If you loiter for too long they have to start paying council tax.

Is a normal pie too much to as ask for?

Better Plait Than Never

Savoury enjoyers rejoice as Pastry Week serves as the usual break from things being filled with any variation on caramel and custard you could possibly conceive – just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone from a small village in Yorkshire appears in the tent with their family recipe for Bovril Caramel.

For their Pastry Signature, the bakers were having to make a Plaited Savoury Pastry – they were doing anything to not call it a sausage roll because I think they were trying to not encourage everyone to come into the tent with a sack of sausage meat

and it did mostly work! Much to Paul’s chagrin, who learns that when you wish for less pork on the Monkey’s Paw, someone will turn up with a vegetarian option and he, like Mister Mxyzptlk if you trick him into reciting his own name backwards, is banished if presented with the concept of tofu

Sir, you are 59 and actively the judge on a piece of food-based programming, just eat the bean curd like a big boy. Prue will make aeroplane noises for you if you ask nicely.
As someone that has been chronically online since 2005 when I discovered the cheat code and gameplay guide community for The Simpsons Hit and Run, my bigger concern for Iain’s Claddagh Ring Plait was this

I’m sure a good amount of you are too pure to have been Goatse’d before, and I cannot in good conscience post the reference image because then I have to classify my blog as a specialist interest site of a different nature AND I’M STRUGGLING ENOUGH WITH ONLINE PRIVACY LAWS ALREADY. (We’re dealing with the Imgur issue, it’s a whole process).
While most of the bakers had gone for just an oblong of minced meat, Iain was attempting the more rarely sighted sausage ouroboros

and while it was ambitious and did retain its shape, his pastry hadn’t quite coloured evenly and the plait ended up losing definition, and the poppy seeds on top scattered like he was haphazardly feeding pigeons wasn’t helping

sadly for Iain, David Schwimmer remains the sole exception in Paul Hollywood’s Anti-Tofu Manifesto that he’s written in his Bluey notebook using red crayon

the flavours of an Irish Stew are probably a little too muted for tofu to carry.

Given that they only had 2 and a half hours, much of which had to be dedicated entirely to trying to cook a slab of sausage meat the size of a newborn baby, most of the bakers opted for the “shortcut” of Rough Puff Pastry – 1 of the 7 pastry disciplines that Aaron used to woo his boyfriend (it’d work on me too, tbh)

however, TobyBot-3000 was going Full Puff, much to Paul’s scepticism

and it became incredibly obvious from this moment that under no circumstances was Paul going to let Toby succeed because even though Toby’s Chicken and Leek Plait looked pretty good

it still wasn’t laminated enough for Paul’s full-blooded puff standards

and then he delivered possibly the most scathing critique that left you wondering if he was talking about the sausage roll or just speaking directly to the fragment of a soul housed in the jumble of scrapheap parts we call Toby

I have never been more convinced that we’re not watching Bake Off anymore and this is now just the Stanford Prison Experiment and Toby is but Paul Hollywood’s most beleaguered lab rat that just wants to experience the loving embrace of Paul’s hand

I truly hope that this lot insistently calling them “Handies” kills the handshake off as a concept. Next year Paul is just handing out curt nods.
The closest someone got to Paul offering them a handshake was Aaron who is still being edged to the very end because despite his Jamaican Beef Patty Plait looking and tasting incredible

it was just ever so slightly underbaked. Not that this would stop Paul from eating most of it later

the handshake is dead, The Paul Hollywood Tupperware To-go Box is the new measure of success on this show.

Aaron wasn’t the only one to have a slightly underbaked plait, with Nataliia’s Monolith to Kyiv also being underbaked

she scores maximum points just for the concept of “What if a Chicken Kyiv, But Bigger? No. BIGGER!”

The problem for her was the sheer amount of garlic butter inside it, which had rather sodden her pastry – but she was overjoyed by the amount of garlicky, buttery goodness oozing out of every crevasse

as she should be!

Tom was taking us even further afield, using his time in Hong Kong as the inspiration for his Dragon Tail shaped Sausage Plait that looked more like one of the Iceland Party Platter tempura prawns

he was attempting to broaden Paul Hollywood’s palate with the use of a fermented chilli paste, that I am 90% sure is gochujang or at least gochujang adjacent, and which Paul Hollywood claims to have never had before

DID DYLAN MEAN NOTHING TO YOU, PAUL? I know his fumbling of that finale was some of the most flabbergasting television you’ll ever see

but you can’t fully disown him!
The filling of Tom’s Jumbo Prawn Plait got high praise for the texture and level of the Mysterious Never Before Tasted Chilli Paste, however the pastry was not taken to very keenly and getting one minor critique immediately sends Tom into a downward spiral looking for the highest point at which he can throw himself from

and has him lowering his goal of winning the whole show to simply curb stomping TobyBot in the Technical to win senpai’s approval

maybe we just do a rerun of the psych-evals quickly?

