Who will watch the oven watchers?

Enjoy this self-saucing Recap.

Sauce?

For this year’s Dessert/Pudding/Quaint-British-Slop Week we were starting with a first in the tent, a staggered start for the Signature Challenge as the bakers all had to make a batch of 8 self-saucing puddings

the pressure of getting the ball rolling fell upon Gary, so while he spent 10 minutes being the only one allowed to do any cooking the others had to awkwardly cheer from the side lines, busying themselves with drawing alarmingly accurate amateur portraits of Paul Hollywood

or offer stilted interjections that very much began to sound like activation codes for KGB agents

they might not even have been Gary’s oranges that smelled nice because we had a bit of a 4 Chocolate Orange Pudding Pile-up. Although while Moyin, Connie and Gabe had all gone slightly more straight forward with their chocolate and orange combinations, Gary with his inability to resist the urge to slosh some Bailey’s into anything he can and the further addition of Espresso did begin to sound like he had just poured a gastropub’s entire dessert cocktail menu into a ramekin

despite this feeling a little bit like a Self-saucing Dirty Pint, Paul and Nigella were actually both rather impressed by the fact Gary had managed to balance the chaotic flavour profile so well. However, Connie proved that simplicity is best with her straightforward Molten Chocolate Orange Puddings that earned her a handshake from Paul

her squeal of delight when Nigella hacked into that pudding like a woman possessed to reveal that it did indeed have a melting middle is everything I love about this show

I think it’s something that the casting department has done very well this year – this particular cohort feels much less ~television ready~ and really captures that sense of just watching a group of ordinary people being very passionate about baking instead of a group of influencers trying to hard launch a lifestyle brand. Funnily enough, seconds after writing this, Clara posted a screenshot of a Daily Mail article about how “everyone” was complaining about this year’s Bake Off being “too influencery” and of course that “everyone” being 8 of the worst people they could find in Elon Musk’s Nazi Bar. The only contestant I’ve felt is a bit too invested in the social media potential is Tom and even then I think this episode also did a lot to soften him because I don’t think there’s anything more ordinarily human than watching him turn out these sloppy messes that look like Maggie’s Flourless Syrup Sponges trying to ride again

it’s the gentle dusting of icing sugar that really seals the deal for me

it just reminds me a lot of when Fanny Cradock made a Mince Pie Omelette and seemingly only became cognisant of what evil she was birthing halfway through the process and promptly had her unglamorous besmocked assistant, The Faceless Sarah, bury it under a good inch of icing sugar

and I’m so glad that Nigella stood up for the rights of a pudding to look like a blob

god forbid your slop have some personality! Gary gets it

the show however will never gaslight me into believing Paul and Gary look alike. They’re literally just two men with an affinity for a polo shirt.

There were a couple of other bakers struggling with the difference between a sauce and a “heated liquid”

there is really nothing more threatening than the vagueness of the word “liquid” when it comes to food – that could be bath water, custard, the blood of a fresh kill, gravy!? In this case, it was Clara struggling the most with the unspecificity of her liquid as sadly for as good as her Dulce de Leche puddings looked

they were not so much a self-saucing pudding as they were a self-caking sauce with the ratio being a little off

but at least there was a sauce! The only person who had ended up with something just about completely sauceless was Gabe

which was unfortunate because his hot chocolate inspired puddings looked really good and Halloweeny, making them the ones I think I’d be most likely to try find the recipe for

the judges did however like how grown up they tasted with the combination of Cointreau and Non-Brand Affiliated Bedtime Hot Chocolate.
Moyin caps off our parade of people doing their best not to mention Terry’s Chocolate Oranges with his puddings looking like textbook Chocolate Fondants with that slightly squat squidge giving them that brim at the bottom

unfortunately his quest to have the best Chocolate Orange Puddings in the room were scuppered by his puddings being just marginally overbaked but he was happy to take the back seat to the superiority of Connie because that’s auntie

long live The Conniessance.

Mo and Yannis were both drawing their inspirations from other baked goods, admittedly of varying levels of prestige with Yannis harkening to Austrian Strudels and Mo going for the a Macadamia Nut cookie from Subway as his muse because it’s the only time he’s felt joy in the last five weeks

to be fair, the Subway cookies do absolutely slap and his puddings looked a suitably grand tribute to their elite cookie status

the only thing getting in the way of them being a home run was that Paul thought the nuts in the ganache were making it a little bit too gritty.

Lastly we have Yannis, who was also the last one to start baking in the staggered start set up and meant he was suddenly very self-conscious of the fact his ramekins were the size of soup bowls

so I hope you’re all hungry for Strudel Soup

it was not Yannis’s best showing in the tent, as much as Strudel Through a Straw sounds like a revelation.

