Here’s a funny thought: this time last week, we were sweating. We watched in our pants, mainlining Magnums and fanning the backs of our necks weakly with takeaway leaflets. Now, we have entered Autumn Mode. The twee memes about tights and crumble have begun. Tonight, I genuinely thought about putting the heating on. I wasn’t even cold; it was a craving for emotional heating, a Pavlovian response to Biscuit Week honed over years of routine TV scheduling. How did we even know the seasons had changed before Bake Off? Just carry on leaving the house in flip-flops and jorts until the hypothermia set in?
Anyway, this episode’s a treat. We’re only a week in and the show is smashing through our Bake Off bingo cards like a premenstrual packet of Fox’s Crunch Creams. There’s extravagant meltage! Something that looks like a turd! Hot nuts! Sentences like: “I’m a little disappointed by the definition on the dolphin.” Crying!
The bakers themselves are feeling less confident, especially knowing that two contestants could be sent home at any time. Alice has been waking up in a cold sweat thinking about biscuits, which some of us prefer to an iPhone alarm. Phil’s wife is a “biscuit freak”, which was Rick James’s much less successful follow-up single. And Jamie? Jamie doesn’t make a lot of biscuits. He must be protected at all costs.
Though I have to say, I’m growing increasingly convinced by my friend Amy’s theory that Jamie is the Chantelle Houghton of the competition – i.e. a Fake Baker, thrown in to fool us all. There isn’t even any cake on his Instagram, guys. That grid is entirely selfies.
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Choca-Block
The signature challenge is a chocolate-covered biscuit bar. King of the lunchbox, Duchess of the dunkers. “What I don’t want is a whole lump of chocolate with a little bit of biscuit in it,” says Paul, who has never known the subversive joy of a waferless KitKat. Or, just, joy.
Gently stepping up their efforts in the Lovely Boys competition, Lovely Henry has come dressed for his work-experience placement and Lovely Michael has revealed he plays in a musical trio with his parents. It’s delightfully pure.
Across the tent, marshmallow, nougat, fudge, barfi, jelly and mousse are all being rustled up to fill the biscuit bars. Alice is making ‘hokey-pokey’ and struggling to turn her oven on. She’s put her left tray in, her left tray out. In, out, in out, sit on the floor and pout. From the oven to the coven, Helena is making green witch’s fingers with gnarly almond ‘nails’, and hovering around Michael in case of more bloodshed. If you thought her spooky schtick was just a first-week gimmick, it wasn’t.
Some bakers are using individual moulds, some a perilous cut-and-dunk method. And time, as well as temperature, is against them.
“They’re a little bit… not solid,” announces Jamie, turning out a biscuit that looks like something Rosie would have to medicate a horse for producing. Amelia and Priya are also having a shocking time of it, and suddenly it’s all hands on deck to help them ice their chocolate landslides. Everyone’s covered in more molten brown stuff than me in duty free after a five hour flight delay. But they do it! Ish!
What follows, quite unexpectedly, is one of the most appetising judgings the Bake Off tent has seen in some time. There’s something about the cool snap and clatter of a knife slicing through hard chocolate and biscuit that has the power to send a person immediately to their phone to see if it’s possible to Deliveroo a packet of fridge-cold Twixes. Mmm. Mmmmm.
Still high on last week’s victory, reigning star baker Michelle has turned out exquisite Bakewell bars. Rosie, Henry and Alice have all set the bar high, while Amelia and Jamie have failed to set their bars at all. Priya’s ruby chocolate is too thick, Steph’s biccie is too crumbly and David’s nougat has ‘sloughed’ out the side.
“Like when you’ve got a sloughy wound, with all the pus coming out of it,” he explains. Helena takes notes.
The Marriage Of Fig Rolls
The technical challenge is a tribute to Paul Hollywood’s father, and indeed all parents who have ever bought the least-nice biscuits in the shop just so they could have them all to themselves. They’re the biscuit that should be called ‘digestives’, in a world where words were used properly: fig rolls.
