Welcome back, gluten groupies! Put a brew on, put a bib on and join us for the biggest lot of bend and snap since Legally Blonde was last on ITV2: it’s biscuit week.
First things first – Berry’s got her bomber on, hip hip hip hooray! It’s snazzy, it’s paisley, it’s quilted, it’s coming to a Toby Carvery loo queue near you soon. But if she’s deploying the bomber so early in the series, what else is Mary building up to? Can it be too much to hope for a floral jumpsuit? A snazzy culotte? A fez?
Scandal has ROCKED the Bake Off already this week, by which I mean the Daily Mail has prodded it feebly in the gonads while everybody else looked the other way. The scandal is that Marie, last week’s star baker, is ‘professionally trained’ because she did a one-week patisserie course at the Ecole Escoffier in Paris in 1984.
If that’s the yardstick we’re measuring these things against, then I’m a professionally trained pianist thanks to those four keyboard lessons I had in 1997 where I learned to play the Eastenders theme tune. People forget stuff over time, guys. You know, like all that journalism ethics training you presumably once did.
Anyway. While she might have been in hot water, they’re not going to ban Marie… so on with the show!
Uptown dunk
As I might have mentioned last year, one of my biggest fears for the Bake Off is that the reservoir of production ideas is, like a gammy piping nozzle, running dry. We’ve already had grilled cake, green cake and The Cake That Looked Like A Brain – how long can it really be before Paul and Mary are just doing a 2am ingredients-sweep in Londis and claiming the resulting creation was actually invented in 18th century Vienna?
'Yeah, it’s a Ricekrispie-twix…entorten,' they’ll shrug, 'and it’s meant to be cooked one-handed on a makeshift rotisserie over a single gas hob. Good luck!'
So when Mel and Sue announce that this week’s first challenge is a variety of biscuit 'never seen before in a signature bake!' it’s both a relief and a bit disappointing to find out it’s just biscotti, otherwise known as the scaffolding that holds up the counter at Caffé Nero.
Biscotti are like that one colleague we all have at work – incredibly dry, only good when soaked liberally in booze – and to earn top points it’s crucial that they’re crunchy with a good, crisp snap. Our bakers must go hard or quite literally go home.
Most of the gang are using classic dried fruit and nuts, but Alvin is risking a soggy botti by putting fresh jackfruit in his, and Ugne is representing the Whole Foods contingent by using goji berries. Ian’s addition of rosemary is met with so much scorn by Sir Hollywood that you suspect Rosemary might also be the name of a lady who once harshly critiqued his iced bun, so to speak. At least Prison Paul isn’t doing thyme.
Nadiya has forgotten to put fennel in her coconut biscotti, which is a bit like forgetting to put cabbage in your custard tart. Nobody will mind, Nadiya! Leave it out! Throw it in the bin! Put it down the si- ah too late, she’s used it.
Snap out of it
Onto the judging, and most of the bakers have turned out impressive biscotti. Alvin proves that the judges don’t know jack(fruit) with his fancy flavour combination earning praise, and Ugne, Sandy, Nadiya and Mat all get snaps for their crispy bics. 'My rosemary is vindicated!' cries Ian, which might be a line from a rejected late-season episode of Law & Order.
However Marie’s biscuits have crumbled, Flora’s aren’t uniform enough and poor Dorret (who is starting to sound more like a tragic Dickens character every time I type her name) has recovered from last week’s mousse mishap only to make biscotti so hard they pose a threat to Mary’s dentures. You can get through this, Dorret! You’re a tough cookie.
WAIT, WHAT’S THIS? 'Hard, bland and indigestible' – it can only be the return of Sue’s Incredibly Gripping Historical Segment! Or SIGHS, for short. This week we’re learning about a whole town of biscuits, the birth of the bourbon, and reevaulating our career paths to work out if it’s too late to become a food historian.
Choice excerpt: 'docker holes'.
Arlette, the best a man can get
On to the technical challenge, and this week it’s ‘arlette biscuits’. Please see previous remarks re: Bezza and Hollywood just making stuff up.
An arlette is apparently a kind of edible coaster, and features our old pal, ‘laminated’ dough. Disappointingly this doesn’t mean the end result will be wipe-clean, just that there should be layers of butter running through the pastry to give its rich, crispy texture.
'I’m following the recipe step-by-step, because this has got to work,' says Random Sandy, with a level of groundbreaking insight not seen since Normal Norman walked these shores. 'They’re really helpful instructions actually; it just says "make the dough",' deadpans Tamal. Or at least, I think that’s what he said but I was too busy imagining what our children would look like. He’s matched his shirt to the blue plaster on his finger this week and everything. Swoon.
