“The new Team Challenge format will encourage team work and rapport building”

Inside of you are two MasterChef contestants. They’re both having a horrible time!

There’s Something In The Pair

As ever we start the Quarterfinal off with a Team Challenge, however it has been altered slightly in that it no longer involves one celebrity having to lead another through a single recipe using only semaphore, charades and interpretive dance. Instead, both team members have access to the recipe to refer to and self-flagellate with

and they’re cooking a three course menu as they roleplay a restaurant service for Grace and Giorgio playing mum and dad to the room of toddlers with their velcro vegetable cutting toy set

I do think this is a much better iteration of the Team’s Challenge, it feels much less like farming for a viral moment while still having the element of disaster being but a knife’s edge away. The disaster being Jason Mohammad having to fear for his life

the dividing line for the teams were Emily and Jason in green with Shakira Khan and Joe Pasquale in red – the role of head chef and benevolent dommy mommy being assumed IMMEDIATELY by Shakira

who proceeded to talk Joe through everything like she was going to hang his crayon drawing of a sun on the fridge

and while they had a wonderful time making beautiful pickled cucumber ribbon art

over on the other side of the kitchen Jason and Emily were going through the messiest divorce committed to film since Kramer vs Kramer

we might be getting two Christmases this year, lads. if I play my cards right I might get a pony!
It all started, pretty immediately, with the underboiled eggs that Emily was desperately having to try mash into a Scotch Egg before they glooped everywhere

Oh Giorgio, Emily was going to make it ABUNDANTLY clear what was wrong and whose fault this was

my favourite part of all of this is Grace and Giorgio realising there’s at least another hour and 15 minutes of this awkward dinner theatre production of Pinter’s Betrayal ahead of them

meanwhile, Shakira was showing off her perfectly formed scotch egg like it was a baby rabbit she wanted Joe to stroke very gently like a good boy

Emily, an expert in putting eggs in unusual places, had eventually managed to cram a rather snotty egg into its Smoked Mackerel Casing and it actually looked really good!

the major problem with their plate was the pickled cucumber which hadn’t absorbed enough of the pickle because it was mostly skin and paled in comparison to Joe Pasquale’s girly-pop ballet-core cucumber bow

the yolk of their egg was also still runny and the dish was pretty much perfect, which Emily was taking super well

I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if this sinks the Teams Challenge in its entirety – I don’t think we’ve witnessed a murdering of the vibes quite this bad since Gemma Collins and Stefanie Reid had to be separated by 50ft at all times following their car crash of a double act. I think it’s a case of two different sporting personalities really not gelling – Emily is super competitive, by her own admission

and I don’t think that was ever going to quite work with Jason’s more laddish here-for-a-good-time attitude and she really let it get the better of her. But also Jason cutting fondant potatoes into prehistoric megalithic constructions wasn’t helping his case

and my God was Giorgio trying to help this poor man out of being suplexed into tomorrow by a woman that can famously bench press three times his weight

and having still served raw potatoes, he would have to spend the entirety of his pudding making crouched and begging for his life because he’s just a little birthday boy

especially after he’d convinced Emily that what she really, really needed to do was use the electric beater to make the Vanilla Cream

that wire beater was a paid actor!
And she would immediately overbeat the already pretty much perfect Vanilla Cream. Thus having to start again

HOWMST SO EVER! The dessert was their best dish

mostly on account of the fact that all Shakira and Joe had managed to make was a Sticky Sloppee Puddle

Shakira desperately trying to scoop her primordial toffee soup back into the ramekin to bake it again before Giorgio could show up <3

I have to admire the optimism that another 30 seconds in the oven would somehow speedrun the evolutionary cycle of a pudding and give it a backbone

they needed at least another 4 minutes just to get beyond the branches of cnidaria

it may have been more akin to a hellacious Starbucks order but sometimes all you want is vente cup of sugar that you regret when you need a three hour nap in the afternoon because you can’t see straight anymore

I do love that Grace and Giorgio still wolfed down the tepid toffee muck – they’re real ones for that.

The main course was also nearly a disaster for Shakira and Joe as they started cooking their chicken just a little bit too late but managed to still get it all done and at least cooked to Giorgio and Grace’s liking but may have still been too underdone for some

the star of the plate however were Joe’s fondant potatoes which were absolutely faultless.

