Sure it is, buddy.

What are you the T-rex of?

Ready Layer One

It continues to be Nitin’s Misery Hours in the MasterChef kitchen as once again he has found himself backed into the corner having to wrestle with the concept of sugar-based lifeforms. This time at the hands of Ravneet Gill – she of having to pretend that a gang of the most precocious middle class children have made cakes that are in any way edible fame

but at least with everyone here being over the age of 15, we’d all be very sensible, right? RIGHT JOE?

the Met Gala is currently on the hunt for a theme because who amongst us could possibly have know that Jean Paul Gaultier was not a great choice? And I would personally like to suggest Joe Pasquale: One Man and His Shirts

I am not quite sure of the correlation between dinosaur and trifle but I do have a conspiracy theory! Joe declared that this was going to be a 6 layer jelly-free trifle and it is very obviously only 5

and I am personally choosing to believe that he came armed with a box of those plastic dinosaurs that were meant to sit somewhere in this mango-y raspberry abyss as though consumed by the tar pits

and the show told him that he wasn’t allowed to use them because they could not risk Giorgio Locatelli choking to death on a plastic Pachycephalosaurus. However, Jurassic choking hazards or not, the judges did actually quite like his trifle, just so long as you didn’t make direct eye contact with it while eating it because it did look like someone had disembowelled the very concept of the office Christmas party

the whole thing was rather absurd, as you would probably expect from Joe Pasquale who is essentially three or four children in a trench coat

which I imagine left Ravneet Gill in the corner rocking in the foetal position as she remembers Charlie’s depiction of Winston Churchill if he’d been involved in a gruesome chimp attack rendered entirely in bread

while Grace tries her best to stop her lower intestines from herniating because Giorgio Locatelli is very seriously using the phrase “chubby thumbs” to describe Joe’s lady fingers which were soaked with enough booze to make her temporarily forget where she is every 15 seconds

it truly is Joe’s fever dream and we’re just living in it!

Joe wasn’t the only serving up a dessert monolith that would put the entire production team in a food coma for about a week as Donna set down the understudy to the cake that Bruce Bogtrotter ate

my favourite part is Ravneet, assuming by the size of this lunk, that Donna had managed to get all six of the layers into the coffee cake and her finding out that no, Donna’s cake is just like that

but for what it lacks in elegance, it more than makes up for in the amount of coffee that has you seeing into the next dimension

but all the judges loved it, raving about how moist and flavoursome it was without either being too sweet or dried out, not that it had much choice given that Donna was apparently going to be using so much coffee syrup in it that it constituted being declared its own layer

but while Donna was using enough coffee to put Costa out of business (Donna no, this is my home!) Shakira had been a little bit more reserved when it came to her Tiramisu

she had made by far and away the most elegant looking dessert of the round – it’s very corporate seminar hosted in a Marriott Hotel who have outsourced their desserts to Cake Box. It was certainly redeeming her from the *checks notes* Croquem DOUCHE

there’s something about MasterChef that is somehow the perfect reality TV format to allow the Love Island contestants to really thrive. I have tried to watch Love Island in the past and it’s just really not my show, it’s too unga-bunga-dragging-women-to-the-cave-by-the-hair for me but I have never not thoroughly enjoyed one of the Islanders on MasterChef and Shakira is no exception.

Given that it was a layered dessert themed challenge, someone of course had to do a Mille Feuille. I was genuinely surprised that we only ended up with one of them, coming from Nitin because it was the closest dessert he could find to a bowl of low-sugar muesli

the lack of effort is actually astonishing? You had two hours sir and you spent all of it cutting up fruit and whipping cream? Shakira whipped cream AND made accidental butter in that time!

I don’t think it would have even flown in an Invention Test where they had half the time and had been completely blindsided by a sheet of Jus-Rol premade puff pastry and a punnet of blueberries. I know he doesn’t eat sugar but like, I’m pretty sure Lauren probably doesn’t either and she still served up a Black Forest Fortress of Doom having misheard “layer” for “lair”

and the judges loved it – finding it pretty much faultless, the only slight pointer was that it maybe could’ve had more cream?

While there was a tendency to go very Bake Off in this round which I can’t hold against them because it was essentially their audition for Bake Off SU2C. Emily was going a little more Bake Off: The Professionals with an Entremet

I have total respect for someone who did a cursory google search for “layered dessert” and ran with the first result <3 Which was by no means perfect – Emily had found herself quite a few times having to resort to the multi-faith prayer alcove to ask for divine intervention

however, I do think, while not great, it is better than a few attempts at an entremet we’ve seen on Bake Off, granted she had the advantage of not having to do in a gazebo in the middle of July

and the judges were very impressed – both with her techniques and how distinctive the raspberry, pistachio and white chocolate flavours were. That was something that Sue had slightly struggled with, as her Meringue and Pistachio Cream layers all kind of muddled togeter

it was still a very good dessert, just perhaps too ambitious to get four layers of meringue made and cooled enough to keep the layers of pavlova more visible

but she was just happy that it didn’t look like someone had shot a bag of Bakers 100% Tender Chunks in the face

I adore the chemistry of this cast SO MUCH.

Finally, we have Dynamite who was making a Strawberry and Vanilla Cheesecake and ran into the same problem as Jay McGuiness did with the base of her cake tin becoming frozen to her biscuit base

and I felt bad for her because she did of course get the lecture from Giorgio that you shouldn’t serve any sort of cake like this because I think he’s perhaps got them wrong impression of how British people thing cheesecakes work

but she knew that! She didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just that the MasterChef kitchen unfortunately doesn’t come stocked with a mattock! But beyond the bonus layer of inedible metal she’d given them, the actual cheesecake was a little bit too soft and hadn’t quite set enough

and both of these problems probably would’ve been solved if she’d just chosen to make them individually instead of as one big cheesecake.

