Smile, you’re on camera!

Does anyone still wear a hat-shaped cake?

It’s All Relative

I apparently jumped the gun in last week’s recap and thought that as usual, Week 3 would be Bread Week but apparently Strictly Come Dancing isn’t the only one soft rebooting as we get our first ever Global Democracy Roulette Week

unfortunately none of my suggestions were taken seriously:
– Swiss Rolls inspired by your favourite Greek philosopher
– Just A Normal Technical, An Innocent Technical
– Replacing Paul Hollywood with a puppet of a very distinguished duck
– A firing squad for the concept of a Biscuit Mosaic
– 3 Tiered Cake Illustrating How You’d Like To Die

remember how last year they made “decorated Basque Cheesecakes” and there was a collective “Huh????” over why you’d decorate a Basque Cheesecake? WELL GUESS WHAT, MIMI? We’re doing it again

technically it didn’t *have* to be a Basque Cheesecake and they didn’t force them to decorate it but also Paul has been on people’s cases for playing it safe so no way was anyone turning out a cheesecake that didn’t look like it had been put through a Drag Race makeover challenge. You just had to hope your makeover partner wasn’t Lala Ri

oh Nikki…

The Cheesecake was only one third of the brief though with the audience choosing the bizarrely safe option of “A Family Favourite” for the flavour profile instead of something like “Your seventh favourite vegetable” but it doesn’t stop there with the bakers then also having to do this challenge as a three-legged race with one of their relatives

and I’ll hand it to whoever sent in this idea, it worked really well and was VERY cute – Connie and Myke are pure relationship goals

so democracy has a two out of three hit rate which gives me… hope?

The main problem with this challenge is, as ever, the time – they only had three hours and a Baked Cheesecake is something you ordinarily cool slowly overnight and that maths is certainly not mathing whether you’re double fisting fans or not

Gary unfortunately does not have the privilege of the LGBT (Let’s Go Bake Together) agenda behind him

Gary was working with his sister Paula, who was in charge of building a flotilla of meringue swans

and I will say, she absolutely knocked these swans out of the park, I’m just not *so* keen on the roiling lake of blood they’re swimming on

for a cherry compote it was a little lacking in tartness but it was kind of all about the swans, with Nigella leaving the table with a pocketful of swan to run evil experiments upon later

they did also think that Gary and Paula had put too much of the compote on – I get the distinct impression this was largely done to hide any cracks caused by having to cool the cheesecakes down too rapidly as they were far from the only ones to over moisten a cheesecake. Clara and her fiancé Kieran had the same problem having covered their Honky-Tonk Cheesecake in Peach Jam

I’ll be honest, in the year of our Lord 2026, anything with an American flag on it really gives me the ick but my god a Peach and Bourbon Cheesecake sounds so damn good. They’d decided on those flavours because they’re apparently moving to Georgia sometime in the nebulous future

I do not know how that plan is currently developing but… much luck to you guys on that one and I’ll leave it at that. While we’re on the subject of America-

NO DON’T LEAVE!

My blog shows me which websites people are clicking through to my blog from and I’ve been getting A LOT of engagement from the American Osteopathic College of Radiology and I don’t know why. So if an American Osteopathic Radiologist wants to enlighten me, please tell me! And if you’re from Georgia, I’m really sorry? Peaches and Jacob Andrews are both great exports! Go… Falcons?

Connie and Myke had also received complaints about the moisture levels being increased by the amount of pears atop the cake

it was very much a case of perfect flavour combinations in the pear, ginger and lemon but just the wrong medium. And then of course there was Nikki’s which was just moist because it hadn’t cooled enough

but the fact it looks like a rations era birthday cake made of sawdust and whatever jam you could scrape together, the bigger problem was the 4 teaspoons of almond extract causing varying degrees of misery across the board

somebody get Nikki a novelty t-shirt that reads “I Went one Bake Off and all I did was cause Nigella Lawson second degree burns”.

Nikki wasn’t the only one to slightly botch the flavours as Shannon had attempted to pander to Nigella by holding a bag of Himalayan salt in front of her like a zookeeper offering seals a mackerel if they clapped

as well as being double salted, it was also doubled Baileys’d having been inspired by their pet dog who drank some at Christmas

and is sort of a Schrodinger’s dog being at once perfectly fine

and dead

Nigella was similarly horrified when she found out that the cake was in fact too salty

and Paul was pulling no punches now that Week 3 had come around just outright saying he hated everything about it as a critique

you could have at least said something nice about this Thornton’s window display piece of a cheesecake, Paul

what happened to the art of the compliment sandwich?

