We are under no circumstances calling it a Paul Handy.

This recap sank last week, so I rebuilt it anew out of gingerbread.

A Slice of Life

For their Biscuit Week Signature, the bakers were having to make a batch of biscuits that were baked with an inlaid pattern. However this is the big leagues so they didn’t want anything as simple as a checkerboard

which might honestly have been a more complicated pattern than Nadia making Avocado-shaped biscuits which is just 3 concentric oblongs

meanwhile you have some bakers tackling things like ancient Byzantine architecture, lovingly (or scornfully) rendering the faces of their pets in biscuit dough or Pui Man offering gender affirming care to cattle

Protect the Dølafe.

Pui Man’s cattle gender spectrum were inspired by the fact she was born in the Year of the Ox and given that throughout the rolling and shaping process the biscuits fluctuted between looking like Lightning McQueen and Darumaka

she ended with more bovinesque biscuits than I had anticipated, granted the ears and horns made out of fondant, and are therefore ILLEGAL, are doing a lot of the visual language here

I honestly think the judges were a bit too harsh on these not looking enough like bulls – I think it’s actually a really good rendering of a bull’s face in the style of a Chinese opera mask, which was some part of Pui Man’s inspiration.

I was honestly amazed by most of these biscuits (Sorry Nadia, those were just circles). I wouldn’t even know where to begin with making something like Tom’s Hagia Sophia

the skill in doing that is unreal. However, amongst the whimsy of Jessika’s little breakfast biscuits (my personal favourites)

and Toby’s splicing of canine and feline DNA to create’s Man’s Best Frenemy

Tom’s being so rigid and him trying to force a Handshake with Paul (WE. ARE. NOT. CALLING. IT. A. PAUL. HANDY.) through the power of his mind, they do leave me cold in that they feel specifically designed handshake-first

relax my guy, you’re going to sprain your hippocampus.

While Tom managing to construct Minecraft’s Hagia Sophia was very well done, I think the most ambitious biscuits were Aaron’s baby biscuits which had a stupid amount of detail and still came out incredibly well

I don’t entirely think dipping the back of them into chocolate was necessary – both flavour-wise and because I think the butterfly effect of Alison never getting to say this would only lead to a better world

you go and sit on the Matt Lucas Naughty Chair and think about the amount of psychic damage you inflicted on Paul

she gets a reduced sentence because I do love to see him miserable.

While Aaron’s main baby biscuits were very good, the star of his Signature Challenge was very obviously the uncanny Noel Fielding Biscuit

it also looks like Mike Wazowski if he listened to a little bit too much Secondhand Serenade

tonoight will be the noight tha o I will faioll foir youiuuuuu.

The last of the face biscuits was from Iain who was creating a batch of wanted posters for an outlaw wanted for festive grand larceny

I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t think Victor would ever do anything wrong in his life. MY MAN IS INNOCENT, I TELL YOU! The real villain in this situation is the creator of the white chocolate mincemeat ganache

they’re really good and I suspect Iain may have regretted it once he watched Paul punch one of them in the face

and yet still more identifiable as a cat than Lesley’s were as cupcakes

I keep staring at them, trying to see a joke I can make about what they look like and just nothing… they don’t look like ANYTHING. It’s just a gathering of shapes and colours, like a Montessori lesson in a sandpit.

The trick to this challenge was very much trying to find something that has a very simple and easy to understand shape language. I think cupcakes probably take a little bit too much explaining and preamble to get to deducing what they are. Whereas something like Jasmine’s sailing boats are obvious sailing boats

this is exactly how the Spanish Armada went – we’d all be speaking Spanish now if it weren’t for that giant pink seal and titanic duck coming in to save the day.

The other real trick to this challenge was trying to cut the biscuits without squashing and distorting the pattern, something Nataliia wasn’t entirely successful with

because SOMEONE was hogging all the dentistry supplies

I did really love Leighton’s oranges and thought they came out pretty spectacularly – ignore the potato quality of this screenshot, that one particular moment didn’t want to render above 240p

again – on a whole, I think this was actually a really good Signature Challenge given that it could’ve gone so horribly wrong. I mean, nobody was shovelling melting biscuits onto a plate.

