I think you’re neat.

How many lives does a toucan have?

Cookie Monsters

It’s Biscuit Week and with Shannon returning from The Great Beyond, it’s a full cohort and this time nobody goes home ill halfway through, try as Danni might

when you’re looking imminent elimination dead in the eyes, or at least pretending you’re making eye contact with it, you do have to start playing dirty. But I’m getting ahead of myself because this is the Signature where Danni still had all the gleeful hope in the world

and for their Biscuit Week Signature the bakers were having to make a batch of 30 American-style Cookies. Danni was leaning into the Americana of it all with their Snickerdoodle inspiration

they look really good! The problem arose in the fact they’re not vegan cookies and therefore Danni had not been able to taste test as she went along

and as it turns out, doubling the snickering and the cinnamon might not have been the wisest decision that Danni made in that tent

so it’s back to the drawing board and placing an order for that black market arsenic

Danni was far from the only one to have an issue with their cookies – there was overbaking, clashing flavours and in the case of Moyin kind of just not making a cookie at all

I’m going to blame Crumbl for this for no other reason than that I am their biggest hater. I just think once your cookie exceeds a centimetre in height, maybe it stops being a cookie and becomes something else entirely. While the verticality of the cookie was a minor concern for the judges, it was Moyin’s flavour choice that was raising Paul Hollywood’s born yesterday eyebrows

Sir, DO NOT act brand new! Over just the last 6 years you have likely eaten a bucket of miso caramel on this show – it was literally Crystelle Mc2021’s ENTIRE personality, she launched a miso caramel sauce in Waitrose off the back of this show! Thankfully Nigella was having none of it

and she was not having any of his food moralising bullshit either

GET HIS ASS LAWSON!

so you hear that, Clara? Stop shaming your dog

but in all seriousness, I have always appreciated the way Nigella talks about food with nothing but gay abandon and desire. I went through a very gnarly eating disorder in my late teens and in no small part, watching Nigella’s cooking shows unpicked a lot of my behaviours and toxic ideals about food. At university I did a whole project on culinary TV and a part of it focused specifically on Nigella Lawson and her distinctly unique approach to food. On a complete whim, I sent an email to her agent asking if I could get a quote from Nigella, not expecting a reply or to be taken seriously. I will never forget the surreal moment that Nigella took 5 minutes of her time to have a phonecall with me about food TV and eating disorders for a second year university project that truly could not have mattered less to her lol. And I’m glad to see her bringing that attitude to Bake Off.

I also like that Nigella is reinforcing the fact that it’s actually ok to just make something pretty ordinary as the show begins to catapult itself ever closer to the high concept event horizon

granted, Gary’s Chocolate Chip Cookies were not entirely without concept given they were sort of dead goat séance cookies

did… did you try the old hair dryer trick?

we’ll get to the Resurrection of Parakeetsus Christ eventually.

The more common problem amongst the bakers was underbaking their cookies, Connie having the worst time of it after her first batch came out much too spread out and gooey

which really put her on a backfoot and even with the communal cookie disaster relief team, didn’t quite manage to get a full of batch of 30 to the pass

Lads, did you help AT ALL? The ones that they’d managed to plate up and decorate by lashing with enough white chocolate to cover most of their sins were reasonably well received by Paul and Nigella who were even willing to forgive the use of banana essence in her caramel

but it won’t be allowed again so you all better start carrying an emergency banana in your back pockets

Moyin’s aforementioned EXTREMELY NORMAL Miso Caramel wasn’t quite so successful in terms of balance, but as far as a scientific foray into the limits of Nigella’s penchant for salt, a success!

so the limits lands somewhere between several pinches and a Number 15 on the Mr. Miyagi Sushi Menu.

On the higher end of the ranking were Tom’s cookies, which you knew were going to be good because he was allowed to say the chocolate bar brand name

whereas Nikki was winking and nudging her way through Legally Distinct Non-union Cherry Ripes

and Tom knew his cookies were good as he begged for a drive-by compliment

it is truly a miracle that they were willing to give him Star Baker this early given that they could’ve tortured him for at least 5 episodes before it began to start feeling like a violation of his human rights.
Nikki’s Rerry Chipe Cookies weren’t quite as successful, even if I do appreciate the fact that it looked like instead of making 30 cookies she’d just made one massive shunting cookie

her use of fresh cherries, while tasty, did mean they were a little bit too moist. It wasn’t the only use of errant fruit as Nigella didn’t appreciate having to pick mango out of her teeth on national television, Mo

but his Lemon Meringue Cookies were so pretty!