Everything else was generally more positive for the rest of the bakers. Which is a bit of a surprise in the case of Yassin because he was using Quark in his German-style Cheesecake and Nigella was prepared to put him in the doghouse for it

but really the only problem ended up being that Nigella didn’t appreciated having to pick fig seeds out of her teeth for the rest of the day

I think this was my favourite sounding cheesecake of the challenge? I am sadly cursed to be a fig-enjoyer and detest the fact that texturally they are like someone decided that what an apricot needed was to be filled with sand. But as someone who will tactically leave all the Bountys in a box of Celebrations until last, I was very taken with Gabe’s Legally Distinct Coconut Bar Cheesecake

Gabe’s assistant was one of his partners, Ellis which does raise the question of how they decided which one would get to do this

my guess is they sat them down in front of a cardboard cut out of Nigella and whoever cracked and said “mee-croh-wavé” first had to sit it out. I just want to know what colour Tyler’s neckerchief is

the best part of this all was Paul Hollywood getting introduced to polyamory as well as Gabe really trying to make “boy band” stick

unfortunately their Chocolate and Coconut Cheesecake’s quest for a third hadn’t ended quite as happily as it did for Gay Rascall Flatts with the lime curd not really feeling like it fully belonged

and Mo’s Strawberry, Pistachio, Lemon and Cardamom Cheesecake was also deemed a little bit too busy

but to be fair, I don’t know how much lemon there actually was because his cousin, Esrat, is only a marginally more gifted lemon zester than Richard Blackwood

every day is a learning opportunity.

Moyin had gone for the simple but very effective route, making a purely Orange Cheesecake instead of throwing the entire kitchen sink at the concept

and it certainly paid off with the first Hollywood Handshake of the series going to him

and his mum, Kike The Schemer

I’d rob a museum with her.

Molly had had to bar her mother from joining her in the tent for this challenge because her track record is akin to Molly’s with Chocolate Stout Bundts

so instead her husband, Ash, was joining her because he’ll hoover up anything

SEE PAUL? Floor Cake isn’t that bad!
They’d gone for a Raspberry Cheesecake flavoured largely with freeze-dried raspberry powder

it did look very pretty but there wasn’t much depth to the flavour or anything to cut through the tang of the raspberries like Tom had managed to do with the classic addition of white chocolate

he’d been joined in the tent by his boyfriend Alex and using the opportunity to publicly shaming him into an engagement

it’s a bit hard to put a ring on it when you’re making him stand 6 feet away and just watch you do everything, TOM

“How’d you get engaged?”
“Like a game of quoits.”

A Family Favourite Baked Cheesecake Raking:
1. Orange You Glad Your Mother Was Here
2. Tom’s Solo Cheesecake
3. Yannis’s German Cheesequark
4. Gary’s Bloody Swan Lake
5. Gabe’s Looking For a Curd
6. Choosin’ Georgia
7. Connie’s Perfect Pearing
8. Mo’s Lessons in Zesting
9. Molly’s Unfloored Cheesecake
10. Nikki’s Decanted Trifle of a Cheesecake
11. Schrodinger’s Chocolate Salty Balls

Bakes and Larders

For the Technical Challenge, the audience had apparently voted to reheat MasterChef’s nachos with the bakers being given access to Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet of Mystery Ingredients and told they could bake anything their hearts, brains or pancreas told them to

and then just about everyone grabbed the lemons and a punnet of raspberries and hoped to God that would be enough, so the result is sort of a Lemon Drizzle Family Reunion with a couple of partners who begin to feel uncomfortable with the family’s in-jokes

the biggest outliers of this biblically accurate village bake sale were definitely Mo and Yannis who had respectively opted for flexing with an off-the-dome Paris Brest and an Esterhazy Torte, who I believe I went to university with?

sadly for Yannis his Esterhazy Tortes hadn’t quite worked out for him because of the lack of delicacy and to be fair for something that takes pride of place in the Mozart Cafe, they did look a bit more like the custard slices in a bakery display of a South Yorkshire sandwich shop that’ll make you the most banging Hot Pork Roll you’ve ever had

and these cinderblocks of Austrian patisserie unfortunately dragged him to the bottom of the leaderboard alongside Molly’s lemon cake

and Gary’s lemon drizzle loaf that’s built like an accordion that shows up on Antiques Roadshow

Tom’s face when Gary took it out of the oven to reveal the depressive slump his cake was going through <3

however Gary was saved by the fact that his Disaster Bake at least tasted great, whereas Shannon’s, despite looking really pretty, unfortunately had very few redeeming qualities and ended up in last place

and with being decidedly last in both challenges so far and being lead towards Paul Hollywood’s Backyard Guillotine with near certainty

I’m sure she’ll come out swinging in the Showstopper Challenge and won’t just make a big biscuit…

At the top of the leaderboard, it very much felt like Mo was the one to beat as the adrenaline of the challenge wound down and everyone realised that he’d just been a bit quirky and made choux pastry with little to no bother

however, while the choux pastry was perfectly cooked, there was one slight negative! He was not immune to the raspberry panic and had unnecessarily shoved a few of them in there which had unfortunately apparently softened the choux pastry a little

leaving the smallest gap for a very shocked Gabe’s Lemon Meringue Tart to sneak into pole position

Nikki had also made a Lemon Meringue Tart but had decided to go a step too far for the judges by shoving a load of raspberries into the meringue hole

the only bakers immune the apparent allure of the raspberries were Luke, Shannon and Clara who had made an almond cake that if you want to be complimentary looks ethereal and if you want to be the NARS makeup artist doing my shade match, looks pallid

shout out to my vitamin D deficient girlies who refuse to do anything about it!

The middle of the leaderboard is a cacophony of layer cakes, the most interesting of which is probably Moyin’s purely for the how cool the decoration is

and Connie had managed to set herself apart from the other cakes by opting for a Chocolate Icing to go with her orange cake

Paul and Nigella just felt that the addition of the emotional support raspberries was kind of gilding the lily and setting the balance of flavours slightly off-kilter. Tom’s Citrus and Raspberries worked slightly beter

but fell short on the technical front having been overbaked which along with the excess of zest in the cake was making it a little bit too bitter.

A Mystery Box Bake Ranking:
1. Gabe’s Immunity to Raspberry Fever
2. Mo’s Second-best Paris-Brest
3. Clara’s Almond Cake in the shade “Oslo”
4. Nikki’s Whole Meringussy
5. Moyin’s Lemon Meringue Art Attack
6. Connie’s Overfruited Cake
7. Tom’s Bittersweet Citrus Cake
8. Gary’s Lemon Drizzle Antique Accordion
9. Miss Esterhazy Torte
10. Molly’s Raspberry Tipped Lemon Cake
11. Shannon’s Raspberry-free Lemon Drizzle Load

It’s Called Fashion, Sweaty

The producer wearing a moustache and calling themself an audience member was being particularly Machiavellian with the Showstopper, challenging the bakers to create wearable bakes to shove on various pieces of dissected mannequins

I feel like we may have drunk from this well before? Or at least people have certainly made handbag-shaped cakes in the past for various reasons only really known to the oracle atop Ben Nevis furiously shaking a Magic 8 Ball that usually decides these challenges. I was surprised that we only got one handbag this episode, which was a severe serve from Clara who was the only person actually brave enough to wear their bake in so much as holding a handbag is wearing something

although I imagine all the footage of Nikki wearing her sombrero and doing the Jarabe Tapatio with all the cultural sensitivity of Speedy Gonzalez may have been wisely left on the cutting room floor

the most popular item of clothing were various styles of hats, which doesn’t really surprise me because they’re the most cake-shaped items of clothing, and for those unfamiliar with a hat, here is Molly explaining them in a way that makes me think she might be from outer space

we had a beanie hat, a wedding hat, the aforementioned sombrero, a cap and in the case of Moyin, just a cake brute forced onto that mannequin head like me trying to make a paper crown fit my head at Christmas dinner

and much like my paper crowns, it was on the floor before too long

but to be fair to Moyin, his was the only cake hat Paul had cut while it was on the mannequin’s head. I’m not sure Connie’s wedding hat would’ve faired any better once the weight had been shifted

Gary would’ve been fine because Paul only just managed to pull the beanie-shaped cake off of the mannequin head and is now the rightful King of England

Moyin may not have met the brief (AT ALL) and you can see the precise moment he begins to realise this as he begins to explain how hats work to Paul Hollywood

but he was very much saved by the fact that they really loved his Pistachio and Raspberry Cake-shaped Cake he was calling a hat. Which was certainly not saving Shannon who hadn’t seemed to realise that all she was making was a big decorated biscuit until Paul pointed it out

and if they called Moyin’s cake with aspirations of headwear into question for not feeling like there was 4 hours of effort in it, then Shannon’s slab of biscuit was about to be taken outside and used for clay pigeon shooting

the name is more complicated than the bake </3
The critique was a little soft, I think it might have been a bit too mean to make it more obvious than it was that Shannon was not hanging around after this. It is at least very prettily decorated .

Shannon also wasn’t the only one doing wings with Mo going in a more Victoria Secret direction and choosing to use most of his four hours to secretly turn this into the untapped potential of the Great British Papercraft Off and making god knows how many feathers out of rice paper

it’s effective and looks very pretty but I don’t know how much of a wearable bake it is considering it’s kind of just cake shoved into a backpack being held together by a DIY harness made out of various belts

I’ve been to Pride, I’ve seen worse.
Neither Paul nor Nigella questioned how much this was a wearable bake and were actually quite taken by the whole thing. Having overdone the flavours in both his signature and technical bakes, he’d pared this right down to a simple combination of Almond and Cherry which was much more successful with the judges.

The rest of the bakers had opted for more pieces of headwear of various novelties, which is potentially why they glued a pair of bagels to Alison’s tits and made her sashay

nobody wanted to make bra cupcakes, huh? We did end up with two crowns though, Gabe opting for something quite classic that Paul deemed untidy

and Nigella looked like she was going to make Paul rue the day he demeaned her new gay best friend

and that’s allyship ✊
Flavour-wise, they both really liked Gabe’s Turkish delight inspired Profiteroles with the balance of the quite divisive rose flavour being pitch perfect. However the actual biscuit structure was overworked and tough, a problem I think you just have to expect when you’re asking people to fabricate abnormal structures out of biscuit because at that point you’ve rescinded its status as biscuit in favour of plasterboard adjacency.
Yannis’s crown was a ceremonial headpiece worn by grooms in Bengali weddings, the traditional name of which I believe is a Topor

and again Paul questioned how much work Yannis had put into it which I think is VERY unfair considering he engineered various biscuit shapes like Linda Barker making a coffee table out of MDF on Changing Rooms, baked mango diplomat-stuffed profiteroles AND hand-decorated it (maybe don’t look too closely at the hand decorating)

I don’t quite know what Paul expects? I think it was just impressive to get something that is instantly recognisable to sit stably on the mannequin? He also didn’t have any complaints about Molly’s cap that was no bigger than Yannis’s and kind of just a hump of cake with fondant thrown over it

there are some lovely little details in it like the stitching and the dotted cherry blossom effect to replicate the limited edition Daniel Riccardo Sakura Cap. The only problem she really had was that her fondant icing was a little bit too elastic and beginning to droop down giving some much needed ear protection against the sun

it’s beginning to look a little bit like Feathers McGraw wearing lipstick.

The last of the bakes was from Tom who had made a Dolly Parton wig topper

it’s such a clever idea and I deeply admire the attempt to make the mannequin look at least Dolly Adjacent – the false lashes are frying me! This is more of the Tom I like to see after last week where he felt too deep in the sauce to see the fun and whimsy of the challenges.

An Unofficial Wearable Bake Ranking:
1. The Devil Wears Clara
2. I Guess This Is The Official Memorial Bust of Dolly Parton Now
3. Connie’s MOTHER! of the Bride
4. Nikki’s Own Personal Mexico Week
5. Yannis’s Topor the Pops
6. Bake Off’s Next Drag Superstar
7. Gary’s Tightly Sealed Beanie
8. Molly’s Brainfilled Cap
9. Mo’s Backpack Full of Cake
10. Moyin’s Suspiciously Cake-shaped Cake
11. Shannon’s Big Biscuit

The decisions this week felt quite easy because even though Clara had a few mistakes with her signature, the flavours and idea were really interesting and there was no denying that she was leagues ahead with the showstopper, so it’s a very deserved Star Baker for her

which resulted in perhaps the best phone call to a loved one ever committed to film

I do believe he may have called her “a clever cunt” and if that just isn’t terrific, I don’t know what is!

The elimination was even more of a no-brainer with Shannon having bottomed harder this week than [I HAVE BEEN ADVISED NOT TO MAKE THIS JOKE.] Thus it is goodbye to the final boss of Fiat 500 Twitter

Sick, Bottom, Elim is one of hell of a track record! I hope she comes back in Pastry Week to give us the full Antonina Nutshell fantasy

I am never not thinking about this.

And I once again apologise for the delay of this recap as we move on to Bread Week *checks notes* tomorrow evening