An Unofficial Self-saucing Pudding Ranking:
1. The Conniessance Begins
2. Gary’s Cocktail Menu Mug Cake
3. Mo’s Self-saucing Subway Cookie
4. Tom’s Interesting Blobs
5. Moyin
6. Gabe’s Mug of Solid Horlicks
7. Clara’s Self-caking Sauce
8. Yannis’s Strudel Soup

My Bread and Butter

This week’s Technical Challenge was a Choose Your Own Adventure Bread and Butter Pudding with the bakers being given free rein to pillage a selection of ingredients to truss up a Bread and Butter pudding as they pleased

the only vague piece of advice they were given was from Nigella who gave them the same advice you give a toddler when they meet a kitten: don’t overwhelm it, ’tis a delicate little creature (even though I think a Bread and Butter Pudding could survive a Siberian winter all on its own)

the bakers were given all of the base ingredients, so you didn’t have to worry too much about someone going completely rogue and making a Wholemeal Brown Bread and Butter Pudding. They’d also been given a basic recipe, imaginably straight from the war

which was once again mostly for Clara who is increasingly coming to believe that this entire show is a practical joke at her expense and slowly being driven to madness

I’m genuinely surprised that it isn’t one of the nonsense questions on the British citizenship test. She is however willing to concede on the point of Beans on Toast, however she will under no circumstances give us Bread and Custard Lasagne

although, coming third might help persuade her

for her foray into Bread and Butter territory, she’d gone for a pretty classic combination of Raspberry and Almond, which did at one point look rather vascular

I’m personally a bit of a Bread and Butter Purist – I will extend to raisins and stand by the occasional decision to use Croissants instead of bread. And that was the sand trap of the challenge as with the bakers being presented with an extensive array of fresh fruits and spice, Gary won with a simple Dried Fruit Extravaganza

and Yannis unfortunately sank because he’d overloaded his Bread and Butter Pudding with cherries, chocolate and hazelnut (which sounds delicious and he’s welcome to make it for me anytime he wants)

he was however saved from being put in last place because Moyin had overbaked his Citrus and Spice version

it wasn’t the only pudding that was a little on the dry side, with Mo’s White Chocolate and Saffron offering suffering much the same fate

if only there was a punnet of blueberries he could’ve used…

FINALLY! Someone using the overstocked pantries for their real use: glorified extensions of the craft service van in the carpark! I was sad that they hadn’t implimented the same rule as last year’s Tart Challenge wherein the bakers had to use everything they picked up, including that single Basil Leaf

I miss that gremlin every day.

An Official Improvised Bread and Butter Pudding Ranking:
1. Gary’s Dried Fruit Extravaganza
2. Connie’s Just Desserts
3. You Unfortunately Have Gotta Hand It To Bread and Butter Pudding
4. Gabe’s Triple Bread and Underbuttered Pudding
5. Tom’s Over Fruitening
6. Mo’s Eternal Saffroning
7. Yannis’s Bavarian Overload
8. Moyin Arid Butter Pudding

The Trolley Problem

Seeing out Dessert Week was a bit of a throwback with the bakers all having to put together a three piece Dessert Trolley, or if you’re Tom you throw in a 4th because you’re doing 2 for 1 Cocktail Hour and the unevenness of three is causing you anxiety

the shrug as though he didn’t do this to himself <3

My favourite part of this challenge, other than Nigella making it her personal mission to set the benchmark for Trifle Shovelling

was that while everyone worked to give their Dessert Flights punny names or fun themes, Mo will do no such thing and his trolley shall go unchristened and suffer in dessert limbo for the rest of eternity

due to the nature of the challenge, most of the bakers were going very retro with it and playing firmly into Nigella’s hands. Mo however is of a generation raised on Freakshakes and whatever awful genetic experiment Greggs is doing with a croissant and was only too proud to present Sticky Toffee Pudding In A Hartley’s Jam Jar

this is straight off the menu of a city centre dessert bar whose main business hours are between 11pm and 1am and unfortunately the judges were definitely looking for something slightly more delicate and less of a decision made while 4 vodka Redbulls to the wind. His other two desserts were much more successful, particularly his Mango Mousse that Paul deemed worthy of a 5 Star Hotel

and it was all his own recipe! Unlike Yannis who was daring to drop a Mary Berry recipe in front of Paul Hollywood like a cat giving you a dead mouse as a gift

I get the distinct impression that Mary Berry blocked THAT TRAITOR Paul’s number and he has never recovered from it and will under no circumstances praise her Queen of Puddings recipe! The portion sizes were Yannis’s biggest issue – I get the impression he was working from recipes for larger puddings and trying to downsize them for individual portions which sadly worked against him. I was also surprised that he went quite so British with it, even capturing the true British spirit of trying to claim another country’s identity as its own

Yannis, your entire Unique Selling Point on this show has been coming from Austria! Vienna is a dessert trolley made… well, not flesh but… flagstone and stucco! We have Gary for things that look like they were made by a 68 year old B&B owner called Vera!