Meanwhile Mat is upping the stakes in his bid to be this year’s Tent Crumpet by coming dressed as an extra from Quadrophenia (check he’s not smuggling rogue parkin inside that parka, guys), and, fittingly, he’s talkin’ bout his lamination. 'It says you have to roll it, but it doesn’t look very rollable to me,' he worries. YOU’VE GOTTA ROLL WITH IT, MAT. Those are the words your haircut was looking for.
It looks like the Curse of the Star Baker is claiming its first series six victim – after baking disappointing biscotti, Marie is now having trouble getting her oven to work. 'I don’t know if they’re going to be ready,' she frets over her raw dough. 'I don’t know what to do.'
And only now in the midst of this uncertainty do I realise that if you close your eyes, she sounds exactly like Mrs Doubtfire! Mrs Doubt… oven? Anyway, buck up Marie. You’re bottom of the pile, but at least it’s a crispy bottom.
In happier news, Dorret has won the buttery biscuit race. 'Inside I’m doing a little dance,' she says, and we all briefly imagine the trailer for Non, Je Ne Dorret Rien: An Underdog Story.
Boxing clever
Onto the final challenge, and it’s an edible biscuit box, full of biscuits! Just like Granny never made.
Thanks to Bake Off, biscuit architecture is fast becoming the new national pastime, after selfies, online bingo and collective apathy. We’re basically only a few years away from Boris Johnson funding a billion pound bridge across the Thames made entirely from Garibaldis and Matchmakers.
(Innuendo fans should note that this section contains dangerously high levels of rudery, due to the number of times everybody gets to say ‘box’. We’re talking all-smutter shortbread. They’re basically custard creaming themselves.)
Into the final stretch, and there are tempers fraying and templates flying as the bakers pull out all their best biscuit construction skills. Nadiya is tempting fate by making fortune cookies – and it doesn’t look like the odds are in her favour, as she’s broken her first attempt at a gingerbread bowl.
Flora, notably the only contestant with the audacity to be named after low-fat margarine, is making Earl Grey biscuits in the shape of teabags. And across the tent, in what I’d describe as ‘a spot of competitive teabagging’ if I didn’t want to ruin shortbread for myself forever, Mat is making exactly the same thing – only he’s piling his into a biscuit fire engine with melted boiled-sweet windows.
This will ring alarm bells for any GBBO scholars among you, knowing that the boiled sweet technique has a doom-filled history writ in Bake Off lore that dates back to the beginning of time itself (2010). In short, Janet from series one tried it and massively ballsed it up.
Elsewhere, Ugne is in less danger of clashing with anyone else because she’s decorating her biscuit box with fondant baby legs. Y’know, for all those times you’ve seen a baby so gorgeously chubs that you’re tempted to sink your teeth into a limb! 'Don’t bite your mate’s child – have one of Ugne’s Fondant Infant Legs instead!', the ad could read. 'Suitable for vegans.'
You’d be interested, don’t lie.
Ack-in-the-box
Sadly there’s no sugar baby love in the tent for Ugne’s efforts, which Mary declares 'garish' in the same tone you’d imagine the Dowager Countess of Grantham might dismiss a tarty parlourmaid. But she’s redeemed by her traditional Lithuanian cookies.
Likewise Alvin’s brandy snaps tastes great, but his biscuits are still in their flat-pack form. Tell them you were thinking outside the box, Alvin! Tell them it’s an ironic Ikea reference! Nope, he’s crying instead.
Flora has cracked her elegantly swirled lid, but gets away with it because everything else is so perfect, and Mat’s tea-filled boiled sweet fire engine is also a flaming success. Gentle Ian has beaten Prison Paul in the war of the pink macarons, Sandy’s chest looks magnificent and Tamal’s beautiful chessboard biscuits earn him a 'checkmate' from Dunkin’ Bannatyne. Sorry, I mean Paul.
But at the bottom of the barrel is Dorret, back to being ‘poor Dorret’ again, who cut corners with a shop-bought cutter and turned out some bitter frog-shaped biscuits. Luckily for her though, it looks like success in the technical challenge translates as ‘arlette you finish’, and instead it’s Marie whose weekend of hard knocks and soft box are enough to send her packing.
Sacré bleu! Perhaps a week of cake school in 1984 ISN’T enough to make you Bake Off queen in 2015? We’ll miss you, Marie. And on that note, I’m off to cancel my piano recital.
Next week: Quick loaves, baguette woes and a 3D sculpture park of dough. Get bready.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.