly grateful for and definitely not the dog he has been forced to begrudgingly accept

He was also filling his cornucopia with a very generous three breads – a cat-shaped cottage loaf, amaretto doughnuts and Maple Bacon Knots (what is knot tying but braiding that tricked the boy scouts?)

it is an absolutely fantastic looking display – the loaf didn’t end up looking at all like the cat that the illustration promised

but given how clean and crisp everything looked, Paul and Prue just completely glossed over that because it all tasted phenomenal to boot as Dylan’s bread pendulum swung back to Paul’s Golden Child

the only real competition for how perfect their cornucopia looked was Gill’s Devonshire Coast inspired display

but she’s, I think rather unfairly, getting the annual Boring Baker edit and will probably always land in the top 3 but never get Star Baker before getting eliminated during a week where she can’t rely on “classic British flavours”

her greatest sin was being a regionally accented woman over the age of 50.

Joining Gill in drawing inspiration from a favourite holiday, Andy was making a New York themed Cornucopia in which he was celebrating the best pizza he’d ever had. Alongside the pizza inspired buns would be other classically American inspired breads such as pretzels and… focaccia for some reason?

aside from the obvious problem that in the current climate anything even vaguely American themed should come with a content warning – the bigger problem for Andy was that his pretzels weren’t pretzels

the pizza buns were… the opposite of pizza

and unsurprisingly focaccia that’s been forced into the shape of a muffin just isn’t focaccia bread

Andy, quick! Claim it’s a commentary on how the all-American identity is a sham! A facade of elitism that nobody can truly live up to and is only used as a political tool to- *a shepherd’s crook pulls me off the soapbox*

Andy was also slightly let down by his distinctly unsuper-sized horn, a problem that also cropped up for John

the size of John’s horn did turn out to be the least of his issues, but I still enjoyed this match-cut of Georgie and Mike fighting the concept of space and mass to get their horns to fit in the oven while John’s very small horn slipped straight in

but as they say, “size doesn’t matter”. However, that’s not the full quote. The actual saying is “Size doesn’t matter when your bagels are sinking like stones”

this would be my biggest fear of going on Bake Off – having something I can do with my eyes closed at home going horribly wrong and knowing there’s going to be a million people at home rolling their eyes at my hubris. At least he had Alison on hand for a hug and some sage competitive advice

I always forget how far Alison actually got on Strictly, mostly because every routine she did is eclipsed by the single best 90 seconds of television that is her running around like a horned up bedsheet during her Wuthering Heights American Smooth

she was in the Bottom 2 for that as well BECAUSE THE BRITISH PUBLIC HAS NO TASTE but Aljaz didn’t have to threaten to Showgirls someone because she was up against Scott Mills as Uncle Fester

the fact they realised Scott Mills had neither the allure nor dance ability to pull off being Gomez Addams <3

John did manage to push through his bagel crisis, hoping that the look of his cornucopia and world’s straightest gay buns would be enough to pull him through

I don’t quite know how the bagels fitted into the Pride theme so just assume they’re transgender because we famously do not float

there’s a lot of INSANE conspiracies theories about us trans people but my favourites are our apparent lack of buoyancy and inability to use elevators.

Personally, I probably wouldn’t have served up the bagels that looked like Dr. Fuji’s failed attempts at cloning the pokemon Mew

but he did have to serve at least two different kinds of bread to meet the criteria so open wide and eat your disappointing Mewtwo

I would build an obviously unsafe submarine to see footage of Paul Hollywood actually eating the Titanics of the bagel world. Just a nibble. At the very least a little kiss. KISS THE DENSE TRANSGENDER BAGELS PAUL!

Not helping John was the fact the flavours of his edible buns weren’t punchy enough, a problem that Sumayah also had despite her display looking as pretty as you’d expect from her

but her concha breads lacked flavour, although her Paprika and Cayenne Pepper flavoured cornucopia did at least somewhat make up for them.
Christiaan was in a similar boat – his floral display looked good but fell short in the flavour department

and came with the added concern that his attempt at creating orchids out of bread did look a little bit more like a mesopotamian fertility symbol than one would probably hope for

it also looks like it should be sweet and yet it was flavoured with stilton and onion, or at least in theory it was – the stilton got a little lost amongst everything else.

Nelly however was going to make absolutely sure that the judges could taste EVERYTHING – whether it be but shoving a quantity of poppy seeds into each bun that would get the airport sniffer dogs going after you

or just good, old fashioned threats

I wouldn’t wish being cast on The Apprentice on my worst enemy but I do think Nelly would be an unstoppable force of salesmanship – I don’t think you’d have any other choice than to buy 3 dozen poorly made novelty cupcakes out the back of an unmarked white van from her. Her cornucopia however was anything but poorly made

there’s a good argument to be made that she should’ve been Star Baker this episode but… Dylan’s bakes did fit with the more Paul Hollywood approach to baking that tends to get prioritised during Bread Week and she’s got this whole Quest for Finesse storyline going on which I imagine can come to better fruition during Caramel Week or Desserts Week.

Lastly we have Georgie who was going for an autumnal harvest themed Cornucopia decorated with the farmhouse mice that have successfully bullied her into liking them

it was also a very pretty looking display and her chosen breads accompanied it really well with her pumpkin buns letting her down ever so slightly by being underproved but her buns filled with Legally Vague Chocolate Spread were very well received

was she called “a bit boring” for making glorified Nutella sandwiches? No, she was not.

An Unofficial Cornucopia of Bread Ranking:
1. EVERYONE BUT YOU, YOU ADORABLE CORGI.
2. JUSTICE FOR GILL
3. Nelly By Threat Alone
4. Georgie’s Ode of Pumpkin Spice Season
5. Illiyin’s Family of Knots
6. Mike’s One Man Production of The Iliad
7. Sumayah Half Arsing Bread Week <3 <3 <3
8. A Bouquet of Fallopian Orchids
9. Andy’s Unamerican New York
10. John’s Cornucopia of Corporate Pride

Between his Signature and Showstopper, Dylan was the undeniable winner. However that rock bottom placement for his Technical threw a bit of a spanner in the works. But when have they ever cared about the Technical? So they shrugged and gave him Star Baker anyway

I think they maybe should’ve given it to both Dylan and Nelly but as I said, I imagine it’s Nelly’s to lose in a week where refinement is key.

The elimination was much less suspenseful. They tried their best to play up Andy’s lack of success in the Showstopper, however he did come third in the technical and… we all heard Paul Hollywood lavishing praise on the flavour of Pepperami sticks so inevitably it was John getting the boot

should’ve got the marbles out, babs.

and so, Caramel Week approacheth!