Lesley was walking on thin ice this week, using Paul Hollywood’s sausage roll recipe but making it even more off-putting by running a gooseberry compote through the centre of it – I’m put off gooseberries for life because my childhood friend used to have them in his garden and they were NEVER nice

however, Prue deemed it a massive improvement and elevation on Paul’s basic-ass sausage meat

and things were also going very well for Jasmine, as you’d expect. Like every countryfile presenter that does anything ever, it does seem like Jasmine is just good at everything she turns her hand to

put her on Strictly, I need to see her doing a pitch perfect jive.

An Unofficial Plaited Sausage Roll Ranking:
1. Aaron’s Plait to Go
2. Oops, I Did It Again: The Jasmine Story
3. Lesley’s Gooseberry Tinkering
4. What Is This? An Iceland Party Platter For Giants?
5. The Stanford Prison Off
6. Nataliia’s Death by Garlic Butter
7. Tof-oops

Ooh Gala

For their Pastry Technical the bakers were dabbling in Hot Water Crust, clearly not one of the 7 pastry disciplines that Aaron uses to woo his suitors

the task for their Technical Challenge was for them to create a Gala Pie – a holdover from the period of time where the fanciest thing you could do with food was to hide a second food inside it! The Gala Pie’s signature being the stealthy parade of eggs lying in wait to shock and surprise your guests when you cut them a slab of your concerningly square pie

despite having sworn off meat for the last 8 years, Iain still managed a silver medaling pork pie, being pipped to the post by Jasmine being accidentally good at everything

everyone seemed to get on pretty okay with making their pastry and filling for the ie – they had after all been treated to a whole 8 step recipe! Most of which may or may not have been teaching the youth about piccalilli

I simply know piccalilli as the jar of disturbing yellow something-or-other that an older relative gave your mum at Christmas and sits in the pantry unopened for years on end, slowly building up a potentially lethal gas bubble.
The bigger struggle was attempting to dismantle the Pork Pie Puzzle Box at the end

do it wrong and you potentially summon a Cenobite that’ll stuff you into the middle of pork pie like a line of lurking eggs.

A few of the bakers had neglected to put the necessary hole in the top to vent out all the Meat Steam™, Tom in particular had to watch his chances of beating Toby in the technical get washed out to sea by a tidal flood of pork juice

the judges were also very critical and specific about the leaf decorations that the tops of the pies were meant to be covered with. Nataliia got the closest with her pork pie hedge but was criticised for the leaves being “too small”

you leave Nataliia and her petite leaves alone! She had also neglected to put the hole in the top of her pie so it was also extremely sodden the entire way through. Both Toby and Lesley had put holes in their pies, but also hadn’t managed to escape their pastry having the texture of the laundry you forgot about and left sit in the washing machine for the whole day

An Official Gala Pie Ranking:
1. My Name’s Jasmine and I’m Doing his Now
2. Iain More By Accident Than Anything Else
3. Lesley’s Pork Laundry
4. TobyBot Feels… Love?
5. Nataliia’s Sodden Pork Hedge
6. Tom’s Rising Pork Tide
7. Aaron’s Structurally Unsound Pork Pie

Tart Attack 2: Structural Boogaloo

The Pastry Week Showstopper is always rather gratuitous in its Not-a-Thingness and this year was no exception with the bakers tasked with creating a Highly Decorative 3D Sculpted Tart. And on top of that, it had to reveal something about the bakers. While many of the bakers were just telling us things we know: Iain is Irish, Lesley has grandchildren, something takes an innate dislike to Toby. Aaron’s disastrous pork pie had him revealing a secret he’d rather take to the grave

Edgar Aaron Poe’s The Tell-tale Tart (you cannot tell me I do not deserve a Pulitzer Prize for the nonsense I scrawl on the walls I call this blog) was that he used to move his friend’s mum’s garden gnome which I do believe is at least partially a form of gaslighting

and thus I regret to say he deserved this

however, despite his gnome having taken to cowboy tree surgery

the bigger issue for Paul was that Aaron had used Jasmine Essence (of the flower, he wasn’t harvesting the baker’s life force…yet)

and Nataliia was in similar trouble when she, all too gleefully, whipped out her secret weapon

Tamar, have you ever seen the show?
But despite the lashings of raspberry essence she’d dumped into her tart, I would say that her Swan Tart almost best fit the brief of a “highly decorated 3d tart structure” better than some

I just think it’s really pretty! Granted, she does have the recurring problem of making tarts that have a pastry so thick they could be the foundation for a block of flats

but maybe that’s just how they do it in Ukraine?

