The Great Sport Relief Bake Off – Episode 3

And on we go to the Great Sport Relief Bake Off episode 3, which you can download by clicking the link. If you want a catch up from your ever faithful, non roving reporter, you can read about Episode 1, and Episode 2 by clicking on the links.

In today’s episodes, the last of the heats, the four contestants were:

Anita Rani – an absolutely gorgeous lady who is apparently a journalist and television presenter.  Of whom I know nothing due to living a sheltered life, in a small box. She is just delicious. Never mind her baking.

Alex Langlands – A chap who my mum would recognise, as he’s a historian and archaeologist who apparently does those programmes where people dress up and pretend to live in a Victorian farm.  My mum likes these programmes. I do not. Hence me not recognising him from Adam.

Pearl Lowe – Ex lead singer of Powder, wife of Supergrass’s Danny Goffey and now fashion designer.  I recognised her.  Signs of my mis spent youth.

Alex Deakin – A BBC weatherman. No clue. Not one. I haven’t watched a weather forecast since the days of John Kettley and Michael Fish.  I am all about the retro weather, me.  He seemed unusually presentable for a weatherman.  Have they had to get more with it and dapper in these modern, cut and thrust of global warming times?

The signature bake this episode was a crumble.  Crumbles are relatively straightforward as long as you don’t make the bottom too juicy and you don’t overwork the topping.  Apart from that it is a piece of piss.

Ahem.

I may be stating this with too much confidence really. After having developed serious cravings for rhubarb crumble when pregnant with Tallulah, I am now a ninja at crumble making due to having eaten four a week for four months and turning into the Goodyear Blimp filled with crumble.  I could do that as my signature dish, no trouble at all.  In fact, I could probably make it in my sleep.  If you are a crumble novice, and I find it hard to imagine such a think, I recommend the Cranks crumble recipe.  It’s foolproof.  And I are a fool, so I know of what I speak.

Anita made the perfect pineapple and blackberry crumble, flambeeing her pineapple in dark rum and ginger.   The topping was pimped up with coconut, oats and almonds.  I gave her total kudos for a) describing the pineapple as a ‘kickass fruit’, which it is, and b) not getting any seepage in her crumble topping.  She was the only one who didn’t.  Although the thought of eating coconut in my crumble topping made me want to weep a bit.  I did wonder if it would end up tasting a bit too much like that dreadful Kellogs’ Fruit and Fibre?

That wouldn’t be good.

Apparently it tasted good. Mary said that it was the first pineapple crumble she had ever eaten, but it would not be the last.  She says things like that in a way that although coming out of her mouth in a very ladylike way, always has the overtones to me of something dark and slightly nefarious.

I picture her hobby as being an international jewel thief.

Pearl made a plum crumble flavoured with red wine, star anise and cinnamon.  Despite seepage (which is a terrible word, particularly when related to cookery, as it makes me think of effluent and biological horrors, but there you go), Paul considered it stunning.  As usual, whenever Paul praises anything at all, everyone involved swoons and has to have a lie down on the grass.  I wonder if Mary ever rolls her eyes behind his back when this happens?

I so would.

Alex weatherman made a spicy plum and blackberry crumble with cinnamon and mulled red wine.  He put his spices in a muslin bag which made Mel refer to his efforts as underpants crumble. It did look rather like he was cooking a particularly unappealing, greying pair of old undercrackers to be fair, which put me off things rather.  He also overcooked his fruit and suffered a lot of seepage.

From his undercrackers.

The star for me was Alex farm.  Alex farm, in the new and exciting tradition of James Wong the botanist in episode 1, was all about going off piste.  He didn’t really like sweet food and admitted later that he had never baked a cake in his life.  Which proved tricky when the technical challenged cropped up later.  In the meantime he had decided to shun sweet crumbles with a firm hand and created a pumpkin, marrow, onion, tomato and chilli crumble.

It was the monster truck of the crumble world.  It took him so long to construct it, and I use this word advisedly, that there was very little time to actually bake the crumble, so that when in fact Mary and Paul tasted it, the crumble topping didn’t crumble.  And he hadn’t bothered to peel his marrow.  Which is a bit like eating a melon, whole.

