It’s all to Play For – It’s the Semis of the Bake Off and Nobody is dressed as a Belgian Bun

Last night was the semi finals of The Great British Bake Off, the programme which I have retitled: ‘My drug of choice.’

After last week’s eviction of Yasmin, who left clutching the caramelized stump of hand that was all that remained after her disastrous croquembouche attempt, we were down to four:

Holly, who is practically perfect in every way, and who uses a geometry set to make sure that her pies are all pi.  She is like Mary Poppins with a slide rule. She scares me.

Mary Anne, who is an avant garde experimentalist, and makes Heston Blumenthal look like my gran when it comes to baking inventiveness.  Every week I wait with baited breath to see what wonders Mary Anne will perform.  Will she strain her strawberry coulis through an 18th Century fisherman’s wig? Who knows?

Jo, who still has a teeny, weeny voice. I don’t know if I can trust the baked goods of a woman who consistently sounds like she lives down a well.  It has been troubling me all series. I still have not resolved it in my mind.  I might make a better decision if she gave me some cake to aid concentration.

and last but not least, the glorious, the one and only Janet, dazed and confused but ready to channel Delia like a mo’fo’.  Janet needs to wear a tin foil hat to stop the voices, but goodness I love that woman.

I was delirious with joy when they announced that in this programme, entitled Patisserie, that they were reintroducing the signature bake.  My psychology project is back from the dead.  I did a little dance  I uncrumpled my graph of fox’s heads on sticks and licked the end of my pencil. I was poised.  If I find out where Lord Lucan is based on mousse preferences I will get a knighthood at the very least.

The signature bake challenge was to make a layered mousse cake.  There had to be sponge that was light and airy.  There had to be mousse that was thick and lusciously flavoured.  There had to layer upon layer of moussey, cakey wonder, and it had to look sensational.

The problem, according to Paul Hollywood who much like Kevin McCloud in Grand Designs, is all about pointing out the horrendous things that could go wrong whilst mentally rubbing his hands with glee, is that because the cake layers are light and thin, they stand a good chance of being crushed by the sheer weight of mousse unless you get your proportions just right.

It really doesn’t sound like a problem to me. I do not see why being crushed by the weight of mousse could possibly be a bad thing, but that is because I am a ginormous greedy pig of the first water.  I dream of being immersed in mousse.

Holly, who I thought would rock this round, due to the need for ratios and precision, had a complete disaster with her Genoese sponge mixture.  Now I sympathise here.  Genoese sponge does not use fat in the mixture. You just whisk your eggs etc in a pyrex bowl over boiled water until it looks like meringue and then fold the flour in.  If you can do it right you achieve light, succulent sponge of aching beauty.

If you do it wrong it comes out like recycled road surfacing.

I know this from bitter experience.

Holly now does too. Her mixture just would not rise properly. Paul raised his eyebrows to show how it should be done.  It is a little known fact that his eyebrows are sculpted from Genoese sponge cake.  Mary worried about whether Holly’s eggs were fresh enough. Apparently the fresher the egg the more bouffant the mixture.  Sadly there were no pregnant chickens to hand, so she had to soldier on with her sub standard eggs and reap the whirlwind.

Holly’s cake was sort of redeemed at the last moment by the fact that she sprinkled it all over with praline, but it didn’t float my boat.  The judges weren’t that keen either. Holly ground her compass into the back of her hand and looked darkly at her protractor.

Jo did a towering edifice with strawberries and raspberries and a decided list to one side, much like a patisserie version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  Paul commented that her strawberries were too big.  At this stage of the competition it is very important that you be able to size your strawberries properly.

I noted this down on my graph.  My fox’s head had a small strawberry tucked behind one ear.

Janet did things with chocolate mousse, which is always satisfactory.  She smothered her sponge in Amaretto liqueur and produced something which made Paul go mmmm.  Praise indeed.

Mary Anne, as ever did something complex.  She made fatless cakes, that were very like swiss rolls, but she made a special type of cake mix to put in them called something like jaconde, which you pipe into intricate patterns and then freeze to create an amazing marbled effect.  She did this and then kind of wrapped her entire mousse in slabs of chocolate marbled wonder. Nom Nom Nom.

Apparently Mary Ann has seven hundred cookery books, which explains the strength in her upper arms.

It did not help her a lot in the technical round, sadly.  She clearly has not got round to ‘I’ for ‘Iced Buns’, as this is what they had to make.  Paul obviously read my comment of last week that he was Ms. Berry’s beehatch when it comes to the technical challenge, because it was his special recipe for iced buns.

Iced bun shaped slap down for La Berry there I think.

