It’s like Iain never left the tent.

This recap is made out of 12kgs of chocolate.

All Horned Up

This week is the dreaded Patisserie Week, which is just an amalgamation of every other week doing a mildly offensive french accent. And kicking it off was a pastry task in which the semi-finalists had to make two batches of cream horns, both filled with a pair of complementary fillings and crammed with all of the most basic innuendo

If there’s one thing this group don’t need, it’s a specification for “complimentary flavours” – they’re kind of all just cycling through the same 6 flavour combinations AND I AM SO BORED. Ban Jasmine from using Chocolate and Raspberry, I need to see her sweat just a little bit

at least Aaron’s throwing a bayleaf into his homemade lemon jam as pained as I am by him continuing the Pro Bayleaf Agenda, the true enemy of the people

I have enjoyed this series – there’s been some real highlights in Iain, Nataliia, Jessika, Lesley and the brief time we knew Hasaan for. But the more this episode goes on, the more you realise we have strayed far to far from God’s light and we need to turn the show off and on again to go back to a time where someone could bake Jelly Tots into bread, not get eliminated and go on to be a semi-finalist

Imagine there’s an image here, I’m not forking out £9.99 for 1 image of jelly tots melting into bread.

Jasminder, you will ALWAYS be famous. We need to return to a pint were we had more than three people over the age of 45 in the tent. But I think older homebakers see the absolute nonsense this show has people doing and see it as a young person’s game – weeks later and I am still asking myself “What even *is* a 3D sculpted tart?” But we can still hold onto the Signature Challenges, which are at least still somewhat accessible and relatively normal.

The only real problem the bakers had with this particular signature was that it was a very hot day and they were all on edge because Aaron had been sending them laminated death threats all week

which could’ve led to some very unfortunate hubris, but ultimately his luck held and Paul was very impressed with the lamination that he achieved

and while they liked his Lemon and Caramel Ganache horns, Prue wasn’t convinced by the combination of Cherries and Nectarines for whatever reason

I personally just don’t see how that doesn’t work as a flavour combination – but Prue was just rolling dice this episode to see what critique she’d give. There was absolutely no consistency. Paul however has seemingly realised that the whole thing is a forgone conclusion of Jasmine winning but just keeping up the pretence of a baking competition to conduct his continued salting of Tom’s psyche

I’m convinced that Paul can’t tell Toby and Tom apart, because Tom’s track record isn’t as bad as Paul seems to think it is whereas Toby feels the most like he’s here on borrowed time – only making an impact in the 7th week of a 10 week competition does not a winner make

Paul – Tom’s the one that looks like a Cenobite wearing the skin of an eligible bachelor in an Agatha Christie novel. Toby is the one that looks like a novelty alarm clock that gained sentient

but whatever social experiment Paul is conducting on the world’s tallest lab rat, seems to have been successful in beating the whimsy out of him. You can sort of just see the skeletal remains of what I assume was Tom’s original plan to serve his cream horns looking like ice cream cones

he did probably have the weakest pastry of the bunch, with it being compared more closely to shortcrust than puff pastry with how much of the lamination he lost

but they really liked his raspberry cheesecake filling because again, that is literally something on every supermarket shelf.

Lastly we have Toby, who had learned from the sins of Pastry Week and was relenting to trying a mere rough puff pastry. However, he’d be damned if he was using Paul’s recipe

but Toby was the most scuppered by the rising temperature of the tent with his pastry desperately trying to fuse with his countertop

which ultimately led him to getting his horns into the oven a little bit too late leading to them being distinctly underbaked

but the judges still loved his flavours. His flavours were of course just Chocolate and Coffee & Lemon Meringue so it’d be hard for them *not* to be nice.

An Unofficial Cream Horn Ranking
1. Aaron’s Mildly Interesting Jam Session
2. Jasmine Taking the Pistachio
3. Toby’s Tepid Horns
4. Tom’s Whimsiless Ice Creams

WHAM! BAM! FRAMBOISIER!

And this is where the jaws of the Patisserie Week beartrap clamp shut around the bakers as they are tasked with creating a French Framboisier. And if you’re wondering what a French Framboisier is, it’s basically just the freestanding trifle that Paul had in a dream that one time

although there was nothing freestanding about the quagmire of framboisier that Toby ended up serving up after making the critical error of mixing the butter into a warm custard

every single shot of this formless slop disassociating itself further and further from the concept of french patisserie gets better and better

as ridiculous as the Freestanding Trifle Showstopper was, it does now feel like the answer to a puzzle in a D&D campaign that you gave your party 5 sessions ago and none of them took any note of it and they probably sold the key item to solving it so that the wizard could buy a Cloak of Billowing ~for the vibes~. I’M NOT MAD ABOUT IT GUYS, I’M FINE.

