I don’t think anything sums up this episode of Bake Off better than that.

I too feel like a slightly too warm cake barely clinging to life.

In what feels like a deliberate attempt to fry my brain, somehow we have ended up with a brief overlap of Bake Off and Sewing Bee on the same at just about the same time

so I am doing my best to keep afloat between recapping them, training as a nail tech and planning a D&D campaign with a group of players that routinely scam people out of money using a flying monkey in horse races, make baseless accusations of shapeshifting and have a habit of not preparing for a single situation. I love them, they are perfect goobers.
Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons, here are this year’s Bake Off contestants as sorted into what class and species they would be because I am hyperfixating and have the insatiable urge to sort and categorise people

they’re the perfect party to stop the end of the world. And if they want to get on with it, that’d be nice…

High Rollers

As ever, we start with Cake Week and the Signature Challenge being for the bakers to create a Swiss Roll that was filled with two different fillings and had an inlaid design on the outside. Some people went more all out with the inlaid design than others, all Lesley did was a few horizontal stripes that vaguely hinted to her Blueberry and Lemon fillings

while Tom made a Swiss roll that looks like it was a pair of spiked shoes short of managing to pass the St. Andrew’s golf club dress code

I was worried that I’d never be able to tell Tom, Toby and Iain apart because they are all just a varying amount of hobbits in a trench coat – but it does become very easy, very quickly because if you can barely see him above the counter it’s Short King, Iain

if he’s skulking around the tent looking a bit like he’s about to murder someone in an Agatha Christie novel, it’s Tom

and if he’s neither of those things, He’s Just Toby™

and Just Toby™ had a bit of a momentary nightmare when he had to restart the creme pat for his Rhubarb and Custard Swiss Roll

but he managed to mostly pull it together by the end and did have by far the longest roll of the lot and size counts for quite a lot when it comes to judging cakes

it obviously doesn’t have as pronounced a swirl as you’d want from a Swiss Roll but at least it was holding its shape instead of slipping through his fingers like the plasmatic concept of an eel succumbing to its own existentialism

has there ever been a more prophetic series of events than Hassan breaking a sieve within the first few minutes of being in the tent

and throwing an axe only for it to come flying back at him

I love him. He’s perfect. And here’s how he can still win the whole show

at least he can rest assured that his coffee, chocolate and caramel sauce that his Swiss Roll had turned into was tasty

I guess he really did achieve the impossible

because of the inlaid design, there wasn’t a lot of chocolate in the tent. The optimal flavour instead being Lemon with 5 of the contestants opting for it. The Lemoniest of them all probably being Leighton’s biblically accurate lemon pig

it is something of a miracle that it had that pattern at all considering he had to scrape the sponge back into the bowl after pouring it over the design because he’d forgotten the flour

it’s also a miracle that anyone could eat it at all considering it apparently had the near impenetrable hide of a Sumatran rhinoceros

if nothing else, he’s at least discovered a new sustainable building material.

As for the rest of the lemon party

Jasmine was going for a classic pairing of raspberry for a very well structured roll but slightly over-baked sponge

while Pui Man was going for something a little more divisive, packing her Lemon Sponge with a Matcha Cream until her Spongebob Time Card burrito begged for mercy

Paul appears to have decided that he doesn’t hate Matcha anymore because Bake Off has to try and court Gen Z. Which is why we have scary modern concepts like the confusing things Jessika as Oliver Klozoff makes you feel

that’s just Dylan

I’M ON TO YOU, JESSIKA.
As for her Swiss Roll she’d gone for the most intriguing flavour combination of Peppered White Chocolate and Grapefruit because she wants to brag that she’s not anxious or on HRT (and I took that personally)

I do like the interplay between her inlaid design and the 3D effect, she certainly managed it slightly better than Aaron whose 3D honeycomb was more of on obstruction than a design element

the transition between the two just needed to be slightly smoother and I think he would’ve been on to a real winner with this one because they loved the balance between his Honey and Blueberry fillings. I do however want to run a 6 episode investigative podcast pondering the question “Why isn’t the bee themed Swiss Roll honey flavoured?”

Prue was worried that Iain’s take on Fifteens would be much too sweet as it gets its name because it’s made with 15 digestives, 15 marshmallows, 15 glacé cherries, a tin of condensed milk and takes 15 years off your life every time you have it. He was also going for by far the most ambitious inlaid design, hoping to render Queen’s University and pulled it off better than anyone really should’ve been able to

it’s very much the First Year of University vs Hassan’s being the Third Year of University

I can’t have been the only one that sat down and wept like a lukewarm caramel Swiss Roll in a Tesco Café while I sent emails to my lecturers begging for extensions to assignments, right? PLEASE TELL ME I AM NOT ALONE.

