It might be better if she used the proving drawer and not her mouth.

I’ve been a spiralling circle all week.

Confidence if Monkey Bread

For their Signature Bread challenge the bakers were having to make Monkey Bread – which is very different to a tear and share as Nataliia found out

I hadn’t realised that the average barbary macaque could be quite so discerning. Also, rich coming from a man that CUT THE SHARING LOAVES WITH A KNIFE

cretinous behaviour.

Bread Week is always one of my least favourite to recap because Paul has scared everyone into taking it absolutely seriously making it A whimsiless deadzone. Thus leading to a series of breads that all look the same – you cannot tell me that the editors didn’t mix the footage up and just show this loaf of bread twice

oh… that’s exactly what happened

There were some attempts to give their breads themes, Tom sort of just screamed “FRAAAAAANCE!” like a Miss World contestant with his trio of breads flavoured like French Onion Soup, Croque Monsieur and Steak

I personally just like the mini croissants dancing around it like the Clefairy on Mount Moon

the only baker taking us further afield than Europe was Pui Man with her bread flavoured with a Morning Glory Pesto and Red Bean Paste wearing the same wig Maisie Adam wore on Taskmaster

she had forgotten to glaze them which is why they look like Pizza Express’s always disappointing doughballs – Prince Andrew isn’t the only thing in Pizza Express lacking a sheen. Pui Man did have a slightly struggle with time but despite looking constantly surprised that time does indeed move with every time call

her bake on the bread was actually reasonably good. Aaron however had had a bit of a disaster as he turned out what essentially became a flatbread

and then proceeded to talk about it in the past tense, desperately trying to emancipate himself from it

but that was about as bad as it got for anyone in the tent, I mean Paul continues to tell TobyBot-3000 that’s he’s boring and that he’ll never be a real boy

excuse me, it was anything but boring, his Parmesan Monkey Bread was doubled cheeked up on a thursday afternoon

buns of steels, more cake than bread etc, etc.

Jasmine’s certainly looked the most like what I personally expect a Monkey Bread to look like – the size of her doughballs were perfect

some of her flavours got a little bit lost – most notably the olives. AND OH MY GOD, Paul would not shut up about eating olives with coriander (which I am sure he has talked about on every series for the last 3 years)

I think they were just desperately trying to bully at least one baker into changing their ingredients because we did end up with a multibaker Vaguely Italian monkey bread pile-up

The only successful bullying was into Lesley adding a fraction more stilton to hers and Nataliia’s bread that were sharing a trench coat

and it was still told that it lacked stilton. Jessika however had perfectly pulled off the blue cheese ratio in her picnic season bread that was also filled with figs, walnuts and caramelised onions

I think hers sounded the best to me, but I did also like the sound of Iain’s showcase of three Irish cheeses

what were these Irish cheeses? We don’t know, they were just three anonymous Irish cheeses – we never learned their names. At some point, it really did feel like everyone got thoroughly bored of this challenge and just sped through it. I didn’t think I’d ever long for the days of Frances Quinn who would’ve sculpted a monkey bread to look like the Dr. Zaius chorus singers

Lastly we have Nadia, who was doing a showcase of the Calabria region of Italy which all sounded really lovely

her bake wasn’t perfect and she’d had a bit of an issue with her balls detaching

[incredibly unclassy joke here]

An Unofficial Monkey Bread Ranking:
1. Jessika’s Spot On Stilton
2. Jasmine’s Lost Olives
3. FRAAAAAAAAANCE!
4. The Irish Cheese Witness Protection Programme
5. Nadia’s Detachable Italian Balls
6. Is It Nataliia’s Or Lesley’s? You’ll Never Know
7. Toby’s Ass Friday
8. Is it Nataliia’s or Lesley’s? You’ll Never Know
9. Pui Man’s Beige Balls
10. Aaron’s Divorced Flatbread

D’OH! NUTS!

For their technical challenge the bakers were having to make a batch of 12 doughnuts and, I imagine because there was 10 vats of boiling oil going, they had been given more than 5 instructions!

there were a lot of steps that this could of all gone wrong at, not least of all the part that involved trying to understand what “spiralling circles” meant

while it was the proving and frying times that tripped up most of the bakers, Pui Man was immediately on a back foot on account of boiling her yeast alive like it had been found guilty of murder by poison between the years 1531 and 1547

and she sank to the bottom of the ranking faster than her doughnut to the bottom of the fryer

Aaron however had managed to redeem himself from his Signature Challenge disaster, landing in third just behind Nadia in second and Jasmine taking the top spot despite her misconstruing of a spiralling circle

I was genuinely surprised that so many of the bakers managed to work out what a spiralling circle was – they’d have received a zigzag from me and better have been grateful. The consistency of the icing proved to be more difficult, despite Iain’s best attempts to copy the others

those countertops are just too high and he ended up with a slightly too thin glaze

which was also Toby’s problem as he suffers his first Technical Challenge loss, by which I mean he came fourth

it’s very confusing for TobyBot-3000, he only really understands 1s and 0s.

An Official Doughnut Technical Ranking:
1. Jasmine’s Upwards Spiral
2. Aaron’s Multi-ringed Ring Doughnuts
3. NaiThirdia
4. TobyBot-3000 Does Not Compute
5. Tom’s No Proof of Purchase
6. What do Iain’s Icing and a Refrigerator have in common?
7. Jessika’s Pride Before a Hole
8. Natalia’s Big Doughnuts, Little Doughnuts
9. Lesley’s Greasy Teen Doughnuts
10. Pui Man’s Yeasty Massacre

Celebrate Good Times, Couronne!