But the issues with this task also aren’t necessarily on the bakers who had to devote a significant amount of time to creating the clear sugar dome to go over the cake. Which came with the sort of twist that makes my blood boil on this show

sugarwork like this is bordering on a professional technique and I would not expect a homebaker to know the ins and outs of it. Especially with something like making a perfect dome that I think they would’ve struggled to make even with a detailed video guide to follow along to. Sure, let them muddle their way through vague recipes for genoise sponge and mousseline so that you can get your ~lolarious~ footage of Toby serving the feeling you get after you’ve eaten an entire bag of jelly fruits in one sitting made corporeal

because there’s some logic to making a mousseline and a genoise if you stop to think about it. But sugarwork is such an exacting science that this was just setting everyone up to fail in a way that felt malicious and I wouldn’t have blamed Toby for bolting out of the tent after his what? third attempt at it?

heavy is the head that wears the crown

the only person that managed to serve a semblance of a dome was Aaron and it looked like the sort of ectoplasmic goo that has you calling the Warrens

the bigger issue for Aaron however was that he’d split his mousseline, ultimately dragging him into third place while Jasmine and Tom rose to the top (I feel I don’t have to specify that Toby’s escaped trifle came fourth? Good.) because they made the decision to not shackle themselves to a sugary cinderblock as they threw themselves over the edge of the patisserie bridge. The two of them were basically identical – in fact the only real negative you could say about either of them was that Jasmine’s fondant rose looked more like a fondant Rose Toy

I do feel a little bit sorry for Tom because he did at one point have a perfect sugar dome

and then broke it as soon as he got a little bit excited and ran to the fridge too fast

perhaps a slightly too on the nose metaphor, huh?

An Official Framboisier Ranking:
1. Ringer, Ringer, Jasmine’s A Winner
2. RIP Tom’s Dome
3. Aaron’s Dome-ish
4. Toby’s Fram-Blah-sier

Mac-a-Wrong’un

For their showstopper and ultimately deciding who was getting to join Jasmine in her victory lap of a final because Aaron, Tom and Toby were all pretty tied for elimination, was a challenge to put together a Macaron Centrepiece. And this is very much where it feels like Bake Off has not just jumped the tempered chocolate shark but also careened into the side of a cliff as Tom heaves his industrial 12kg sack of chocolate around

I’m so mad about this – as much at Tom for sinking so much time and energy to such a pointless venture as the show for allowing it to get to a point where people who are, and I cannot stress this enough, HOMEBAKERS bringing in a good £100 of chocolate to make the sort of obscene structure that even has Benoit and Cherish side-eyeing a chef on the Professional series

and then the macarons, the only baked component of this challenge are just… distinctly average and an afterthought to the monolithic suspended buttplug they’re haphazardly glued to

it’s just bad – badly planned, badly executed, I’m beyond annoyed that Prue said *this* to Tom

and said *this* to Toby because he’d built two stacked crates out of gingerbread because GOD FORBID SOMEONE ON THIS SHOW BAKE ANYTHING

Tom would’ve been better off building an apiarist’s beehive out of gingerbread because then he could at least say his entire thing was baked

I would genuinely argue that Toby had the best bake in this round and marking him down so heavily because you made the mistake of eating a lemon macaron straight after one of his chocolate ones, isn’t his fault

he’d also made by far the most impressive piece of macaron baking, having made the signage on his crate entirely out of macaron

and the textured chocolate macarons were also very successful. God knows I never expected to go to bat for Toby so hard but I will defend the honour of this little weirdo

I did not have Feet Finder being mentioned on Bake Off on my 2025 Bingo Card. Maybe he did deserve to go home.

Aaron also isn’t entirely off the hook with easily the worst macarons of the challenge – not featuring the sort of foot even the sleaziest of feet finder users would agree to fork cash out for

and then on top of that, his concept was also a little wishy washy and didn’t ultimately come together to make much sense. The macarons didn’t really add any texture or clarity to what was meant to be a sloth but looks a bit like your gran sneezed while doing eyeliner

and lets say nothing of the pose

it’s not a sieg heil guys, he’s just awkward in social situations.

Lastly we have Jasmine celebrating Christmas early with a gingerbread Christmas tree that I am 90% sure you can buy as a DIY kit every year from Waitrose

it’s very well done and neat as anything but I am increasingly convinced she’s a plant from the British supermarket industry and we’ll see her face on the box of a Marks & Spencer roulade within the year. Chocolate and Raspberry flavoured of course. The pistachio variant comes out in July.

An Unofficial Macaron Display Ranking:
1. TOBY WON, SUE ME.
2. Jasmine’s Gingerbread Kit
3. Aaron’s Dubious Sloth
4. This is a Baking Competition, We need to see your Baking.

So we might as well get the obvious part of this episode’s conclusion out of the way first – congratulations Jasmine, you’re Raspberry and Chocolate empire grows ever stronger

and then it’s on to the elimination which was down to any of the other three – just line up a dartboard and blindly throw something at it to decide. HOWEVER. I firmly believe Tom should’ve gone home – his signature was the weakest, he barely baked for his showstopper and he hadn’t even fully completed the task of the technical. Whereas I think while Toby’s technical was a literal flop, I think his macarons were redemptive enough and we shouldn’t have been saying goodbye to him this episode

it’s WILD to me that Tom survived, especially with it being the semi-final and standards apparently being so high.

And so, all we can do his cross our fingers for Aaron in the final: