Never has a Technical Challenge felt more like a police line-up.

Bread is kinda boring and sad.

Vampire Proof Breads

It’s finally upon us, Bread Week is here and Paul Hollywood has assumed his roll of lurking in the background like a paranormal entity in a yeasted edition of Insidious

and to get the ball rolling, the bakers were having to make Garlic Bread, the only specification of which was that they had to use a yeasted dough. We will be running headfirst into the concept of flatbreads a little bit later, for now a garlic and coriander naan won’t cut it!

Aside from trying not to cry when Paul Hollywood rocked up to your bench with a flashlight and that beeping machine from Line of Duty to interrogate you about the exact origins of your bread, the biggest challenge of this particular bake was deciding on the quantity of Garlic to put into it. And I have to assume Gabe was doing the classic thing of mixing up cloves and bulbs – SURELY

I think putting 12 bulbs of Garlic, which probably amounts to something like 120 cloves, into one rugby ball sized loaf of bread classifies this as an artisanal weapon of chemical warfare before it does a bread

the gods tried to smite him down before he served it up to Nigella

and when the biblical hail didn’t work, they just decided to make sure it didn’t cook instead

unfortunately for everyone else, Gabe was the first to be judged and even being within the vicinity of his ticking garlicky time bomb had momentarily left Paul and Nigella’s tastebuds completely inactive. Did Connie’s bread lack garlic or had their tastebuds just been flashbanged into inertia?

the only people who had actually managed to nail the level of Garlic were Tom, Moyin and Nikki – sadly the latter wasn’t there for the judging to receive the praise for her breads with Alison serving as the Nikki by Proxy

the simple reason was “for family reasons” but as we found out at the end of the show, it was due to the death of her mother

which is devastating and completely understandable that she won’t be returning to the competition. She was a real be bright spot in the tent and I’ll miss her a lot.

Gabe wasn’t the only one to end up with raw dough but his was at least spared the humiliation of having it dropped onto the table with a sadly very satisfying *thud*

and I’m almost tempted to say that the Technical-to-come was a dirty protest against this rudeness because that’s an easier explanation that everyone suddenly going insane and not knowing what flatbreads are.

Underproving was also an issue in the tent, so much so I’m almost tempted to blame it on the new proving boxes that look like the children of that menacing moon robot from A Grand Day Out

where did they come from and how do we send them back? I don’t trust them – I sense the enemy within them.

The problem with Bread Week from a beleaguered recapper’s perspective is that they do all tend to look very similar and there’s only so much you can say about the varying combinations of garlic and regionally specific cheddars

Tom, you’re talking to the woman that has a dedicated walk-in pasta pantry, she probably has her own private cheese garderobe full of cheeses you couldn’t even begin to imagine! Of course she’s had Black Bomber! Tom’s grand idea was to make Garlic and Cheese Chelsea Buns

a novelty that surely nobody else would possibly conceive of-

sorry Tom, you’ll have to think of something sillier than that to set yourself apart! Personally, I’d have made a bread bear with the most pronounced nipples you’ve seen since James Blunt showered like a self-driving car had been taught to clean itself

oh, well, there goes my bright idea!
Mo was the only one to go quite so whimsical, mostly because he seems to have been put on this earth entirely to ruin Paul Hollywood’s life

so according to Mo bread is boring and biscuits are for old people – I eagerly await his personal stance on trifles in dessert week.
Mo was another one that had not managed to get much garlic flavour into his bread, mostly because he’d just sort of brushed it on top like his buff Yogi Bear had oiled himself up to compete in Mr. Universe

the main flavour was instead a Naga Pickle which on the Scoville Heat Index is sort of the rough equivalent of the Red Paper Wasp on the Schmidt Sting Index

and on the complete opposite end of the heat and venomous insect scale, you have Molly’s perfectly innocent accidentally plain white bread

it does at least look very pretty, the braiding pattern was very effective and had developed a lovely colour and crust.

Clara had set herself apart from the others by deciding to bring in a slightly more unusual flavour with her use of Thai Basil

they look amazing – probably the most appetising ones in the room, I’m a sucker for an individual roll. Unfortunately her love of Thai Basil had got the better of her and she’d kind of overdone it and overpowered the garlic.

An Unofficial Garlic Bread Ranking:
1. Nikki’s Gold Medal Proxy Vote
2. Tom’s Garlic Chelsea Buns: Volume 1
3. Connie’s Garlic Yumyum
4. Moyin’s Garlic Cakes
5. Clara’s Thai Breaker
6. Gary’s Garlic Chelsea Buns: Volume 2
7. Bready, Teddy, Dough!
8. Molly’s Plain White Bread
9. Gabe’s Weapon of Mass Garlicky Destruction
10. The *thud* Heard Around The World

Stuffed Up

For this week’s Technical Challenge, the bakers were having to bake Flatbreads. Which sounds relatively easy and straightforward. However, Molly had made the mistake of making a wish using the Monkey’s Paw

and thus the spirits of the burial ground that the Bake Off Tent is built upon rose from the ground and drove the bakers to madness!

Although, I don’t know how much of this is the bakers’ fault so much as it is Paul’s for creating something as malevolently evil as flatbreads filled with Roasted Grapes and Blue Cheese

I just cannot bring myself to believe in Roasted Grapes, or as Mo rightfully pointed out Tepid Grapes because they only had 1 hour to do all of this in

even just 30 minutes extra would have helped! Or at least Gary would have been able to find the word “filling” in a four line recipe he was treating like a wordsearch

Gary, honey… IT SAYS IT RIGHT THERE – FOR. THE. FILLING.

apparently Gary had been possessed by the ghost of an illiterate Victorian Orphan and made pizzas that look like a cultivar of the 270 sexes of French mould

GARY YOU WERE LITERALLY SAYING “FILLING” WHAT WERE YOU DOING?????

Connie had also at some point given up on believing this challenge was anything but a test of will and instead of filling her flatbreads with the ambiently temperatured grapes, instead scattered them like an osteomancer and hoped they offer from guidance

outcome unlikely.

The word “filling” had really stumped them and seemed to have been interpreted as “a pocketful of lukewarm grapes and blue cheese” leading to increasingly thicker and thicker not-particularly-flat-flatbreads

Alison had tried her best to warm them

and I think the other thing that had confused things was the instruction to shape the dough into “rounds”

which in cooking instructions is usually an indicator to keep something small and compact, not roll out to a paper thin 10 inches

and from there, the instructions had specified that the breads had to be fried, unless you’d decided to forge your own Technical Challenge and make horrid little pizzas instead

so it’s no surprise that the entire judging process was essentially Nigella and Paul opening a series of crumpet-sized flatbreads to reveal raw dough and barely cooked grapes like the Dead Dove scene from Arrested Development

but there did have to be a judging and because Gabe’s were the only one that that the judges were willing to eat parts of, he gets the world’s most hollow victory since I won a 100 metre sprint because as they said go I let rip a massive fart and everyone was laughing too much to sprint

and joining him in second place was Clara who has had the most fraught introduction to the concept of flatbreads one could possibly imagine

so bread week is going *well*

we’ll just lock this Technical Challenge in the Vault of Bad Ideas and forget about it.

An Official Flatbread Nightmare Ranking:
1. Nikki By Virtue of Not Being There
2. Gabe’s Marginally Edible Bread
3. Clara By Virtue Of Not Knowing What Flatbreads Are
4. Moyin By Virtue of Everyone Else’s Level of Failure
5. Tom by Virtue of Being Uniformly Raw and Not Flat
6. Connie’s Grape Tossing
7. Mo’s Boreder and Sadder Flatbreads
8. Molly’s Unflattened Breads
9. Yannis’s Doughy Balls
10. Gary’s Sinister Pizzas

Bread Fest

For their Showstopper Challenge and last chance of redemption in the pale blue eyes of the Lord of the Bready Underworld the bakers were having to make bread centrepieces for a festival of their choice. I think it did end up going… better? I mean, the challenge ended and Yannis had the face of that frog that always looks like it’s plotting murder

but at no point did Paul Hollywood rip into a brioche and discover that its doughy heart was still beating.

As was to be expected, festival theme did mostly result in a 5 European Christmas pile-up. Moyin’s being a sort of Multicultural nexus point of yuletide cheer

the central bread was a Swedish Kanelbullar and the orbiting torpedos are Italian Pandoros with everything being spices with Nigerian Grains of Paradise. It wasn’t the best bake in the world with Paul likening it more to cake than bread – a critique so common you have to begin wondering if perhaps Paul has completely lost all sense of reality and is going through a yeasted psychosis because every time he complains about the texture of a bread, Nigella actually quite likes it

does Paul even know what bread is anymore? Do any of us? I felt particularly bad for Yannis who had gone through the trouble of building a bread shed out of brioche

only to then have Paul “Well, actually…” him about the fact that brioche is not meant to be used as a building material

YOU LITERALLY ASKED HIM TO DO THIS PAUL!???? Was that not the challenge? His stollen were at least more appreciated, if apparently a little too dry having probably overcompensated the bake time after Flatbreadageddon. Molly had done the same with her Harvest Festival Basket but at least the warm glow of Dulux’s Aurburn Leather gloss varnish is autumnally appropriate

much like Yannis, everything was a little dry and overbaked – I did think her babkas looked amazing though. The pumpkin breads were the real issue with them not having a great deal of pumpkin flavour and actually being kind of sour.

Connie had also gone for a Bread Basket, themeing hers around Easter and hoping to God that Paul Hollywood wouldn’t dare critique his own hot cross bun recipe to harshly

I’m afriad it’s all your fault that Connie’s buns were too dense

can’t believe you’d do this to such a nice woman, Paul? And on Fake Easter of all days!? SMITE HIM, GOD!

apparently the only thing that hates Bread Week more than Mo is the British climate. I do enjoy that if we felt like it we could use the hailstorm to pinpoint the exact days on which they filmed. I’m willing to make the anniversary of the Flatbread Technical or the Day Mo Killed Paul Hollywood into national holidays

having never engaged with the concept of bread, Mo did what everyone would do when having to make brioche for the first time: doomscroll

and what a great trio of TikToks they must have been because his Eid display looked really good!

his solution to his Depressive Bread Episode was to just make the bread as cake-like possible, stuffing one with Pistachio Paste and White Chocolate and the others with Chai Custard and Date Paste. Nigella really liked them. Paul was unconvinced but as we’ve established, he was in need of a dark room, a long lie down and perhaps an exorcism

when not cleansing Paul’s aura, Gabe was honouring the summer solstice with his Maypole Saffron Brioche

the colour of the bread once they opened it up was *so good*

and while the main brioche loaf was very moreish, he had been a little overzealous with the lemon his smaller rolls.

With Tom, Gary and Clara we return once again to Christmas in October with Clara finally finding a bread she’d actually familiar with

a Bolo Rei is one of the finest baked goods of all time so I was very excited by this! Much like Moyin, it wasn’t the best on a technical level but the flavours were nice enough to forgive. Or at least Nigella could, Paul hasn’t met a slightly too dense bread he wouldn’t start a generations long blood feud with. At least he doesn’t have to worry about The Gonks, he loves the Gonks

the Gonk was Tom’s bake as he once again sort of just gestured vaguely towards the Nordic Bloc and shrugs. He’d gone up and above most of the other bakers, having done three breads which did prove a little too tight on time meaning the dough of the main body hadn’t had time to develop enough. And given that if we’ve established one thing this series it’s that Tom has the stress regulation of a cockatoo, I think we can understand why by the end of the episode he had the same maddened eyes of Cabanel’s Fallen Angel

I just want Tom to get through this series without experiencing a very literal twink death.

Finally we have Gary and his really beautiful Christmas star and teeny tiny panetinnis

it looks stunning – like something you pay far too much for at M&S and then kind of forget to eat until about mid-January. Again, it was a case of tasting great but being texturally wrong. I really think we’ve let the whole “Breadfather” thing go to Paul Hollywood’s head.

An Unofficial Festive Bread Centrepiece Ranking:
1. Gonk with the Win
2. Gabe’s Summer Solstice Gaypole
3. Moyin’s Nexus of Christmas Cheer
4. Easter Does It
5. Mo’s Three Tiktok Bread
6. Clara’s Bolo OK
7. Gary’s Teeny Tiny Polka Dot Panettone
8. Yannis’s Bread Shed
9. Molly’s Seasonal Appropriate Overbaking

I genuinely thought they were going to cancel the Star Baker announcement this week because Paul was so traumatised by the Technical Challenge and barely dished out a compliment in the Showstopper. They just seemed to write the flatbreads off, which is fair – unless you’re Gabe who if they counted it probably should’ve won but instead it goes to Tom

which means we have our first double winner – perhaps a bit too soon to be doubling up on the wins but we’ll allow it for now.
As for the elimination, despite Nikki having had to exit the competition, they were still going forward with the elimination due to not having sent anyone home in the first episode, with it being Molly making her exit

I wish it could’ve been a better overall week for her, and for everyone really.