While Iain’s flavours were really well received in the end – he’d forgone the Condensed Milk so the sweetness was just right. Nadia wasn’t quite successful. There’ll always be one person who doesn’t learn that almond essence is the trigger than turns Paul Hollywood into a reptile

she’d also had a bit of a ruptured rolling

which she tried to hide with a spackling of flaked almonds – the pebbledash of the culinary world and was about as successful at hiding the lack of structural integrity as the average landlord

And lastly we have Nataliia who was giving her Swiss Roll an almost embroidered inlaid design of her favourite Ukrainian wildflowers and a filling of passionfruit and mango

I don’t know if it was the best inlaid effect – it gets a little bit messy and indistinguishable for me. But the Mango and Passionfruit combination will always be a real winner.

An Unofficial Swiss Roll Ranking:
1. The Start of University
2. Tom’s Golf Playing Swiss Role
3. Nataliia’s Tropical Embroidery
4. Aaron’s Detrousered Bees
5. Jessika’s Handywork
6. It’s Jas Lemon
7. Lesley’s Minimal Effort
8. 2 Hours Later…
9. Leighton’s Lemony Rhinocerus
10. Nadia’s Almond Spackling
11. Toby’s Rhubarb-flavoured Long Boi
12. The End of University

Fancy That

For their first ever Technical Challenge the bakers were being thrown in at the deep end with having to create a batch of 9 fondant fancies – a task that was once upon a time the Technical Challenge in the series 3 final. On top of the tricksiness of a fancy, the bakers would not be given a recipe and instead had to backwards engineer everything from their example fancy like they were solving a murder mystery

and no murder mystery is complete without a few red herrings as bottles of essences, flours and bowls of fruit gathered in the living room ready to find out who did it in the tent with the silicon spatula

and of course, the ending has to be a twist

Tom’s face of absolute shock and betrayal at finding out that Paul would use Almond Essence after HOW MANY series of constant complaining about anyone that so much as looked at the stuff <3

so it’s no real surprise that I think everyone had used the ground almonds in the sponge, which resulted in some very squat fancies. Or Tom creating a flapjackian housebrick

granted his fancies looked sturdy, but they did also look a bit like they’d been used to bludgeon someone to death

J’ACCUSE!

Most of the bakers seemed to work out that the flavour profile they were going for was Raspberry and Almond. However, there were a few exceptions with Iain going for honey

and Pui Man going even further left of field with rose water

I like Rosewater – I am team Edmund Did Nothing Wrong By Selling His Siblings To A Witch For Turkish Delight until the day I die (Ben and Adam, I’d do the same thing in a heartbeat) however, it is not a flavour you really want to be unprepared for

and so she was immediately dragged down to 11th place with Tom’s fondant covered cinderblock dragging him to the depths of 12th place. I was surprised Iain managed to beat 4 other bakers given that he flavoured his fancies wrong and had gone for a very Goldilocksian tableau approach to uniformity

the missing 9th one of course being the Just Right one that she ate. It’s really more of a testament to the level of failure that Tom, Pui Man, Jasmine and Hassan achieved

IT’S LIKE YOU WANTED TO BE ELIMINATED FIRST.

At the top of the leaderboard was Toby, however it was not being deemed a success story by any means

the abject failure across the board almost certainly meaning they’ll do all of this again next year with a batch of Mr. Kipling’s Angel Slices.

An Official Fondant Fancy Technical Ranking:
1. NOBODY CLAP FOR JUST TOBY
2. Jessika’s Fondant Fanc-He
3. Nataliia by Virtue of Good Jam
4. Aaron’s Consistent Mess
5. Lesley Fondant Abstraction
6. Leighton’s Cherry on Top
7. Nadia’s Icing Landslide
8. Iain’s Fondant Goldilocks
9. Jasmine’s Fondant Shortstacks
10. Hassan’s Fondant Apathy
11. Pui Man’s Turkish Fright
12. That House That Flapjack Built

Landscape Cakes

For their Showstopper, the bakers were having to create a Landscape Cake. The brief for which probably should’ve specified that the bakers ought to do some sort of 3D carved element because we did end up with a fair few tiered cakes with a design painted onto the side. The most egregious of which was definitely Jasmine’s that was meant to evoke the Scottish Highlands but really was just a gnome short of being a fairytale woodland cake for a 5 year old’s birthday

that being said, the flavour combination of the pistachio mousse and the cardamom cake sounded really lovely

and at least added some interest that Leighton’s Swansea themed Leaning Tower of Victoria Sponge definitely lacked

the landmark decals did make it locale specific, so it’s not like Leighton was relying entirely on you equating a some spartan pine trees and toadstools to Scotland… Leighton had Oystermouth Castle, The Mumbles Lighthouse and those packs of Pekingese dogs that roam the Uplands of West Glamorgan

but at least Leighton and Jasmine had tiers, Lesley’s was literally just a cake

granted, I do like the angle of using Bob Ross’s landscape art as part of the theme, however I do think the execution then has to be a little bit stronger than the sort of viewer submitted art Neil Buchanan had to humour on Art Attack.