An Unofficial Sliced Picture Biscuits Ranking:
1. Tom’s Unquenchable Thirst to Win
2. Jessika’s Big Breakfast
3. VICTOR DID NOTHING WRONG.
4. Jasmine’s Historically Accurate Spanish Armada
5. Days of Fielding Past
6. Orange You Glad You Flossed?
7. Toby’s Catdog Reboot
8. A Rose By Any Other Dimensions
9. Lesley’s Visual Stimulation
10. Pui Man’s She/Herd Biscuits
11. So Close!! That is a Shape 💕

Hobnobbing

For their Biscuit Technical the bakers were tasked with creating a batch of Chocolate and Caramel Hobnobs (the worst kind of hobnobs) and were given one instruction from Prue

which is more of an instruction than the list of demands masquerading as a recipe they were given to follow

THAT’S NOT A RECIPE, THAT’S JUST A BRIEF!

the misleading thing about the probe is that a lot of people thought it was just for the chocolate but it was also for the caramel. Nadia however was just occasionally prodding something with the thermometre because of peer pressure

I just hope she was on the other side of the tent to Jasmine

however, sometimes peer pressure works as Nadia did manage to come second, moreso for her perfect ratio of caramel and chocolate to biscuit than for her feathering, some of which looked like it had been done by a duck hitting water

and she was only beaten by Toby who has rapidly become this year’s Designated Technical Challenge Android

and that’s about where the real success stories end as while Toby’s are feathered like an award winning Wyandotte show chicken, Leighton’s were more a case of one of those city pigeons making do with 3 toes between both feet

but the real disaster of this round was from Pui Man who spent a great deal of the challenge basically trying to make sandcastles out of muesli because she’d made the mistake of not cutting the hobnobs out before baking them

with not a biscuit to speak of, she didn’t really have any choice but to then just stick her oaten rubble into the setting moulds and hope that it would all hold together, a bit like your GP throwing IAPT services at you while you’re on a three year waiting list

the problem was then getting the hobnob debris out of the moulds and I don’t think anything this series will manage to be funnier to me than Nataliia celebrating her own excavation of a perfect hobnob

and then seeing Pui Man facilitating the world’s worst archaeological dig and backing away slowly like Homer Simpson into the hedge

her guilt did bring her back and between her and Pui Man

they did manage to flop 6 and a half biscuits onto the plate for judging like the last of the Moa’s plunging off the edge of a cliff by accident

AND YET, despite having critiqued Pui Man’s self-inflicted extinction event and Leighton feathering with all the delicacy and finesse of a swan on ice

Paul decided to just kick Lesley in the shins for no reason

they did still at least give her 9th place, allowing her to beat Pui Man and Leighton’s tandem nosedive into the accidental moa mass grave.

An Official Hobnob Ranking:
1. Toby the Hobnob-bot
2. Nadia’s Peer Pressured Hobnobs
3. Nataliia’s Sutton Hoo-bnobs
4. Jasmine’s Proportionally Accurate Hobnobs
5. Iain’s Partially Feathered Anxious Hobnobs
6. Tom’s Blood Lust for a Win
7. Jessika’s Jackson Pollocked Hobnobs
8. Aaron’s Feathered Poetic License
9. Lesley’s Not Least After All!
10. Leighton’s Bumble-footed Hobnobs
11. Pui Man’s Base-jumping Moa Birds

Time Done

Another year, another desperate bid to find any other use for gingerbread on Bake Off as the bakers were asked to create a Biscuit Time Capsule filled with 5 biscuit mementoes – gingerbread not explicitly required, but what other choice do you really have? An Orange and Limoncello Sugar Cookie?

NADIA, NO!
She did at least manage to pull it back and by the end of it did have a fully standing Italian Picnic basket with some macarons shaped like the cherry tomatoes that have been in your vegetable basket for so long they’ve started oozing slightly

she wasn’t the only baker going for a picnic basket, with Jasmine turning out this really charming creation

and the biscuits inside, all themed around her life in Scotland and how much she misses it, were equally well done

I think hers would’ve been my favourite if it hadn’t been for the momentous rise of Pui Man from the ashes – who was risking a rather portentous make with the Jumbo Restaurant Boat that sunk just 3 years ago

I feel like deciding to making a sunken novelty restaurant out of gingerbread on Bake Off is the equivalent of bellowing “MACBETH!” in the National Theatre. AND YET, I quite honestly want to shake her hand myself for this creation – it’s astounding, quite honestly

you can really tell she’s a dressmaker and knows her way around a pattern given how well engineered the whole thing is – I somehow doubt there’s a downloadable Jumbo Boat gingerbread pattern out there ready and waiting to go

also, I appreciate anyone who makes a biscuit that could cause blunt force trauma

I think the only thing that really stopped her getting the full handshake treatment was that if anyone got it before him, Tom would waste no time in a biscuit being used for blunt force trauma. And hopefully he can just relax now that’s he’s got the Hollywood Polycule he wants

you know what they say, the quickest way to a man’s heart is with a Cardamom Spiced Recreation of Your Danish Grandmother’s Cottage

it really is immaculate and his flavours were interesting and varied – not a lot of the bakers seemed to do multiple different biscuit flavours but Tom had brandy snap cigars filled with lemon cream, Chocolate Orange Digestives and Peanut Butter Cream baskets. There was a lot of work, so much that his hair melted

and he deserved the congratulations. But, I do need him to chill. Lesley’s dog can help with that, I hear.