It looks deceptively easy, but the fig roll’s cakey, crumbly dough is an enigma. Especially as Paul’s recipe just reads ‘make the dough.’ There are unknown quantities of cinnamon and ginger to add to the filling, and nobody’s quite sure how to perform the correct forking.
Jamie is the only baker dousing his biscuits with egg wash – a move we know will end in disaster, if not exactly why. Oh god. And Helena has come up short with only 11 fig rolls, so she’s drawn a chalk outline where the 12th biscuit was murdered. Helena also used to be a professional poker player. Start drafting her Rebel Girls chapter now, I say.
When the judges return, it’s Alice who has made the honour roll – again – with her perfectly-baked bics. Poor Helena is last with her biscuit crime scene, while Captain Eggwash comes in 11th place because his “look more like sausage rolls”. Not one person makes an ‘overegging the pudding’ joke. The country really is in turmoil.
A Bad Worker Blames His Tuiles
Just when you thought this year had gone back to basics, along comes the traditional lunacy: a 3D biscuit sculpture. “A really jolly challenge,” according to Prue, a person not required to bake anything.
The judges want to see them using dough ‘as if it were clay, so it’s confusing that not a single baker is humming Unchained Melody while straddling an imaginary Patrick Swayze. Instead, they’re rustling up the usual array of niche hobbies, patriotism and beloved pets. Phil is making a tortoise, Steph a cat, Michael a Highland cow. Rosie is crafting a feisty chicken from 212 individual biscuits. Priya is making a dragon to impress her sons, and Michelle is making a dragon so that she’s allowed back into Wales again.
And while those guys battle it out for the Goblet of Fire, Helena is – naturally – in the Forbidden Forest, kicking back with the giant spiders. At this stage I am genuinely worried her Earl Grey tarantula’s egg could earn her the ducking stool.
Jamie is crafting a shortbread guitar, which somehow looks like something Paul Simonon has smashed against an amp before it’s even left the oven. And Henry is also baking a tribute to a favourite passion; his organ. It’s a big organ, he explains to Paul. About the length of a baking sheet. STOP IT HOLLYWOOD, STOP CORRUPTING LOVELY HENRY. Can’t a boy enjoy his instrument in peace?
From one kind of tense assembly to another, things get fraught as the bakers attempt to glue their sculptures using nothing more than sugar and a prayer. Lovely Michael is in tears over his collapsing cow (you know what they say, it’s no use crying Bovine Split Mike), while David throws shade. “Classy is sometimes nicer, isn’t it?” he says, finessing his beige bouquet of biscuit flowers while Paul pipes himself a neon tortoise. Sometimes the editing in this show is more cutting than the knives.
Come judging, the sculpture park looks incredible with only a few bum notes. Priya = hard biscuit. Phil = soft biscuit. Steph = no-deal biscuit. But just as we were on the verge of Hexit, Helena whips out a backstop in the form of her biscuit tarantula. It looks “magical” and tastes it too. She’s safe!
Rosie’s chicken is the pride of the tent, but it’s Alice who bags star baker with her very expressive lamb. Petition for a Nick Aardman animation starring them both, as pals on an adventure.
But while other bakers have jumped the shark, Amelia is sat on a dolphin. Her biscuit seascape disappoints Paul and Prue, who don’t believe stacking constitutes ‘real’ biscuit ‘sculpture’. Do tell me about your retrospective at the Tate, Paul.
For a while it looks like it could be crunch time for two bakers, but in the end Amelia hangs on and it’s poor Jamie who finds himself breaking off into our televisual cup of tea too soon. We can’t say we didn’t see it coming.
Farewell, Lovely Boy. We’ll think of you every time we see a frosted tip.
And to paraphrase a wise man: it’s not failure – it’s just a little bit… not success.