I was surprised that the judges were as receptive to Tom’s cake as they were because it is sort of just a location nonspecific cube

it was meant to be Iceland and I can’t really say it’s not Iceland in the same way I also can’t say it’s not Padley Gorge, the Scottish Highlands or Little Goose Creek just outside of Sheridan, Wyoming. I think there could’ve just been something Iceland-specific, it does have plenty of natural wonders: Geysir, Black Sand Beach, Eyjafjallajökull and that hot cat on the boxes of chocolate milk

I would like them to do Hear Me Out Cakes next year. I want to see a pair of millenials going head to head for the affections of Lightning McQueen.

While many of the bakers went with cakes based around their hometowns, there were a number doing their favourite holiday destinations. Nadia was going for a very tropical inspiration of Mauritius rendered in Coconut Sponge and Lime Curd

and she’s got all those famed Mauritian landscape features – palm trees, sand, sea water with the density of a squash ball

but she wasn’t the only one to have water issues as Toby’s monument to Jacob’s Ladder Beach in Sidmouth became a portent of climate disasters to come as his sea went AWOL

just say it’s low tide, babe.

Toby wasn’t the only contending with natural disasters as Iain’s Downhill Strand cake proved a foreboding case of nominative determinism

DEPLOY THE EMERGENCY GRANDMOTHER!

but given that he was the executive producer of Hassan’s Swiss Roll 2: Chocolate Slop Boogaloo it came out astonishingly well once he’d slathered it in enough icing and cooled it to a point that it would successfully maintain a corporeal form

granted this did mean that it was a coin toss as to whether you got any sponge at all or just a mouthful of icing (I am failing to see the issue…)

Paul, I think we just have to chalk it up as a success considering that 30 minutes before this you could’ve eaten that cake through a straw

and I imagine Hassan was feeling awfully relieved as he watched Iain trying to keep his cake on his pedestal like Bruce Bogtrotter got Sisyphused

but then Hassan ran out of time to fully complete his bafflingly pumpkin spice flavoured Japanese bamboo garden

quick, just say it succumbed to a devastating plague of pandas!

The tour of East Asia continued with Pui Man’s coffee and walnut rendition of Lion Rock in Hong Kong through which she used to travel to get to school

the mountain does look a little bit nipple-y and she probably could use a few lessons in tunnel artistry from Wile E. Coyote

I, at the very least, need to believe roadrunner could safely run through it.

While most of the bakers went for one specific monument, Nataliia was giving us a geography lesson on Ukraine in its entirety

beyond just being the world’s most poignant traybake because GOOD LORD, I just think it’s really cleverly done – it’s not overly ambitious in its structure but the painting and texturing of everything was really well done. I was so glad it came out so well because, obviously, it means a lot to her.

Continuing our exploration of mainland Europe, Aaron’s cake was based on Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona – home to Barcelona’s Natural Sciences Museum and the city zoo, itself once home to the world’s only known example of an albino Gorilla

which is unfortunately more interesting than anything Aaron achieved with his unfinished and seemingly solitarily coconut flavoured cake

I do kind of love that it looks like a set piece from Legends of the Hidden Temple though.

Lastly we have Jessika who was taking us to Africa with her Lake Bunyonyi cake that ended up looking a lot like Iain’s cake, but isn’t quite as impressive because it never went through the process of at one point being a swamp of cake more dangerous than the Sundarbans of India

however, the Toffee Apple Cake it was made out of sounded absolutely divine – it’s a tough call between this and Jasmine’s Pistachio and Cardamom cakes as to which one I’d be most interested to try.

An Unofficial Landscape Cake Ranking:
1. Ukrainian Geography 101
2. Iain’s Tectonic Rise
3. Nadia’s Dead Sea
4. Iain’s But With Less Trauma
5. Pui Man vs ACME
6. Location Nonspecific Cube
7. The Welsh Meh-mbles
8. A Happy Little Accident
9. Low Placing Highlands
10. Toby’s Climate Catastrophe
11. Aaron’s Gorillaless Park
12. A Plague of Pandas Ate My Homework

If he’d not had quite such a shocker in the Technical Challenge, I think the judges would’ve given him Star Baker. However, in the end it, I think very deservedly, went to Nataliia

and when it came to the elimination, they tried to make it a little bit suspenseful but between the slowly self-liquidising Swiss Roll and… well, really just the self-liquidising Swiss Roll, Hassan’s only real hope for seeing Week 2 was hoping that they’d decide Week 1 wasn’t an elimination week (as it should be) but alas

He came. He baked. He melted.

And so, 11 go on to Biscuit Week