Ma’am, you have to be at least this tall to ride the industrial kitchen pakora mixer.

May contain salt.

Rama-DAMN!

Ever since the Mass Catering Challenge started Lisa Snowdon’s villain arc back in 2022 it has become event television to me, my very own Superb Owl if you will

and this year’s edition was perhaps the mass catering challenge to end all mass catering challenges with Emily serving as resident shire horse to cart around a tubs of sabotaged kheer

I’m pretty sure this was the largest catering challenge they’ve ever done as the celebs arrived at Birmingham’s Quaid-e-Azam Grand Ballroom – a Bad Boy Venue™ according to Shakira

and for a brief horrible moment they thought they were going to catering someone’s wedding – which is Don’t Tell The Bride levels of potential for an inevitable divorce. But we’ll sadly have to hold out for what would be the most ill-advised challenge of all time because they were in fact catering the Iftar for a cover of 120 guests. For the service the nine celebs were divided into three teams of three with each tackling (quite literally in some cases) course of their own. Shakira and Dynamite (we’re not doing Emily S and Emily C) were bullying Max Fosh through the medium of diced onions in the starter

while Sue and Joe Pasquale tried to work out if they could laugh at Lauren’s rehearsal for her stand-up comedy debut at the local working men’s club on mains

leaving Donna, Emily and Nitin to re-enact Judith’s slaying of Holofernes while making desserts and the naan breads that were going with the main

as you can tell from Donna seemingly having to blitz 120 people’s worth of dates with something that looks like you need a license to operate, the quantities of everything were BAFFLING – 20kgs of chicken, 40 litres of dhal, 6kgs of onions and 85kgs of organic Fosh for Shakira to pulverize when she realised that half of those onions were not where they were meant to be

and his punishment for this would be to sit on the floor and mix those onions in by hand

it was absolute wilderness hours in that kitchen – especially because halfway through the head chef, Rehan Uddin, had to leave to answer the call to prayer

but despite the brief diversion to torment Max Fosh, Shakira having the leadership skills of a Looney Tunes villain and Dynamite standing to the side worried about which side of history she’ll fall on after the edit

their starter did go out on time and it wasn’t bad at all!

the only real negative is that the dhal was so thick and stiff that you probably wouldn’t measure it in litres so much as its thermal resistance but it tasted ok. There was a good chance that they might win the Immunity Pin that we’ve hijacked from Australian MasterChef to gain the privilege of sitting on the newly installed MasterChef Mezzanine while drinking champagne and offering the vaguest words of encouragement the serfs below

well I guess that ruins it that the Mains Team wins, which is something of a surprise considering all of the new and unique ways Joe Pasquale was going through to ruin the concept of a lamb kebab having apparently given up on his quest to funnel every flavour of pie down Giorgio’s throat

in the end it was very much a challenge carried by Lauren being so genuinely good she completely disappears in the edit amongst everyone else’s chaos and Sue finding the time to train for Britain’s Next Top Gondolier while stirring an industrial amount of Chicken Korma

Sue’s one minor misstep was mixing up Kashmiri Chilli Powder and Regular Chilli Powder at one point, which ultimately didn’t matter that much and pales in comparison to Rehan ominously gathering the entire dessert team around their vat of Kheer to do a quick little taste test in a tableau that feels not too dissimilar from a drawing room scene in which Poirot reveals the murderer

J’ACCUSE!

Nitin wasn’t particularly pleased to be on desserts because if he has so much as 1 grain of sugar he will turn into a Hydian monster

AND APPARENTLY NOBODY ELSE WAS GOING TO EITHER

the moment he realises and locks eyes with weightlifting gold medallist, Emily Campbell, wielding a ladle like she’s about to go crush some heads in The Battle of Hastings is truly perfect television

I’m afraid I don’t think your four serving spoon buckler shield is going to help you in this face off, hun

although I don’t know who his true opponent was because as much as Emily looked like she was about to use him as dental floss, Rehan looked like he was about to make Nitin into Kheer

luckily Grace was here to work a double shift as host and therapist

which is a better deal that Giorgio got with having to moonlight as a fellow korma oarsman

at some point I think the show had realised that maybe 120 covers for 10 people who only have the passion for food of your average home cook was maybe a bad idea?