Rather than crumbling, everything more sort of sagged.

The technical challenge turned out to be Mary Berry’s own coffee and walnut cake recipe.  I love coffee and walnut cake, but with the disaster of the banana and chocolate loaf of the day before still fresh in my mind, I wasn’t getting my hopes up too high.

Alex farm’s confession that he had never made a cake before, became more and more apparent as the cake making progressed and he whacked, thumped prodded and gesticulated his cake into being.  At one point he got an entire ball of half formed butter icing stuck in his whisk, and spent several minutes pounding the crap out of it, much to everyone else’s alarm.  He also made the classic mistake of misreading the amount of baking powder involved and ended up shoving in an entire tablespoon with entirely predictable results.  The only thing that he got excited by was spreading the butter cream which he likened to plastering a wall, and which seemed to make him happy.  The rest was silence, punctuated by thudding as he hit various pieces of kitchen equipment in the hope of making some kind of alchemical and culinary magic happen.

Pearl, who had done pretty well in the first round, absolutely cocked it up in the technical challenge.  She put far too much coffee in her cake mix, to the point where it looked more like a bit of rich mahogany than a cake.  Then she over mixed it, and then it sank spectacularly in several places.  In the end it went to the table looking more like the wreck of the Mary Rose shortly after they had dragged it up from 350 years on the sea bed than a cake, which was a shame.

Paul’s was slightly dry but very neat and tidy.  Anita’s was perfect to the point where Mary said it could win prizes in a show.

It was at this point that my interest began to wane.  I knew that unless Anita did something diabolical and unexpected, which to be fair to GBBO, could happen, she had it in the bag to go through to the final.  I couldn’t imagine her doing anything too horrific.  I could imagine the others doing something too horrific, which was cheering, if a bit predictable.

The showstopper challenge was, in my opinion, the hardest yet.  The contestants had to make twenty four individual sweet pastry tarts, two different types, twelve of each.

Alex farmer, as you would expect, went a bit Hestonesque again with his rosemary flavoured pastry which was supposed to complement figs, honey and some kind of cream filling.  He also attempted fruit tarts with a creme patissiere filling as a nod to some kind of normality.  I knew the way the wind was blowing when Mary kindly patted his hand and complemented him on his bravery.  When his creme patissiere turned to soup it was all over bar the shouting for him.

He was a goner.

Then there was Alex Weather, who made a white chocolate mousse filled tart with raspberry and chocolate in a chocolate pastry case, and a kind of pear tart that ended up looking a bit like a muffin.  He was doing fine until he went a bit wrong with his white chocolate mousse, which kept going all grainy.  Mary took pity on him and passed him a whisk, which apparently makes all the difference.  He looked at her like someone being given the last seat on the last lifeboat of the Titanic.

She’s a marvellous woman.  It’s her coolness in the face of a crisis that makes me think she would be such a good jewel thief.  She never even breaks a sweat.

Pearl played it safe with lemon meringue tarts and glazed strawberry tarts with cream cheese filling. It has to be said that out of all the tarts on offer, and there were many, these were the ones that made my mouth water the most.  Apparently they were a little under done and a bit stodgy to eat, which was a terrible disappointment to me.  I tell you that I did not have any such problems when I was licking the screen.

Anita made chocolate and chilli tarts in a chocolate pastry case, and star shaped tarts in short crust pastry filled with cardamon creme patissiere and fruit.  She infused the world’s strongest chilli into her chocolate mousse mixture.  Mel got a bit to try on the tip of a knife and nearly expired on the spot.  Luckily the cream and chocolate tempered the tang rather, which was just as well as it would have been a shame for Mary and Paul to have exploded through the tent roof and into space.  I’m sure they have to start filming a new series soon and it would have inconvenienced everyone rather if they had melted down on re-entry.

Despite breaking two of her pastry cases, Anita won with her perfect tarts and is in the final tomorrow against Fi Glover and Angela Griffin.

Oh what a shame, as I would now dearly love to see my final line up with James, Arlene, Sarah and Alex farm in the mix.  I’d probably donate at least a hundred quid to Sport Relief for that great pleasure.