Onwards with the baking blogging. I cannot rest. I fear getting too far behind. If you missed Episode 1 you can read about it here.
Episode 2 which aired this evening featured the inspired celebrity choices of:
Arlene Philips – She of Strictly Come Dancing judging fame, who even I have heard of, and yes I know she doesn’t do it any more, but I can’t think of anything else she is in.
Gus Caseley-Hayford – a rather swoonsome gentleman who is apparently an art historian.
Fi Glover – who is a Radio Four presenter who I adore.
Saira Khan – who is an entrepreneur and who was on The Apprentice. This explains why I do not know who she is, because I would rather stick red hot needles in my eyes than watch an episode of The Apprentice.
The absolute gem out of all these contestants was Arlene. Arlene who has had so much plastic surgery her face is like a complex puzzle that you keep looking at, trying to work out just how it should all fit together properly. She looks like a sort of well preserved chipmunk in a frock.
But she can do the splits, so what the hell?
Arlene does not do cookery. She freely confessed to being totally hopeless, and she wasn’t lying by golly. It’s clear that the closest she has been to an actual working kitchen before this competition was staring at one as the door closed on the waiter bringing her a lettuce leaf and a glass of water.
The signature bake in this episode was a savoury flan, which had to be deep filled.
As regular viewers of GBBO will know, pastry is an absolute bugger at the best of times. This was not the best of times. There was much worry about soggy bottoms, and rightly it turned out.
Fi was making a red chilli and Monterey jack cheese flan with a chilli pastry. She didn’t do too badly because she actually cooks, so she knows how things should turn out, but she generally leaves the baking side of things to her partner, so there was still a frisson of ‘oh crap!’ running through her attempts. I know it’s not good for the contestants to have this kind of worry, but it’s what I like. I feel more in tune and generally in sympathy with someone you know is praying on the inside.
It’s how I normally cook.
It helped that Fi confessed to being terrified of Paul Hollywood. I think this is a normal, human reaction to him. She said that the consolation was that he was not as big in real life as she had imagined him to be. Like the rest of us mortals she had probably imagined him towering above her, zapping her with his eyes. Pow! Blam!
I have woken up in a cold sweat from dreams like that.
Saira was doing a thick onion flan with mustard and cheese crust. She was interesting because although she obviously doesn’t do a lot of baking, she does a lot of winning. Losing is quite an alien concept, and so everything she did was approached with vigour, massive amounts of self belief and the conviction that she would probably surprise herself and everyone else by turning out to be Michel Roux.
She didn’t.
She turned out to be more like one of the Chuckle Brothers.
Which must have been a disappointment.
Gus did a ricotta, spinach, mushroom and sun dried tomato flan made with wholemeal pastry. When he started making wholemeal pastry everyone got a tad worried. Wholemeal pastry is about as easy to work with as small children and animals. In fact you might do better making a flan base out of small children and animals compressed into a thin, malleable layer.
Then he made the rookie mistake of leaving out his baking beads when he baked blind, causing his bottom to rise up and go a bit pouffy. And nobody wants a pouffy bottom. Particularly not on television.
The best one though was Arlene. Arlene who vaguely remembered pastry making from school (at least fifty years ago), but wasn’t quite sure on the detail. Arlene who mixed cellophane into her mixture from the get go. Arlene who glued her fragile pastry vest, is how I can best describe it, to the table and had to prise it off and patch it to the flan tin. Arlene who emptied in all her baking beads but forgot to use parchment, so the baking beads sank into the pastry and welded themselves to it, leaving her having to prise out the beads with a pair of tongs as everything skittered around frenetically.
Despite this, and the fact that it was mostly more hole than pastry, she soldiered on marvellously and actually managed to produce something that was cooked all the way through and tasted lovely, much to her and everyone else’s surprise.
It may be proof, if proof were needed, that there is some kind of God, and Arlene Philips is on his side.
Eeek.
Everyone else suffered from the de rigeur soggy bottom, and it was so touch and go getting Gus’s temperamental wholemeal pastry out of the flan case that Mel likened it to childbirth in terms of stress. She wasn’t lying. I held my breath until I felt a bit sick, it was that stressful.
The technical round involved making a banana and chocolate loaf cake with chocolate zig zag piped icing.