Mo wasn’t the only one taking inspiration from a classic dessert as Gabe sort flavour redemption with his Bakewell Cookies

and it was certainly an… improvement because they weren’t declared dead on arrival this time, they had however gone a little overboard on the freeze-dried cherry. Clara had also “ruined” her cookie with an overeager amount of topping (*Grindr notification*)

Paul claimed he would’ve given her a handshake if she hadn’t been quite so heavy handed with the cream cheese frosting

moderately valid crash-out – I’m still investing in the Lawson Scolding Economy.

Yannis was also up there as a contender for his rose petal strewn Chai Cookies

so that’s salt out and everyone bringing an entire honeymoon suite of rose petals into Bread Week. The only problem with Yannis’s cookies was the fact they were a little bit one note in terms of texture, bordering on being more of a gingernut than a cookie.

Shannon’s great return to the tent was maybe not the triumphant success she wanted it to be with her Strawberries and Cream biscuits being a little but too moist due to the use of strawberry jam

but they tasted great, as you’d probably expect from something as classic as strawberries and cream

An Unofficial Signature Cookie Ranking:
1. Clara’s Tira-missed Opportunity
2. Daim! So Close
3. Molly’s Morally Neutral Cookies
4. Nikki’s Amorphous Cookie Blob
5. He’s Alive But’s Bakewell Tarting
6. Le-Mo-n Meringue Pie Cookies
7. Yannis Rose and Fell Chai Cookies
8. Moyin’s Four Cookies In A Trench Coat
9. Choccie, Can You Hear Me?
10. Shannon’s Return to Centre Court
11. Danni’s 11th Place Residency
12. Connie’s

Little Gems

Apparently this series is very dedicated to new and intriguing gingham shapes, with the bakers this week being greeted by the ominous mini gingham

we head ever closer to the alarming possibility of them one day unveiling a nude model beneath a gingham shroud that the bakes have to render in hot crust pastry. They’re are safe for now as instead of a tiny nude person, it was a plate of Iced Gems to be prodded and poked

which were given as a visual aid, mostly for the benefit of Clara who was getting a whirlwind tour of the lower shelves of the British supermarket biscuit aisle

I don’t entirely know how helpful the demonstrable Iced Gems were because she spent most of the challenge just being increasingly more incredulous that time had a habit of moving without her permission

it doesn’t help when the time calls are being conducted by the guards where one can only tell the truth, the other tells only lies and neither of them are particularly good at rudimentary junior school maths

you two better watch your backs because there’s always someone younger, hungrier and marginally more unhinged looking for a Bake Off hosting gig

it was the icing that caused Clara the most issues, hers was much too runny and I have to somewhat admire the sheer audacity of trying to pipe it into a stiff peak regardless of the fact it was still entirely liquid

to be fair to her though, the icing was tricky with much speculation of how you should achieve the distinct Iced Gem crust. Despite EVERYTHING Bake Off has taught us about icing

the bakers were indeed meant to partially bake the Iced Gems’ icing in the residual heat of the oven

OF COURSE THEY’RE NOT GOING TO KNOW THIS, PAUL. Up until this very moment nobody has ever made an Iced Gem outside of a McVitie’s factory!
They aren’t *actually* that hard to make – it’s shortbread and royal icing, which makes for quite a good technical and everyone got something resembling Iced Gems out. Or at least Iced Gems going through their awkward teenage Nightmare Before Christmas phase that they’ll regret posting about how Jack Skellington can GET IT on social media

I need to know at which point Gary completely lost faith in the principles of colour theory, most of the issues with colour were being too bright and accidentally making Pride Gems

some had managed to get the distinct pastel shades – Tom just couldn’t resist trying to entice Paul in with Narcissus’s Iced Gems

Tom got a very respectable third place – truly everything’s coming up, Tom!

screenshots taken before nuclear woobie face.

Reigning supreme in the Iced Gem Technical was Connie in first place and Mo taking second after completely disappearing in the edit of the challenge only to re-emerge at the end with this little statement

Clara, you are forgiven for hissing at him like the girl at the shopping centre who hangs a foxtail off her belt

Paul, you owe this poor beleaguered Portuguese woman a bolo do caco technical next week or the embassy will be pressing charges

but despite having gone through A Very Bake Off Hell, Clara wasn’t even last or second last, much to her own bemusement

those spots were reserved for Gary’s Iced Printer Explosion and Danni managing to see the positive side of her 11th place residency

and don’t you forget it!