This was a bit a brutal episode with there being an elimination after both challenges and I was a bit annoyed about this first elimination because as much as I’ve liked Nitin in previous challenges, he absolutely deserved to be eliminated here on lack of effort alone. However, it was Dynamite getting the chop for the mortal MasterChef sin of making Giorgio Locatelli look at a cake tin

I will avenge you, diva!

Gourmet Burger Bitchin’

The stacking was only continuing into the second challenge of the episode as the celebs found themselves having to put together their best legally distinct non-union gourmet burger

and I do think it would’ve been kinder to eliminate Nitin in the earlier round because now he was stuck making his second veggie burger of the series, having had to make one for Tom Kerridge’s day trip during his quarterfinal

and if I had a nickel for every time someone made an explicitly Tom Kerridge burger recipe this series, I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice

unsurprisingly, Emily having the recipe to literal restaurant food resulted in an amazing burger that the judges raved about

and I don’t doubt for a second that a lot of the celebs use some connections to get recipes or a couple of lessons, it’s just never been quite as explicit as The Emily Campbell Clean and Jerk Charity Burger™. Like, I feel *pretty* confident that Lauren Steadman walked into her Portsmouth burger joint with her gold medal and they shoved the secret miso peanut butter sauce recipe into her hand without any sort of negotiation

Giorgio was extremely nervous about the concept of a Peanut Butter and Chilli Jam Beef Burger but as someone who has had a beef doughnut burger (Red’s True Barbecue is where culinary decency goes to die) I was on board from the jump! And Giorgio was thoroughly convinced by the end of it

for a lot going on, it was incredibly balanced with the ~Asian~ slaw on the side offering a nice point of refreshment to the headiness of everything else.

The sides were also a very important part of the challenge, obviously chips were a popular choice but I was very invested in the Onion Ring Off between Joe and Donna. The latter’s were more traditional, or at least they were up until the moment she spritzed them with gold

I hope Giorgio has realised that he has now very much opened himself up to the possibility that everything Donna serves him will now covered in gold glitter spray

I trust that Donna knows what she has to do.
And she was definitely taking gold in the onion rings stakes – hers looked absolutely sensational and there’s now nothing I want more than an onion ring

it is unfortunately 10:45am on a Saturday and all I have at my disposal is Costa’s incredibly ill-advised attempt at a Philly Cheesesteak – nobody tell America, they’ll be insufferable about it! As for Joe’s onion rings, they needed a little bit longer which is a shame because the Prosecco batter sounded lovely

but both of them had great burgers. Donna had gone for big flavours with her Truffle Cheese Beef Burger that the judges were very impressed that she’d managed to balance so well and Joe was going all fancy with his Muntjac Burger

aside from Nitin mashing beans, he seemed to be the only person having to make their own mince, which is a distressing thing to watch someone wearing a tie-dye dinosaur shirt operate completely unsupervised and very clearly for the first time

but as always with Joe Pasquale, despite what feels like a real risk to human life, the final result was actually very good!

and I’m going to assume by the noises Grace was making while dislodging her jaw to eat it that it was a damn tasty burger

I just love Joe, I don’t know if he intended to come onto the show and end up taking it so seriously but it’s very endearing

he’s an absolute treasure and I genuinely hope this leads to seeing him around more on TV.

Sue and Shakira were both going for international affairs, Shakira giving us an insight into her Instagram algorithm

I am but an aging millennial so mine is just nail art, that parrot that sings the Bacon Pancakes song from Adventure Time and Pokemon. None of that really translates super well into a burger but… I think I could work with it? But while Shakira thumb wrestles Donna for who got the “Golden” from Kpop Demon Hunters needle drop, Sue was taking us to Spain by the medium of mostly just shoving some chorizo in there, the tried and true MasterChef ~Spanish flare~

she was also doing some Padron Peppers – a god tier side dish that you do not see often enough

it does look much less generous than everyone else’s – even just a dip for the peppers would’ve made it seem more lively. The bigger problem was that the chorizo was kind of lost in the mix, not having really had the time to properly cook out and release its flavour making it a little bland. Shakira didn’t have that issue as the judges loved her use of Gochujang and Miso

I think there was maybe a more interesting bun she could’ve gone with than the standard Tesco 6-pack and it was pretty clear that her chips were overcooked. Although the judges ere very prepared to forgive her for that due to everything else being so good. Nitin was a bit of a reversal of fortunes with his side of Japanese Long Fries, which I am apparently not on the right side of the internet to know about

being the highlight while his bean burger kind of just didn’t offer much in the way of texture or flavour

he was however fighting one hell of an uphill battle and my god did he know it

outside of Emily Campbell being shackled to Jason Mohammed for 90 minutes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a MasterChef contestant resenting a challenge this much. It was not an episode best suited to his interests or culinary style.

The top end of this particular challenge was really quite tight and I think has started to make the final three look a little more clear – I still think Joe and Shakira stand a chance with Emily possibly being the biggest “maybe” out of her, Donna and Lauren. The bottom two was quite clearly Sue and Nitin, with the latter going home in what might be the shortest lived vengeance of all time

Nitin had such a good start to the competition that I thought he was a sure fire finalist but he just didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as the show for most of this week, which has been a little disappointing because when he hit, he hit hard and produced some incredible food!