She’s armed and dangerous.

This is a freestanding recap.

Don’t Basque, Don’t Tell

Having buried Cultural Specificity Week in the flowerbed once and for all was never going to stop Bake Off from spinning the culture wheel to find at least one autonomous community to upset through baking bastardisation. My sincerest apologies to the Basque Region, you never deserved this after having given us Basque Cheesecake and Cristobal Balenciaga

I truly don’t know what the judges expected from this challenge given that they wanted the cheesecakes to be highly decorated but not hiding the burnt top, the key feature of a Basque Cheesecake

and were also giving them only 2.5 hours and wanted it removed from its paper

this ultimately only really ended up screwing Iain over and maybe Jasmine because they were looking for any reason they could think of to try and not give her a 4th Star Baker (lol)

by the time they got to the judging they’d had to completely drop the desire to be able to see the burnt top because, UNDERSTANDABLY, most of the bakers had heard “highly decorated” and assumed it meant they had to garland the entire cake in a garnish last seen in Julia Child’s guide to hosting a dinner party

nothing immediately gets my back up more than a fruit rose. But again with Jasmine, it’s a flavour pairing of lime, passionfruit and mango that you can’t go wrong with and she’d balanced it very well.

Aaron had similarly just covered the entire top of his vanilla and nutmeg cheesecake with plums stewed in sake and a chocolate doily

he at least gets a few bonus points for doing something interesting with his flavour combination and remembering that people have to actually eat and enjoy it. Whereas Tom seemed to have just played a game of word association from “Burnt Cheesecake” to backwards engineer his entirely black cheesecake achieved primarily through black sesame

the final product was at least… striking? In a way that seemed like he had hoped the airing of this episode might better align with the release of Netflix’s series about Wednesday Addams being a cop (ACAB includes Wednesday Addams – don’t get me started)

mercifully despite the fact there’s enough black sesame in there to make Anish Kapoor question if he has grounds to sue Tom, it wasn’t too overpowering. Sadly for Tom, this does mean that the bake was very much style over substance

so it’s another night of observed sleep for Tom

he’s lost all sense of his own humanity and where the black sesame ends and the man begins

apparently there’s only one pair of serial killer gloves and so if anyone else cuts their finger, they have to wear a pair of gardening gloves

it’s heavy duty lime zesting.

Iain also had issues with his flavours, and I’m not just talking about the fact he was begrudgingly putting them together

I truly do not understand why you would choose to make something you yourself do not like, especially at such a late stage of the competition. And he was certainly taking a very lackadaisical approach to the whole thing, especially compared to Tom whose cold dead shark eyes are carefully calculating every move

and you know how in Junior Bake Off (the best iteration of this show) the kids just heave clearly unstable cakes around without any care for logistics or spacial awareness? Very that

but ultimately having to decorate the basque cheesecake would be Iain’s saving grace because he could at least hide the massive crack beneath his candied oranges

and it does look pretty, but I am very much with the judges that the questionable piss yellow colouring was unnecessary and very ill-advised

and his flavours were also a little bit off with the orange bordering on bitter with nothing sweet enough to combat it

and this would begin the trend of Alison Hammond honking like someone stood on a goose every time someone said “pith”.

Nobody was having a more Sisyphean struggle in this challenge than Toby, who was seemingly cursed to constantly turn his white chocolate ganache into white chocolate butter if he so much as looked at like curdling medusa

he was pairing the white chocolate with passion fruit, which he was attempting to create a marbled effect with, but it didn’t really come through very much

and I can’t say I particularly liked the decoration he’d gone for, there’s something a bit “alien nesting site” about it

but he does deserve a little bit of recognition for managing to pull off a batch of white chocolate shells in 30 degree heat. Maybe he can get a Hollywood Patronising Pat

sometimes you joke about the Hollywood Pinky Promise and something stupider happens. The only place with a weirder economy than the Bake Off Tent was Zimbabwe in 2009

personally I think Bake Off should adopt a Zimbabwean approach and just pivot to Paul having to pay the bakers $100 instead of handing out handshakes. EMBRACE GAMIFICATION.