An Official Iced Gem Technical Ranking:
1. Connie’s Very (n)Iced Gems
2. Mo Knows What An Iced Gems Is
3. What A Beautiful Day? Nothing Can Go Wrong!
4. Moyin’s Orange Topazes
5. Shannon’s Semi-precious Gems
6. Gabe’s Unbuttered Gems
7. Molly’s High Peaks and Low Baking Temperature
8. Yannis’s Gems, Undefined
9. Nikki’s Pride Gems
10. Clara’s Anti-monarchist Icing
11. Danni’s 11th Place Residency
12. Gary’s Misunderstood Iced Gems

Multi-biscuit Tile Up

While the show may have managed to develop increasingly new and intriguing Technical Challenges, the Biscuit Week Showstopper Challenge remains, as ever, to make a biscuit mosaic – and this time they couldn’t even be bothered to make up a theme, they just shrugged and let them have at it. The only specification was that it had to be made of multiple little biscuits, which is just reading the Merriam-Webster definition of a mosaic, and fixed in place with an edible glue, EDIBLE GLUE

Paul Hollywood always knew his time would come at the hand of a cyanide-laced pop-up for busty babes over 50 in your area

because it’s Bake Off, obviously everyone had done things that relate to their life or hobbies – Danni spends a lot of their free time trying to find a way to play Age of Empires II in the fashion God intended

your emulators greatly displease the Windows 98 Byzantines.
Danni’s Malware Mosaic was definitely an improvement over last week’s Cake of Many Miscellaneous Weeds, the biscuits were quite tough but both Nigella and Paul were very taken by their Cherry Jam and Almond Buttercream

Nigella, we cannot be adding a new awful layer to scone discourse. Although I’m not sure Nigella believes in food discourse? So if she can find the time, can she please save me from the replies in my post about the very nice pizzas I got

help me, Nigella! You’re my (and the poor Italians’) only hope!

With only 4 hours on the clock for this challenge, most of it relied on finding the middle ground between junior school macaroni art and the artist’s rendering of the 6th century’s X-Factor finale in the Basilica of San Vitale

Tom, flying a little bit too high off a very successful Signature and podium position in the Technical Challenge had bitten off a little more than he could chew with his Mean Girls Burn Book Mosaic

what do we think Paul’s favourite movie is? Because I think he claims its The Godfather but he’s never actually seen it because he doesn’t want to admit his actual favourite movie is Road House (1989).
Despite the fact Paul could’ve increased the amount of times he’d watched Mean Girls by 250% in the time of this challenge, Tom was still incredibly pushed for time, looking increasingly more murderous every time Alison tried to talk to him

meanwhile, Mo, never having been phased by anything in his life, is just pretending to do things to the portrait of a resurrected toucan to look busy

but also, Tom is just maybe a little too highly strung for this show, because you look at this face experiencing every stage of grief except acceptance and you think “God, it must look awful!”

and then it kind of just looks fine?

babe, just breathe! Nikki’s looks like she hired a plumber off Facebook marketplace to grout her bathroom for a fiver and she’s still beaming like nobody else

Paul, however was not, because the biscuits contained a near Norman amount of lavender in them

Tom’s was messy and unfinished but it’s still recognisably the Mean Girls Burn Book to anyone that has seen Mean Girls or spent any amount of time online. I can only assume this nuclear woobie face was because he was devastatingly disappointed that he didn’t get to write “Paul Hollywood is the nastiest skank bitch I’ve ever met. DO NOT TRUST HIM.” overleaf

thankfully Tom didn’t end up having to go commit biscuity seppuku on the lawn as an apology to senpai because his biscuits were probably the best baked ones with a balance of lemon and raspberry to match.

Some of the bakers had opted to try and save time by not making iced biscuits – Moyin going for an Afromodernist mosaic that I wish he’d been given room to explain more about but there wasn’t time between Tom explaining the plot of Mean Girls to a glazed over Paul Hollywood and Mo’s Saga of an Undead Toucan

the judges did think it was a little too stark, however I think the precision of his biscuits deserved a little more praise than he got. They did really liked how punchy his black cocoa biscuits were but the yellow turmeric spiced ones were underbaked and fudgey, which had also scuppered Yassin

and while that is disappointing, it was even more disappointing his biscuit mosaic was of the Norfolk Broads and not that time he delivered a baby on an aeroplane

diva, if you put that on your application form, I hope you know that the only reason they cast you was in the hopes you’d render this moment in French meringue! The Norfolk Broads are lovely – I had a wonderful holiday there and I love a migratory swallowtail butterfly as the next person but it’s not quite labour at 35,000 feet