But while Nitin sank the SS Dessert in the name of a low sugar, bizarrely high sodium diet, Donna and Emily had the sorry task of creating enough Gulab Jamun for 120 people

and Giorgio was going to keep a close eye on those balls

I genuinely thought Donna was going to brain him with that bag of flour but she took the more pacifist Jo Frost approach of implementing naughty corner rules

As you can probably imagine, the dessert was obviously a tale of two halves with everyone loving the Gulab Jamun

while having to look deep inside themselves to forgive Nitin for having salted the earth

this absolute DIVA. How dare she say something funnier than I could ever write. If anyone knows who she is, make sure she knows she’s an icon for this.

Putting the “Celeb” in Celebrate

For not having made the world’s first carameled salt or starting a small fascist state localised entirely to one particular kitchen, the winning team getting to sit out this challenge were Lauren, Sue and Joe – the latter of which didn’t entirely deserve it after his kebabs had to be chiselled off of their baking tray

Sadly we’ll never know which pie Joe Pasquale would’ve cooked in this Celebration Dish themed challenge

which everyone had also apparently decided was a challenge to see who could pile their food the highest and not invite Max Fosh to that particular group chat so all he could do was make an improvised perpendicular lobster risotto

and hope that was taller than Shakira’s Croquembouche that looked like she was serving up the first successfully removed brain of a serial killer at a Victorian science fair

her decision to make a Croquembouche for a celebration is because that’s apparently what the Kardashians do every year as she treated a very glazed over looking Giorgio Locatelli to the niche end of the Kardashian lore

and Shakira had accidentally put herself into a mother tucking croque off, as Dynamite was also making a croquembouche – locking Giorgio into something of a rock and a hard place of either putting up with Kris Jenner 101 or accepting the pairing of Limoncello and White Chocolate

as the world’s number one white chocolate defender and the woman who got hammered on Limoncello Spitzes during Pride (there was a 60% friends discount it’d have been rude not to) I am fully on Team Dynamite in this apparent war against Italian decency. However the judges were not feeling it

and as a result, I think in their eyes she had the lesser of the two Croquembouches even though hers was the only croquembouche, Shakira’s was just a sort of hoarded wealth of profiteroles

her first batch of profiteroles had deflated, forcing her to remake them and leaving her with not enough time to create an even remotely structurally sound croquembouche, or apparently fill all of the profiteroles with her raspberry cream

you see, part of the celebration is when you manage to bite into something that isn’t just plain pastry

Shakira wasn’t the only one to have a deflation issue as Donna’s first batch of Yorkshire Puddings were putting her License to Northern under serious risk

but she managed to get a second batch going pretty quickly and without much fuss. That was until her yorkies became floorkies

and if anyone asks, none of them touched the floor!

I love it when women support women’s rights and wrongs.
Donna’s celebratory dish was, obviously, a full on roast dinner which someone had to do for this challenge and I expected as much. However, I was not quite prepared for the Yorkshire State Building

Donna Preston, you will ALWAYS be famous for this, it is majestic in its ridiculousness, an architectural feat that rivals even the Burj Khalifa – a beautiful monument to British Beige

is it possible to elect a plate of food as prime minister?

But as much as I love Donna’s Yorkshire monolith, I think Emily was the run away winner this challenge with her fried dumplings filled with Chicken Curry and Brown Stew

that is just a GOOD looking plate of food – who amongst us doesn’t want a football-sized dumpling? She truly is the Generous Good to Nitin’s Sugar-free Evil. Thankfully Nitin was taking a break from desserts and choosing to lock eyes with the team that had just been on starters and make a platter of Samosas, Pakoras and Bhajis

it was all a very sweet nod to his parents, who he had lost very recently to filming, and clearly meant the absolute world to him, so I was glad that it all went so smoothly and that the judges really loved the whole thing.

Things hadn’t gone quite so well for Max who was making a Lobster Risotto to celebrate the end of a long week spent YouTubing

and while the whole thing is essentially incredibly italian catnip for Giorgio, the judges thought that the flavour profile was slightly askew with its tomato notes coming through more strongly than either the Lobster or the Champagne, which is a real shame because he’d cooked the lobster absolutely beautifully.

An Unofficial Celebration Dinner Ranking:
1. Emily’s FIFA Regulation Dunplings
2. The Yorkshire State Building
3. Samosad 2: Sentimental Boogaloo
4. A Bona Fide Croquembouche
5. Max Fish’s Vertical Lobster
6. A Dragon’s Hoard of Empty Profiteroles

With Max’s lobster drawing more criticism than any of the other dishes, it was a very sad end to the Foshatelli shippers in the audience (of which I know one of you certainly exists)

Shakira is damn lucky that she gets to carry on gaslighting, gatekeeping and girlbossing.