While we all focused on Pui Man’s shipwreck, we all failed to see the piano falling atop Leighton’s head

the funniest thing about this bake is the fact, it’s relatively simple – there’s like 10 pieces to that piano and yet somehow whenever they cut to Leighton his cooling rack fortification were gradually expanding like a civilisation in Age of Empires

they can’t eliminate you if they can’t reach you in your impregnable cooling rack fort!
They did eventually have to rein him in and ask him to stop booby trapping the place by leaving his baking trays lying around like trous de loup

as much for liability reasons as because Iain needed them

Iain’s was probably most “That’s just a box” of them all, with his record player design that was largely made interesting due to the working turntable

the dumbbell is never explained and we never get to see Paul trying to shove a whole flowerpot into his mouth. However, his Lemon and Pistachio biscuits were very highly praised.

Everyone at least ended the episode with their gingerbread time capsules standing up, which I think is genuinely impressive. Granted, Nataliia’s was trying its best to not stand up anymore

but she was at least trying something a bit interesting with the drawer mechanism as opposed to just having a lid. Toby however had devised the perfect lid mechanism for his treasure chest – which did look very good

and he proved that he knows what a dog looks like

just don’t play poker with him…

the viscera of the playing card murder aside, why is the ace of spades red, Toby? WHY IS THE ACE OF SPADES RED, TOBY!?

The fact the ace of spades had bled all over the place wasn’t the end of Toby’s horror as Paul proceeded to say everything tasted horrible and/or boring

and deemed the whole thing “style over substance” which I think might have been a little bit *too* mean and Toby will certainly spend the next few sleepless nights playing this over and over again

Toby-bot 3000 just wants more from life than the Technical Challenges. He wants to experience joy, to frolic in the fields and pat… he believes you call it “a dog”?

Speaking of dogs, Lesley’s story about her dog getting high is an all time Bake Off anecdote

who hasn’t gone into their local woods and returned with an accidental 2 day contact high? Sadly, the show would not allow Lesley to render the baggy of weed as a shortbread biscuit, so instead her time capsule was The Seaside and Patriotism

it was very good and the judges were particularly receptive to her fish and chips made out of Viennese Whirl dough. It was all very pristine but I do think there was an over reliance on stencils and cutters. Which is fine, but I do think it takes away some of the personality and does limit you to doing very obvious things that come across as impersonal. Which brings us nicely to Aaron who tried his best to render his childhood cat and his graduation scroll as biscuits. The result was… the ectoplasmic ghost of his childhood cat coming back with a vengeance

and umm…

What did the “D” in your PhD stand for?

Aaron was at least successful with his flavours. The earl grey shortbreads and his yuzu sugar cookie went down a treat but the whole thing did look a little bit like a failed Minecraft build you got bored of building halfway through and went to go start an axolotl farm instead (I have done one (1) thing on Minecraft)

if you block out the bridge, it’s not *that* bad – I mean, the cherry blossom effect on the side doesn’t exactly have the delicate etherealness of a cherry tree in full blossom

it looks like it was done by a plasterer named Brian who thinks your tea making skills aren’t up to scratch and listens to Heart Radio at an obnoxious volume.

Lastly we have Jessika who had a few interesting twists on the brief up her sleeves – choosing to inlay her box design with stained glass isomalt windows – I only wish she’d popped a little light inside to really sell the effect

but possibly more impressive was her little biscuit puppet

I just have to hope this isn’t an ominous portent of events to come

DIVA DOWN!

An Unofficial Biscuit Time Capsule Ranking:
1. The Jumbo Boat 2: What’s The Worst That Could Happen?
2. Tom’s Sated Thirst for a Win
3. Jasmine’s High(lands) Placement
4. Jessika’s Hopefully Unportentous Puppet
5. Nadia’s Italian Picnic
6. Well, well, well… How the Turntables
7. Marley’s High but Lesley’s Low-safe
8. Nataliia’s Topless Cake
9. Toby-bot 3000 Experiencing… emotions? *beep* *boop*
10. Burning Unconstructed Bridges
11. Leighton’s Ungrand Piano

I would honestly have given Pui Man the title of Star Baker this week purely for executing the perfect three act structure and hero’s journey – truly an iconic episode for her. However, it could only go to Tom. Both because of his effort and because if it didn’t, there may have been blood

and as for elimination, Pui Man was sailing through to bread week upon her sinking ship. Leaving the judges to discuss Leighton, Toby-bot 3000 and Aaron. I thought Aaron was a goner to be honest and was a little shocked that Leighton went

it does at least mean the tent will be a lot easier to traverse now that nobody’s creating an obstacle course of cooling racks.

And so, to Bread Week!