When they announced this I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I make chocolate and banana loaf cake all the time and they’re an absolute doddle. It made me feel that yesterday’s cheese scone mob were being somehow cheated and that the banana loaf gang would have an unfair advantage.
I began to get indignant on their behalf.
I shouldn’t have worried. I have never, in all my days of compulsively watching BBC baking programmes, seen a technical bake go so comprehensively wrong. It was a bananastrophe.
My best bit was when Arlene grasped her list of instructions, stared at in in puzzlement for a few moments and then announced: ‘Surely you have to put this in the oven!’
Followed closely by Saira’s confession that she was already stumped as: ‘I have never lined a baking tin in my life…you know…what am I supposed to do?’
Genius.
Then she compounded matters by adding half a tablespoon of baking powder instead of half a teaspoon of baking powder.
When I tell you that in the end it was her loaf that won the technical challenge, you will see how good the other’s were. It didn’t help that half way through Mel persuaded Arlene to give her a dance lesson. You felt that their minds were not really on the game.
Arlene didn’t even know how to melt chocolate properly, melting it directly over the heat instead of using a pan of water as a buffer. She then compounded the mistake by adding water to the already solidifying lump of chocolate ‘stuff’ in the bottom of the pan. Giving her marks for endurance I was amazed that she soldiered on, nearly rupturing a muscle trying to squeeze solid chocolate into a piping bag and onto the diastrous cake.
When Mary and Paul came in to judge the cakes their faces were a picture. Mary tried hard to keep her composure. Paul looked at his shoes, at the tent pole, at the grass, at anything that didn’t look like a chocolate house brick covered in pooh. He was desperately trying not to laugh. It was inspired.
I think it has to be my favourite moment of the whole thing, ever, including the last two series. It was almost as if they thought it was a joke and they were going to whip away the terrible cakes and replace them with real cakes.
Except they didn’t.
A veil was drawn, and we moved on to the technical challenge, which was to create a layered, filled cake with three layers of sponge. A classic GBBO challenge I think you will agree.
Arlene decided to go for what she described as a megamix. It sort of reminded me of those books you read sometimes by first time authors, who think they probably won’t ever get another chance at writing a published book, so they will throw in every idea they’ve ever had and hope it makes sense somewhere along the line.
It never does, and neither did Arlene’s cake, despite the fact she had worn a 1950′s WI style dress to help her channel the baking vibe. I think some kind of armour might have been more appropriate. The three sponge layers were ginger cake. It was sandwiched together with coffee cream, chocolate cream and finally cranberry cream with cranberries, nuts and fruit on the top. Mary described the bottom layer of the cake as being more biscuit than cake, and suggested that it really should have come with a health warning. Paul was kinder. I wonder if Arlene had shown him how she could do the splits. Whatever. It wasn’t impressing Mary.
In the end I was impressed with Arlene because she knew she was a bloody disaster but she kept going and never once lost her temper, swore or burst into tears, and with her run of luck I’d have been hugely tempted to do all three, before running from the tent in shame.
Saira did a rose flavoured sponge with rose flavoured butter cream. Despite the fact that she looked in the oven twenty million times, which is the number one no no with cake baking, as every time you open the oven door the temperature dips which cakes don’t like, and the fact that her cakes were sunken, and her icing was messy, and her presentation involved throwing half a dozen roses around the bottom of the cake, she did alright and it tasted fine.
Gus did a ginger, almond and Amarula (a type of Bailey’s style creamy liqueur made by Zulus, when they’re not chucking spears at Michael Caine and hanging out with Ray Mears) cake heaped with fruit and cream. Paul was so impressed by it that he said he would definitely come back for another slice. Gus’s face lit up like Christmas morning when Paul said this. What it must be to wield such power in the world of baking.
Fi made a dark chocolate sponge cake filled with caramel cream made with mascarpone, cream cheese and cream, and layered with strawberries soaked in sherry. I have to say that it looked fabulous and apart from the sherry strawberries which I could have lived without, it is the one thing in the last two programmes I would have been willing to dive head first into without missing a beat.
Not surprisingly it won Fi the golden ticket into the final, which was good news, although like last night’s episode where I was sad to wave Sarah and James goodbye, I will miss Arlene.
What I would pay to see would be a loser’s bake off with those three and possibly whoever makes me smile most in tomorrow’s episode, which I now absolutely cannot wait to see.
Until tomorrow my little baking chums.