A Ranking of Superfluously Decorated Basque Cheesecakes:
1. For Plum’s Sake
2. A Mango Jasmine Flower
3. Toby’s Passionfruit Nesting Site
4. Don’t Eat Yellow Cheesecake
5. Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way

Steam Work Makes The Dream Work

And now for a classic technical challenge that ultimately won’t factor into any decision making! The bakers were tasked with making a batch of 6 Steamed Orange and Cardamom Puddings with the novelty of the task being that they had been given an almost complete recipe because they didn’t trust a group of people with an average age of 30 to know how to steam a pudding properly

The only thing that had been secreted away from the bakers was how long to cook the puddings for

and beyond Aaron accidentally waterboarding his sponge puddings, nobody had a particularly bad time with this challenge

it turns out that actually having a recipe means we don’t have any absolute clangers. Although, I am pretty sure that when Maggie served up flourless rocks that one time, the recipe probably did at least list “flour” as being essential to a pudding

so it could always have been worse. It was however Jasmine’s weakest showing in a Technical since the first week which is the only time she’s ever paced lower than 4th. It does however still mean she was second last for some underbaked sponges

and upsetting things even more was Iain and Tom rising to second and first place despite Iain having doubled and tripled down on his pithing about

but that spark of light that only senpai’s approval can bring had returned to Tom’s eyes

he can be trusted with sharps again!

And this of course means that Perfectly Average Toby came third doing nothing of any note. I love him.

An Official Steamed Orange Pudding Ranking:
1. Notice Me Senpai!
2. Iain’s Luck is Changing
3. Reliably Average Toby
4. Fourth Is Still Second Last
5. Aaron’s Soggy Puddings

A Trifle Stupid

Rounding out the nonsense of Dessert Week was the impossible task of matching Paul Hollywood’s very exacting idea of what a Freestanding Trifle, a dessert that does not exist, should look like when all you were given in the way of direction for this dessert cryptid was jelly, custard and a baked element only to be met with Paul Hollywood pulling a quizzical face at you as though you’ve turned up to the Halloween House Party as the locally specific Flatwoods Monster

this is essentially the equivalent of the Makeover Episode on Drag Race where the judges can just move the goalposts enough to eliminate whoever they want as they just threw critiques at the wall to see what stuck. The way I guffawed at them telling Tom his was “too big”

fair enough, tell him that running incinerated almonds through the whole thing like shrapnel in a car bomb waiting to lacerate your gums with every mouthful is probably *not* the best idea

but how was this any bigger than his stupid mushroom that you loved last week!? I did love the sound of his flavours – fig, almond and honey? Lovely! But only if you use Greek figs

that’s not very saluting the union jack bunting on my fireplace as patriotism of you Prue. Now apologise to the St George flag that Brian from Halifax painted on his roundabout.

Even more baffling was Paul being surprised that Jasmine would do something as crazy as serving up a glorified Fraisier Cake instead of whatever the white whale of a freestanding trifle he’s chasing is

WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN SIR!? They’re all cakes! It’s the only way to achieve this stupid challenge! I feel like I’m going crazy, I’m being whimsically gaslit into thinking a strong independent trifle is a thing and I don’t like it!

in their best attempt at serving as the efit artists for the trifle cryptid that chased Paul Hollywood in a dream one time, Iain and Toby were going head-to-head over jelly art. With Toby on the constant verge of turning his Festive Trifle Bigfoot into a screening of Terrifier 3 apparently

and the second attempt wasn’t any less visceral as Toby had an issue with disem-bowl-ing his jelly (WHY ARE YOU BOOING ME?)

but ultimately his freestanding christmas trifle *eye twitch* did look really charming

my favourite part of this episode was Paul Hollywood complimenting his little strawberry and cream santa toppings and how unique they were

and my mum immediately bringing out receipts that Stacey Solomon does them every year like she was handling evidence in a court of law.

Ultimately Iain being a little too confident in his jelly art skills would be almost as foreboding as the Tent having a full on Elphaba moment as he mutters “nothing bad ever happens”

because despite his freestanding trifle *choking noises* looking really beautiful – that inlaid collar design is a work of art

he didn’t have very much success with his flavours and was going through the roughest blindside since The Black Widow Brigade hoodwinked Ozzy on Survivor Micronesia

it’s the risk you go with being judged last after Toby and Jasmine have killed the flavour receptors on Paul’s and Prue’s tongues with a tag team of Sherry and Limoncello

But at least they liked the uniqueness of Iain’s cannoli layer! The one of three silver linings he could cling on to – the other two being that Paul’s latest MO was to emotionally destroy Tom and the other that Aaron’s was also a bit of a failure to launch

according to Paul there was at least something wrong with every layer making it a bit of a textural jumble – arguably the very definition of a trifle.

I cannot rank that which I do not understand.

It was truly a crapshoot of a week and they’d painted themselves in a bit of a corner of giving Jasmine her 4th Star Baker award despite the technical – which was honestly more of a formality this episode

I don’t think anyone had done anything to really deserve an accolade this episode – everyone was thoroughly middling at best.
They could also have got rid of literally anyone this episode and you’d have to shrug and just say “I guess so!”, the lack of certainty meant that Tom was walking down the garden path like a man approaching the gallows

however, sadly it was time up for the most interesting person in the tent as we say goodbye to Iain

nothing but respect for *my* Short King.

And so, on to Patisserie Week!