my greatest dessert experience (we all have one, right?) was in Vienna where in the Mozart Café (yes it’s a tourist trap, no I don’t care!) I laid eyes upon the greatest dessert ever brought kicking and screaming into the world: The Kartoffel! Which is literally just a ball of chocolate cake that is very lucky that a potato was the first thing someone thought it looked like and it really grabs your attention amongst everything else

I was powerless to the magnetism of that shotputtable ball of chocolate cake and marzipan and every day I have wrestled with the fact that perhaps my soulmate in this life was that piece of continental nonsense patisserie and now I’ll just have to settle. It really was the Rigatoni Mad Max to my Jacob Black
Yannis’s Unfortunately Kartoffelless dessert trolley continued with Sticky Toffee Puddings and the aforementioned colonisation of the Black Forest

neither of which greatly captured the enthusiasm of the judges with the balance of flavours of the British Forest Gateau being off and the Sticky Toffee Pudding being overbaked – but Yannis was hanging in there and looking on the bright side

there was a little hope for him, Clara hadn’t received glowing praise for her Dessert Trolley being, in the words of the judges, “overly sweet” which really shouldn’t have come as such a shock given she chugged that dessert trolley over while shouting “All aboard the Sugar Rush Express!”

kind of think being left with your skull vibrating like there’s a train chundering towards you and you’re tied to the tracks was all part of the creative direction? They did however praise her for how uniformly neat and sized her options were which gave them a very high end hotel feel. And of all the bakers, she was the only one bringing something very new to the table with her Torta de Laranja

I just feel like they lowballed Clara a little bit for the sake of tension even though I think it was pretty clear that Yannis was unfortunately going to be on his way out. Moyin, I guess also struggled a little bit but amongst his goblet of slightly too flat peanut butter profiteroles

there was a gem in his Coconut Creme Brulee. His trolley’s gimmick was utilising traditionally Nigerian flavours for what the Tesco’s Night in For Two meal deal considers a British classic. His third option being an Eton Mess flavoured with Hibiscus

while the judges loved the flavours, they felt the composition wasn’t quite right as he hadn’t crushed the meringues into his cream and had just sat them atop it. So it’s a good thing Tom was calling this a Mojito Pavlova

as previously mentioned, Tom’s whole theme was cocktails so everything was served in a cocktail glass, even it was unhinged to do so

of all of his options, the becouped Limoncello Spritz Tart was probably the one that could’ve been nixed without complaint because I don’t think it truly captures the theme in the same way the Mojito Pavlova, Mudslide Brulee and The Family-friendly Pre-watershed Pornstar Martini do

but if there’s one thing that Tom loves to do on this show, it’s spread himself so thin that by the end of it he looks like the after image of someone that only narrowly survived the trenches of the Western Front

on the on-site paramedics are working over time.

Gabe, Connie and Gary were all turning the retro dial to 11 – Gabe perhaps the most as he drew inspiration from Nigel Slater’s Toast

his dessert platter being made up of a Walnut Gateau, Peach Tea Trifle and a Lemon Meringue Pie

the only slight dud was the Walnut Gateau with the judges really loving the pastry of his Lemon Meringue Pie, and his trifle was probably the most successful one of the challenge. Although something about the sprinkles on Connie’s somehow really captures the spirit of a 70s trifle and I’ll forgive the wishy-washy flavour of it

truly obsessed with the fact that she used to fly trifles to Jamaica for her mother

which just raises a few a couple of questions – most pressingly: how well does a trifle fly? And how is customs about it now? I imagine in a post-2001 world you have to resort to the good old drug mule method. If only you could find a volunteer…

as well as the ode to the most well travelled trifle in the world, she’d also made that high school home-ec favourite: The Pineapple Upside Down Cake and Apple and Pear Pies. Her one great misstep in all of this being that she’d neglected that custard is the lifeblood of the British dessert scene

Gary however has never knowingly undercustarded in his life

and the custard was probably the high point of his Trolley with his lemon tarts suffering from soggy bottom syndrome, his Syrup Sponges being too gingery and his Black Forest Gateaux having more alcohol in them than Tom’s entire trolley combined

Nigella wasn’t allowed to drive home.

An Unofficial Trolley Selection Ranking:
1. Tom’s Happy(?) Hour
2. Connie Despite a Lack of Custard
3. Gabe’s Nigel(la) Pandering
4. Lagos but Not Least
5. Mo’s Hotel, Motel and Holiday Inn Dessert Trichotomy
6. Gary’s Mostly Redeeming Custard
7. Clara’s Sugar Crash
8. Yannis’s Great Brit-ish Desserts

Connie may not have had a roaringly successful Dessert Trolley, however the first two challenges had put Connie well ahead of everyone else, giving her that Star Baker she was probably owed from Biscuit Week

and as much as Connie had excelled in the beginning, Yannis had unfortunately flagged behind and just not quite managed to scrape himself ahead into a safer position, so unfortunately he is this week’s eliminated baker

I really enjoyed Yannis and his point of view as a baker, I think he had some really great and interesting bakes and maybe this week just wasn’t geared as much to that side of things.