Tag: gbbo

Paul Hollywood better lock his doors, turn on the alarm, and get in the panic room because I am coming for him. I’m not going to hurt him or anything, but I am going to scratch one of his cars and eat all the sweet treats stashed in his house, and you know that, like Toby, his stash is considerable. How dare he treat my perfect Tom like that? First, at the beginning of the episode, he looks at Tom’s fingernails and says, “You’ve been hanging on by there for a while.” Seriously? Paul gave him a showstopper handshake, and now he’s like, “Eh, you kinda suck.” Please. Then the judging of the showstopper. Oh, you better clear the decks because I am about to go full Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale on his ass.

The signature is the only challenge during Patisserie Week that I don’t absolutely hate. The four remaining contestants, also known as Jasmine and the Gents, all have to make two batches of cream horns, which spawns about 15 “horny” puns. Only 15? The show is slipping. There is nothing wrong with this assignment, except that things are a little warm in the tent during what was England’s hottest summer on record. Pretty hard when patisserie requires the butter to be cold, which we are told more times than there are horny puns.

Toby tells us that he has never made rough puff pastry before, and the last time he made full puff, Paul yelled at him. So he tried Paul’s recipe, and it sucked, so he’s using Gordon Ramsey’s instead. This is the kind of shade that I never knew Toby was capable of, but it makes me love him even more. When Prue tries Toby’s pastry, she says it’s too hard, which Paul, of course, blames on Toby using a chef’s recipe. I’m sorry, but there will be no vindication for Paul this episode. While they love both his coffee-flavored and lemon horns, they both don’t love the actual pastry, which puts Toby at the bottom.

Down there with him is the artist formerly known as Perfect Tom. Don’t worry, Tom. I still think you’re perfect. The whole time he is baking, he keeps saying his horns are going to be more like short-crust pastry, and when the judges try them, that’s the exact critique they have. If Tom knew this was a problem, why didn’t he find a solution before the (im)perfect judges came along? However, much like Toby, they love his raspberry cream cheese and chocolate and clementine flavor combinations, but it’s the pastry that they seem to be grading.

The opposite is true of Aaron, who the bakers seem to think is the king of pastry, but I’m not sure why. Is there something that happened this season that I’m forgetting? Paul and Prue both love his dessert cornucopia, but they hate the flavor combinations. Paul says that his nectarine and cherry both taste great individually, but together they’re gross. He’s not wrong. It does sound a little like making a Slush Puppy at 7-11 and putting a pump of each flavor into the ice. The same goes for chocolate and lemon, which I don’t love either, unless it’s a See’s Candy Lemon Truffle. Mmmmmm.

Queen Jasmine, of course, gets nothing but praise. I’m sorry, but it’s no fun when there is a clear front-runner. We don’t watch to see who goes home; we watch to see who is going to win, and it’s so obviously been Jasmine for weeks now that there is no suspense at all. The judges love her pastry Bugles, which do look delicious. Paul loves their flake, Prue loves the balance of coffee and chocolate in one variety, and Paul loves the raspberry, pistachio, and white chocolate (barf) ones. However, he chides Jasmine for using too many pistachios for the rest of the episode, even though she never uses them again. Ugh. Paul. Always on my shit list.

The technical challenge is to make a Framboisier, a French dessert with layers of génoise sponge, crème mousseline, and fresh raspberries. (Anyone who has ordered gelato in Paris knows the French word for raspberry is “framboise.”) Bakers also have to make a fondant rose and a sugar dome to decorate the top. As an audience, we want these challenges to be difficult, but we ultimately want the bakers to succeed. We want to see something tricky but doable in the time so that they triumph. Here, no one finishes the cake they wanted in the allotted time, which means there is no problem with the bakers; there is a problem with the challenge. This is just too damn hard. Do they not test these before? Don’t they have something like on Survivor where they have non-contestants run the challenge first? Apparently not.

There is one good thing about the challenge, which allows Aaron to say that this is what he loves about baking: making a cake that looks like a cake, not one that looks like a football, Paul Hollywood’s head, or one of his many cars. Exactly! That’s what we want too. We don’t want them to be engineers, as this show so often turns them into; we just want them to make a great-looking cake. At one point in the showstopper, Jasmine says, “I’m not an engineer, I’m a medic.” Exactly! And she’s perfect the way she is. No wait. Tom is perfect. She’s adequate the way she is. (Just kidding. She’s great, too.)

I can’t think of a more disastrous bake in the history of this show than this technical. Making the glass dome is the part that befuddles most of them. What they need to do is boil sugar, pour it onto cling film (British to American translation: Saran Wrap), press down on the film so it bulges into a dome, wait for it to cool, then take it off the film. This seems like one of those things you watch a pastry chef do on TikTok and then say, “Coooooolllll!! I’m never doing that.” Tom almost completes his and then cracks it while putting it in the freezer. Aaron is the only one who manages to do it successfully, and his dome looks like a pint glass that has been sitting in a gutter for three days. When it comes down to judging, it’s between Jasmine and Tom for the top spot, and the judges like both of their cakes, but it ultimately goes to Jasmine. What if Tom had finished his dome? Would that have nudged him to the winner’s circle? Is it about the cake and its taste, or is it about this foolhardy technique that even Martha Stewart was like, “Why would you bother?”