Clara had also gone for a bit of a landscape inspired by summers spent in Europe, which as ever are denoted by a lemon trees

of all the bakes, this definitely felt the most like it was what the judges wanted to see from the challenge, she got that perfect stained glass abstraction. Whereas I think a few of the bakers kind of felt like they’d just painted a picture onto biscuits? case in point, Yannis and I’ll be honest, even Connie’s Jamaican Flag

don’t get me wrong, this was lovely and an extremely touching tribute to Jamaica in the wake of Hurricane Melissa last year, an issue that’s very close to Connie as her mum’s hometown was part of the destruction

and Nigella continues to ace being a judge, reminding Connie that Actually, Emotions Are Good™ and that for an inspiration so tumultuous, there’s a lot of joy and life in the bake

and then in comes your dad who is only just putting up with this trip to the National Art Gallery you brought him along to

they were also extremely well baked biscuits, Paul deeming her base to be a perfect cinnamon biscuit, the second highest honour of the episode to maybe only Molly having what were deemed the best chocolate biscuit Paul’s had in a while

the jury has one question: when did he last have a bourbon?
Molly had also gone quite simple with her design, making the Disability Pride flag out of iced square biscuits

it’s simple but very effective and because it was iced, it wasn’t too simple whereas Gary’s Massive Clock, done for no other reason than Gary likes clocks, was too simple for not being iced

Nigella however appreciates the beauty in a simple unadorned clock

Mo had also not iced his biscuits but possibly got away with it more than Gary because his was colourful and a toucan is generally more geometrically interesting than a clock

I’m just sad he didn’t have time to fully portray the resurrection of this toucan at the hands of The Lather, The Salon and The Vidal Sassoon 2000W Professional Hair Dryer VSD5129K 200-240V

it takes A LOT to be the most confounding person in the tent when you’ve got Danni wearing all of their favourite anime cosplay pieces at the same time while doing the Attack on Titan salute at Nigella Lawson but Mo is an enigma with an incredible jawline.

Mo’s Toucan wasn’t the only one returning from the dead, as Shannon finally gets a Showstopper in front of the judges instead of walking further towards the light

and I’m glad it went so well for her – I’m not entirely sure what the lower third of it is meant to be, but we can say without a doubt the top third is strawberries and carrots thanks to Captain Obvious

thanks Paul, whatever would we do without you?

Lastly we have Gabe, who was also going for a fruit-heavy mosaic inspired by his hot uncle’s garden that he used to pick fruit in and sell on the roadside

and now my mother is holding me at gunpoint and forcing me to tell you all about the time me and my best friend, aged 7, opened a roadside tuckshop and proceeded to sell things like bacon, cheese and eggs for literal cents because we were 7 and didn’t care for economics like the fact the bacon has cost my mum like $5000 Zimbabwean dollars. As you can imagine, our accidental invention of socialism was VERY promptly shut down. And that’s how I became radicalised by the far left.
Gabe’s mosaic was a tale of two halves

they really liked the blackcurrant and strawberry flavours, but in using apple essence he had unfortunately activated Paul Hollywood. I do get it though, fruit essences are particularly noticeable in their artifice and really, we all know Paul is going to complain about it so… just don’t do the apple flavour?

you had total control in this situation? Make them lemons? Nobody is going to go knocking on the door of Uncle Tom to ask if he was growing lemons in his Wolverhampton garden between the years 1997 and 1999 for a hit piece in The Spectator. You don’t always have to tell the truth on TV

between Richard Grant doing…. THAT and Ross Kemp jumping out of his skin every time someone makes a sharp movement because he’s convinced it’ll kill him, we’re off to a cracking start on Celebrity Traitors

my guy, you’ve done drug busts in Bolivia, Leigh-Anne Pinnock just wanted to know if you were cold!

Star Baker was a fairly complicated decision this week because everyone that was in contention – Tom, Connie and Clara – had had a bit of a fumble at some point. Ultimately they gave it to Tom on the quality of his technique even if his Showstopper went unfinished

I also imagine knowing that being given Star Baker would count as interventive therapy helped sway the decision. I still would have given it to Connie for vibes.

The elimination was an inevitability, nobody was winning any money if they placed a bet on Danni going home this week but my god if they didn’t take it like an absolute champ

I, and I’m sure MANY other people, see a lot of myself in Danni. I didn’t make any lasting connections or friendship at high school or university and unfortunately making friends only gets harder the older you get. It shouldn’t surprised you either that when one of your main hobbies is writing a blog about reality TV, you don’t make a lot of friends in the great IRL and the loneliness SUCKS but you eventually convince yourself that it’s what you like, the quiet and uneventful. Then I started playing D&D and I found the strange and weird to match my own. Danni might not have won, but with a send off like this, maybe they did and I am so grateful to this wonderful group of people for giving them this experience

Top 10 all time Bake Off contestant by sheer force of will alone.

And so, it’s on to Bread Week!