For their Bread Week showstoppers, the bakers were making three tiered sweet bread stacks that had to be themed around a specific celebration – this would range wildly from extremely poignant monoliths of personal tragedy to an enjoyment of the lovely autumn foilage

which is barely a celebration, but I did really love the look of Tom’s Cinnamon Bun Tower with the outward facing swirls, or what little we saw of it because I yet again have to complain about how they film these bakes

WOULD A FULL SHOT HAVE KILLED YOU?
At first I thought they were hiding his tree, but it came out a lot more tree-like than anticipated during the creation process that mostly amount to the lifting of turd-like lumps out of a bowl of ice like the worst game of hook-a-duck you’ve ever seen

You won a goldfish (Don’t tell the police!)

I was particularly disappointed that we never got a good full body shot of Aaron’s showstopper considering how much it meant to him, instead the best I can do is this one of Paul ripping the top of it off that doesn’t even show you the sunflower and rose cascade down the front

his take on a French Couronne was dedicated to his two friends, Fidell Brown and Aliesha James, who both died tragically young. He was clearly really emotional during the judging – I think he’d been able to distract himself with the baking process and then once that was done it all caught up to him very quickly. But it was a very successful bake which I think he and everyone else needed it to be.

Things were looking a little dicey for Iain because his Samhain themed bread didn’t go down particularly well with the judges

I think the biggest mistake that both he and Toby made was thinking this had to be structured like a wedding cake. Both of them had MASSIVE base loaves that unsurprisingly refused to cook because they were about the size and density of a Christmas turkey made out of memory foam

YOU ONLY HAD 5 HOURS, MY GUYS! Not even TobyBot-3000’s beta testing heat vision was going to help cook that in time. Granted, I think his was more forgivable because Stollen should always leave you feeling a little bit like you’ve just finished eating your bodyweight in fiberglass loft insulation

I imagine they were both a little bit annoyed when they realise they could’ve got away with something like Jasmine’s relatively low-lying celebration of Midsummer filled with Cardamom and Cinnamon

it really was stunningly well baked and I loved the delicate icing, particularly on the top layer

I preferred the more minimal bakes – the sheer scale of Nadia’s ever increasingly massive buttercream roses were making me feel a little queasy

however, I did absolutely love her showstopper purely on account of her talking a lot about how she wants to get married all while looking like she’d just been caught red handed murdering the groom

I haven’t seen a wedding this red since Edmure Tully married Roslin Frey

her creme pat was so luridly crimson that it stained anything that so much as looked at it and completely altered your DNA if you dared eat it, rumour has it that Nadia’s and Paul’s tongues are still red

While Nadia had made her roses out of buttercream and human blood, Pui Man had made some genuinely rather impressive roses out of bread

I’m still not entirely sure *what* she was celebrating, other than Love, Generically. Nadia’s was at least a traditional regional wedding loaf for her dream wedding to Mr. Yaffle that she’s been thinking about since she was 6. Pui Man mostly talked a lot about removing the rosebush from the front of her house because of bad Feng Shui

and as someone that does indeed celebrate the rose garden scene from Mommie Dearest every year

I do approve of her showstopper wholeheartedly and the judges were pretty dang happy with it to – really liking her use of coconut and glacé cherries and for a bit it did look a little like Pui Man would manage to claw her way out of elimination again.

Love wasn’t the only contest, as Lesley and Nataliia continued to wage wore in their tandem trench coat as they were both making a Ukrainian Korovai. You can see the precise moment that Lesley thinks she’s somehow slipped into an alternate reality where she has WILDLY misjudged the general opinion of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upon finding this out

for a brief moment the think pieces and notes app apology flashed before her eyes. Ultimately she did win the Battles of the Korovai with her general bake being a lot stronger and her decoration being a lot cleaner

as opposed to Nataliia’s that sort of looked like your reels of ribbon that you haphazardly wind back up and shove into the sewing cupboard hoping you’ll never need to use it again

the edible gelatin lace was interesting, but she did need to cut it to size so that it didn’t look quite so much like someone wearing a pair of edible knickers like a blindfold. The fact she’d dyed her bread pink was the more questionable part, it was somehow of the same Colours Bread Shouldn’t Be as Homer’s horrible sandwich

either it got too close to Nadia or perhaps that was just the love

we must protect Nataliia at all costs.

Lastly we have Jessika with her celebration of the chorus in Africa by Toto. She’d worked with farming communities in Uganda and was theming her Japanese milk bread (it was a global affair) around their celebrations once the dry season broke and the rain finally came

it’s actually a really cute cake, sure it’s a little rough in some of its decoration but I thought the isomalt rainclouds were a stroke of genius. The bigger issue was that it was a little boring and needed some sort of fruit filling to add some dimension to both its flavour and texture.

An Unofficial Tiered Sweet Bread Ranking:
1. Aaron’s Couronne-ign Achievement
2. Jasmine Celebrating Florence Pugh Doing Nothing Wrong
3. Lovely Foilage, Shame About The Lack of View
4. The B-Red Wedding
5. Pui Man, BRING ME THE AXE!
6. Lesley, Ukraine Hun?
7. I Bless the Rains Down in Africa
8. Toby’s Stollen Valor
9. Nataliia’s Love-coloured Bread
10. Samhain Some, You Lose Some

If Aaron hadn’t completely flopped his Signature Challenge, I think he’d have been a shoe in for Star Baker. However, the Bread Week honour went to Jasmine who also thoroughly deserved it

while I was fully prepared for Pui Man to “pull a Farie” and flop her way to the semi-final by virtue of Showstoppers alone, I do ultimately think it was the right decision to send her home

I’m sad she never quite found her stride in the tent, she was certainly trying to do interesting things but it just never quite came together for her.

And so, 9 go on to the potentially very ill-advised Back To School Week