Toby ran into a slight snag, at some point realising this was only a 4 hour challenge and not the 4 and a half hour challenge he’d been programmed for

meaning that his rollercoaster was undergoing some serious Rollercoaster Tycoon engineering that would have your guests pulling angry faces at it while they wandered around the park trying to find the 3 trash cans you hid by the hotdog stand out in the sticks of your park because they don’t match the aesthetic you’re going for

I do find myself longing for the version of Toby who had the starry-eyed look of a baking ingénue that thought he could achieve a loop-the-loop out of pastry before Paul Hollywood killed his sense of wonder and whimsy in his own personal Turing Test

and thus we end up with a straight down plummet – that’s definitely not symbolic of Toby’s general trajectory

As for his inspiration, his tart was inspired by Milly, The Goat That Hated Him and headbutted his knee – it’s what inspired him to wrestle, I assume. And I bet you’re asking “I can see the rollercoaster, but where’s Milly?” and I’m afraid Milly can’t come to the phone right now because she’s been decapitated and interred in the Thorpe Park Mausoleum

I do think Toby’s pastry engineering was actually rather impressive, even if it wasn’t the death defying loop-the-loop he’d once hoped it would be. I do just wish it was a little more colourful? But maybe that’s what the cut 30 minutes would’ve been for. His flavours were top rate though – the burnt honey and blackberry sounded really interesting and certainly made Paul a little bit proud of The Brave Little Toaster we call Toby. And that faint bit of praise was better than any handy could ever be

HE’S A REAL BOY!

In a similar vein, Tom’s Connect Four, was structurally impressive but I wouldn’t consider it “highly decorated” – and it only functioned kind of ok – you could clearly see that the tokens didn’t slide all the way to the bottom so it was really a game of Connect Two At Most

but he had a back up game for everyone to play! For he had hidden a whole almond inside his tart

and you’ll never guess who found the whole almond! (or a little bit of his own tooth)

What was the prize? Apparently entirely untelevisable as we never find out. I can only guess someone got a handy this episode afterall.
Tom’s parlour games may have been a bit of a disappointment, but his Risalamande-inspired tart went down very well

I just love that in the last month two people have evoked the power of a Risalamande and both of them have forced into the shape of a different baked good with Tom tartifying it and Claire over on MasterChef rolling it up in a Roulade like the mafia bundling up a dead body

I guess Risalamandes are like buses – you wait so long for one and suddenly 2 in varying states of disrepair show up at once.

Jasmine was a bit of an inverse of Tom with her Pear Tree Tart looking absolutely stunning and neat as a pin

but her Pear and Chocolate Frangipane tart was just too dry and needed a tertiary component like some sort of chantilly or gel. It’s probably the one where I am the most palpably aware that if you were to eat this tart, a good 80% of it is just plain pastry which just feels so incredibly pointless. I’d be more interested in a Showstopper that had the bakers creating a pair of Patisserie show tarts instead of trying to create a half metre tall pastry tower about the third nipple that they don’t want to tell anyone about. Which is kind of why I liked Lesley’s so much (it wasn’t about her third nipple)

it’s still a nonsense because I don’t think anyone in their right mind actually stacks tarts, but it feels celebratory and thus more special than some of the others. It’s a fairly basic Pecan Pie, but done very well!
Lesley wasn’t the only one going for a Pecan Pie though as Iain was also opting for the classic, but giving it a signature Irish kick with a generous amount of whisky. A possibly too generous a kick of whisky

but his Giant’s Causeway structure was impressive and definitely fulfilled the judges’ brief of being highly decorated and a bit ridiculous better than anyone

I think my biggest issue with this particular showstopper challenge is that it did just begin to feel like a Biscuit Week Showstopper instead – this should probably be made out of gingerbread and not shortcrust pastry. But fairplay to Iain for getting it all done in the time and for it to be as legible as it is.

An Unofficial Highly Decorative 3D Tart Sculpture Ranking:
1. Lesley Celebration Cake In Tart Drag
2. Tom’s Game of Connect Two At Most
3. Iain’s Boozey Giants
4. Nataliia’s Thicc Swan
5. Toby Experiences Human Joy
6. Jasmine’s Running Dry
7. Gnome-Oh No and Jasmine Essence

Another week of slightly weird judging. I would honestly have given Star Baker to Lesley – I think she had a really solid showing through all 3 of the challenges whereas Jasmine really biffed that Showstopper. But I think it comes down to whether you think the taste of the tart mattered more than the effort of the decoration or not. I KNOW WHAT I BELIEVE. But Jasmine gets her third star baker and at this point the others are all just fighting for second and third place – a fact Tom is palpably aware of

the elimination was also a difficult one. Aaron was decisively last in the Technical and Showstopper challenges but definitely the winner of the Signature whereas Nataliia kind of muddled around in the middle regions of the leaderboards. I do also think they rather overpraised Tom in the Showstopper – I don’t think his ambition this week paid off at all. Ultimately it was Nataliia that got the boot, rather confirming to me that the desired final three of the show is Jasmine, Tom and Aaron

I’m gutted to see Nataliia go – her presence in the tent was one of my favourites this series. She had a really fun, old-school Bake Off feel to her and we could do with a lot more bakers like her in the future.

And so, onwards to the Meringue Phase of the Toby Prison Experiment!