Everyone on Twitter was salivating at this point. Me, not so much.  I do not really like iced buns.  Obviously if someone offers me one I will eat it. I am not that stupid. At the end of the day it’s still a cake product, and as such not to be sniffed at, but it is just not exciting.  It’s too bready for a start, and it has icing. I do not like icing unless it has the word butter or the words cream cheese preceding it.

It did not matter whether I liked them or not, sadly.  I have no say in setting the challenges. Would that I did.  My technical challenge would have been: ‘Find ways to fill me with cake that do not make me a) fat or b) sick or c) both.’

That is a true technical challenge.

There was trouble in Bunville over the challenge.  The problems were mostly down to the fact that they had to make a batch of buns, and each bun had to look identical to the next bun and have uniform icing integrity, and other baking phrases that someone who takes a helicopter view would think of.

A cloning machine would probably have been easier and taken less time.  As it was they stumbled on, Holly waving her ruler at every opportunity. If only the Beeb endorsed advertising, Helix would have been raking it in.

Everyone’s buns tasted delicious. Even Paul got icing on his moustaches in his eagerness to stuff as many buns in his face as humanly possible before Mary grabbed them all and ran off to the judging tent shouting: ‘You’ll never take me alive.’  But they were not the best buns in the world.  Icing neatness was a problem.

As I suspected, Holly’s use of set square and military precision measurements meant that the bun challenge was in the bag for her.

The show stopper challenge was to make three types of pastries all made with the same dough, the technical name of which is laminated dough.  This is troubling. Lamination is something I only really consider in relation to whether I should do it to the cat to stop her shedding hair in my keyboard. I haven’t really grasped it in pastry terms.  I think I must have given up domestic science before lamination got involved, probably to the relief of everyone concerned.

Lamination basically involves making a layer of pastry. You then add a pound of butter rolled out into a slab. You fold the pastry over it (you do this bit with your eyes shut, saying ‘It’s not really that much fat’) and then roll it out. You then fold and roll until your arms fall off.  You pop it in the fridge, grow new arms and then repeat several times.  You then leave the pastry for twelve hours while you go to the shop and buy some bakery bought croissants which you eat thoughtfully, shedding crumbs and musing over whether all this is really worth it.

When the twelve hours are up, you proceed to make things like croissants, Danish pastry and a small padded cell to climb into when you realise that you are spending days of your life laminating pastry just so that you can get crumbs in your bra.

Mary Ann, as usual was going off piste.  She was the only one to make savoury pastries, opting for a cheesy plait type thing with onions. She also made praline pinwheels and rose squiggly shapes (and yes, those are the technical terms).  She had a very un Mary Ann like disaster when she took her pastries out too soon and they were raw.

Jo made a chocolate plait and a pain aux raisins as well as a banana and raisin danish which just looked grim to me.  I am always in a bit of a spin when it comes to the banana. I loathe them in the raw. I adore them smothered in custard, ice cream, chocolate, nuts and double cream (with a heart attack on the side), and I occasionally like them in a cake, but I wouldn’t be able to tolerate them slithering over my Danish. Wrongness is the word that springs to mind.

Holly did Escher like star shapes and various other geometric wonders, while Janet, the lovely Janet who had been doing so well up to this point, went, as Paul put it, into ‘the land of the giants.’  She opted to do the classic pain aux raisins, croissants and pain au chocolate and she went all out, producing pastries you could raft down a river on.

Me, I don’t see any problem with this. As far as cakes go, more is always more.

But Mary and Paul were casting glances that boded no well, and so it transpired that Janet’s giant offerings meant that she was asked to leave.

Do you know that this is the only time on the whole programme that Janet did not look surprised?

Also, before everyone could hug her she thanked everyone for her time on the programme, told everyone how lovely they had been and was absolutely the most delightful woman ever to lose a baking programme due to her mammoth buns.

I shall miss her and her alarmed expression. I had hoped against hope that she would make it into the final and maybe even win.  I knew in my heart of hearts it could not be so. The Delia link broke too many times and at the times she wasn’t channeling Delia she ended up baking like me, erratically with a lot of flour in her hair.

It’s great when you’re at home. Not so great when Paul is staring you down with his steely gaze and Mary is wondering about the depth of your filling.

So farewell Janet, may your pastries ever increase. I shall miss you in the final next week.

But just to blow my own trumpet for a moment. I too was a winner this week. The BBC link to blogs on the Great British Bake Off page has a link to my blog post about the week of long pies episode.  How chuffed am I?

Oh, and Sue Perkins has promised, via the power of Twitter, that after the final is over next week, she will reveal to me what the best thing she ate over the whole series was.

A scoop!

Advertisement