The clear loser is Toby, who serves up something that looks like a protein shake and a green juice tried to have sex and both of their bottles fell over and they just spilled all over the floor. His problem is not only with the dome but also with the mousseline. It’s a custard that is combined with butter, but the custard has to be cool and the butter has to be soft or else it won’t set and, as Toby learns, spill all over the floor like a leprechaun’s milkshake. What he serves the judges looks less like a cake and more like a puddle, and Prue also says there should be two layers of sponge, but there’s only one. That’s like showing up at a burned-down house and asking why there isn’t WiFi. We have bigger problems here!

The showstopper is a macaron-based challenge where the bakers have to make a centerpiece at least 45 centimeters (about a foot and a half) that is “bold, impactful” and showcases 30 macaroons. I have no problem with this challenge; this is the kind of thing that the modern Baking Show has been doing for years. It’s difficult but seems attainable.

Most of the bakers (bar Jasmine) struggle with their macaroons, especially Aaron and Tom, who both have to make theirs again. At least Tom was perfect enough to know that the first batch might not turn out perfect, so he made enough for two batches so he could throw the second one right in the oven. Perfect. What makes the baking even harder is Alison and Noel harassing our poor bakers as they work. Noel comes around with his friend Mr. Spoon, who, much like the Magic Rhubarb from two episodes back, can get the bakers to the finals if they give it a big wet kiss. Damn it. If only I could have dressed up as Mr. Spoon, because I’d love kisses from all the remaining bakers and also Alison, if she ever gets herself unstuck from straddling that fence. (Literal, not metaphorical, because our Alison is wonderfully opinionated.)

While I don’t have a problem with the challenge, I do have a problem with the judging, particularly when Tom gets up there. He created a giant chocolate beehive (with Iain inside, according to Noel) hanging from an actual tree and covered it with yellow macarons painted to look like bees. When he brings it up, with much assistance, Prue says that it looks “astonishing.” Paul, however. Not so much. He says, “If it were chocolate week, I would accept it, but I can’t accept that when it’s a macaron challenge. The macarons look fairly flat. The painting is rudimentary, but the main thing I’m looking at is that [pointing to the hive]. It’s very Tom. I understand that. You should have made that smaller and covered all of it.”

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This goes against not only the challenge brief but everything that has been going on at Baking Show for the past decade. They said they wanted “bold and impactful,” and they specified a height. It’s always rewarding more ornate, huger, crazier. Now suddenly this is too big, too ornate, too crazy? They asked for big, and then Perfect Tom gave them big, and they were like, “Never mind.”

How many times have we talked about how the bakers have to pay more attention to the structure of what they’re building, so that they don’t have time to make things taste good? How many times have they limited the types of biscuits or cakes they can make because they need to construct something that stands? I’m sorry, but that comes at the expense of the thing they’re actually baking. If you really wanted to taste delicious macarons with great painting, the challenge would have been to just make some macarons and put them on a plate. But it’s not. The challenge is to put a bunch of macarons on a sculpture, and the judges are mad because the sculpture is bigger than the macarons? Fuck right off.

Meanwhile, look at Jasmine’s. It’s dinky! It looks great, yes, but hanging a bunch of macarons from a Christmas tree is not inventive or creative. Jasmine’s bakes never are. She does the bare minimum, and they never tell her to step it up or tell her that she needs to be more inventive. She’s just skating by, and no one is challenging her. Yes, I know it comes down to flavor, and she nails it every time. But when you’re doing less than everyone, there is more time to focus on the baking and the flavors and everything else. The other bakers are showing some ambition, whether that’s making something huge, something with three different flavors, or even a giant macaron sign that says “Lemons,” because that is what the show has been rewarding for ages. Now, suddenly, they are rewarding flavors but not creativity? They’re rewarding meeting the brief and nothing else. Again, fuck right off.

But it’s Jasmine’s fifth Star Baker and third in a row, tying her for the most Star Bakers in one season. (Note, Richard Burr, the co-record holder, came in third in the finale, so it’s not all hers yet.) Paul and Prue gush over her tree, even though it looks like something you could construct out of a kit. Aaron’s is a bit messier because he had to remake his macaroons, but it has a certain charm. Okay, maybe that’s too generous. Aaron’s is both a mess, and the judges say the cookies are too chewy, and Paul doesn’t think they’re up to the standard. Tom, we already talked about how his looks, but both judges say that the macarons are underbaked.

Toby’s lemon crates look wonderful, but again, they’re like, “That’s a lot of gingerbread.” Dude! That’s what you asked for! While it looks cool, they don’t like the lemon macarons, saying they’re a little underflavored. The chocolate ones on the crates, however, they absolutely love, which seems to put Toby in good standing, like he could have saved himself, especially after the negativity heaped on Tom and Aaron. But it’s him who goes, with Paul saying that his disastrous technical was the decider. Here I am saying the technical doesn’t matter, but apparently, it doesn’t matter until it does. The end of the episode is especially weepy for Toby, like they all can’t believe they’re sending someone home. I thought for a minute Paul was going to put a Ru in front of his name because you know Drag Race loves to pull the “You’re all going to the final!” trick. But it didn’t come. Instead, we just get a lovely Polaroid of the group, Toby clutching everyone in his arms as all the bakers wonder just when and how the whole game changed.