Even with their pudding probably being the biggest disaster of the episode – well second behind the most begrudging high-five committed to film

somehow it would have been less mortifying if she’d just left him hanging, Joe and Shakira were the runaway winners and got to go celebrate backstage

while Emily and Jason had to go and sit like they were giving an interview in a Netflix documentary about what might have been the worst 90 minutes of Emily’s life

VICTORIA HOWARTH TO THE DECOMPRESSION CHAMBER IMMEDIATELY, WE’VE GOT A CODE RED!

You Seema Bit Stressed

This is where we have perhaps over-tweeked the Quarterfinal because instead of the usual decider in which they cook a two course menu of their own design for a trio of past contestants, the last challenge of the quarterfinal is the round in which they cook the recipes of a guest chef – in this case, Seema Pankhania

who is nothing but an absolute delight and the food she had them all make looked and sounded incredible! I just think it’s a very odd decision to have an elimination in an episode that nobody actually got to cook any of their own food? And I have to wonder what prompted such a dramatic shift because the two course menu round always felt quite core to the MasterChef brand. My suspicion is that they were beginning to feel like the “homework” side of things with how much the celebrities were having to prep for the competition was getting too demanding (it’s really not hard to browse 30 minute meals on BBC GoodFood, lads) so really downscaled that until they get to the more dedicated contestants. But also it might have been a last minute thing to stop Joe Pasquale’s Piemageddon. WELL GUESS WHAT, MIMI!

thank you Seema Pankhania, may the nail art gods bless you forever

any excuse to post my current nail art:

I’m getting them redone in a couple of weeks and am very tempted to get something pie-themed as support for Joe Pasquale’s One Man Pie Crusade.

Joe was on dessert duty while Emily got the whole ball rolling with her Khao Soi starter – the first hurdle to get over being learning how to pronounce Khao Soi

she pronounced it like the name of a Mormon family’s 9th child <3
Having recovered from the Teams Challenge and buried the three dozen hatchets with Jason

Emily was firmly back in the game and delivered a really quite good dish

the only real issue was the fact it could maybe have used just a little bit more fish sauce to cut through some of the richer flavours but that was more of a tiny nit-pick than anything that overtly ruined the dish.

While Emily was putting yesterday behind her, Jason was, if anything, only proving that Emily was a saint for not stuffing him into a scotch egg

Seema’s bafflement and Giorgio’s creeping sense of mortification as they approached his bench of complete and utter wrongness <3

he was making Cabbage Dumplings and having Beef Trifled the recipe was pre-cooking the filling where he was meant to only cook a teaspoon of it so that he could taste for seasoning. Precooking all the filling before wrapping it just means it’s less juicy and the leaves wont bind as well. Ultimately if anything, it didn’t seem to impact the dumplings, so much as the workload happening around them, missing off a few details like the coconut dressing for the broccoli and having to serve unegged egg fried rice

I’m especially fond of the paltry amount of chilli dipping sauce he was providing everyone with

especially after lamenting how much he wanted something spicier when reading he was going to be making Cabbage Dumplings

Well, maybe if you read the recipe!

The last of the main courses was from Shakira who seemed to know who Seema was which was really cute

and as such had what was being deemed Seema’s most successful recipe: Butter Chicken with Naan and a Kachumber Salad. Shakira has proved to be a very safe pair of hands in the kitchen so there really wasn’t much to worry about for her and she had an excellent showing

and finally we get to Joe Pasquale and his excitement for what is definitely his fourth pie in only three episodes

truly where there is will, pie will find a way. Or however the phrase goes.
The Topless Pie in question was Seema’s go at developing a pudding inspired by Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a project she undertook while at university

nothing but respect, all I was developing at university was a talent for deploying the word “hegemony” and debt.

It was certainly the most process heavy of Joe Pasquale’s barbershop quartet of pies, which is probably why it looked a little bit like it had been scrapping after school

but considering the other ones all looked like throw pillows in a B&B with a 2-star rating on TripAdvisor this was definitely the… whichever member of The Beatles you consider to be The Hot One. And if it’s not Weird Ringo, don’t talk to me

source: The Thomas The Tank Engine Wiki.

They were pretty impressed with Joe’s go at the Peanut Butter Tart with there being some really good elements such as the chocolate filling. There were however a couple of glaring mistakes – most obviously the lack of butter in the crust giving it the overly crumbly and brittle texture. But his caramel was also a little bit overcooked making it chewier than it should’ve been. This put him in a little bit of a vulnerable position alongside Jason. Ultimately The decision was to let Jason go and let Joe Pasquale continue on his self-administered quest to cook the most pies on a single series of a reality TV competition

He always knew it would end like this.