The Great British Baking Show Recap: Technical Difficulties

Most of the time on a Bake Off/Baking Show challenge there are some bakers who do great and some who serve up what the English would call the dog’s dinner. Never have we seen one challenge go so badly that —

Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep. We now interrupt your regularly scheduled recap with a breaking news dispatch from the BBC World Service. We can now officially confirm that Daddy Dan has gotten a haircut, and he’s even finer than before. This has been a dispatch from the BBC World Service. We now return you to your regularly scheduled recap.

— all of the judges absolutely hated it. They won’t even eat any of them. It might be dessert week, but it seems more like failure week.

I have no problem with dessert week, but what exactly are we classifying as a dessert here? Americans think that English people call all desserts “pudding,” but that is not the case. A pudding is a special classification of steamed sponge cake with a sauce on top, like we see in the disastrous technical challenge. The most obvious breed of this is the Sticky Toffee Pudding, a steamed sponge with caramel sauce on top. It is one of the best things about living in England and I am not sure why they aren’t more popular on this side of the pond.

For the signature challenge, the bakers need to make crème caramels, which are sort of like a flan but with a caramel sauce on top. I am not a huge fan of this dessert because it feels like eating especially sweet mucus. The difficulties with this dessert are getting it to set properly with the right amount of egg whites, not overcooking it and making it taste like scrambled egg, and then actually eating it, because it is thoroughly disgusting. Even Tasha thinks so, and she seems to have excellent taste.

With only six bakers left, there is not a lot of room to hide. Based on the editing it seems like the adorable Matty is going to have a hard time; he has to make his caramel twice because he keeps undercooking it and gets his crème cara-mucuses in the oven last. The great moment of suspense comes when everyone turns over their ramekins and hopes that their dessert will pop out effortlessly, like a wobbly jack-in-the-box. Saku is especially worried about this because she used jaggery, an unrefined sugar that is popular in Southeast Asia and Africa. It gets so sticky when it cools that her dessert gets stuck in the mold.

Of the six dishes, it seems like three are great and three are bad. The tops start with Daddy Dan, who made a Thai-inspired dish with lemongrass and other more savory flavors. Paul and Prue say it’s delicious, and I think he would have gotten a handshake if one hadn’t split. Poor Daddy Dan. Let me comfort you and your new haircut right here on my bosom. Also good are Josh’s, with plums and little chocolate butterflies on top in honor of his nan, and Matty’s chai-flavored crème caramels, even though it seemed like he was going to bungle this worse than Boris Johnson bungled his premiership. (Sick burn.)

The ladies didn’t fare nearly as well. Cristy’s are so overcooked that they fill with bubbles and look like they’re riddled with chicken pox. Prue says the whole thing is too solid, and while she tastes the orange that Cristy infused into her dessert, she can’t taste the caramel, which is sort of in the name. Tasha used reduced honey instead of caramel and Paul says it turned them into a swimming pool of sweetness. My girl Saku’s look delicious, with a caramelized nut on the top of them, but both Paul and Prue think they’re way too solid.

For the technical, everyone has to make a classic steamed pudding called a treacle pudding. Treacle is what English people call molasses or golden syrup, which is close to corn syrup but also totally different. I don’t get it, because a treacle pudding is never on my list of go-tos at the gastropub. This is the technical that’s absolutely horrible. It feels a little bit like old Baking Show, where they don’t give bakers enough time (only 90 minutes when the puddings need to steam for 40 minutes at least) and then are shocked when the results look like the barf in the gutter on a Sunday morning.

The results are uniformly awful, with Paul and Prue only really tasting Tasha and Dan’s. They end up in the top, but Paul makes it known that they are the top terribles. Does that make them the best or the worst? Hard to say. Both judges say it’s the worst thing they ever judged, but at least all of the bakers know they did so bad that they’re laughing about it.

The final challenge is to make a meringue bombe. I hate to do this to white chocolate, but meringue might be the grossest thing that we see most often on this show. It’s both too crunchy and too sticky. It’s sweet but it doesn’t really have any flavor. It’s not good on its own and it just mucks up other delicious things like an Eton mess. (I’m sick of explaining English things to you. Just Google it.) This is more of an engineering challenge than a baking one — the meringue is basically an edible case with something else inside. Paul and Prue say you’re supposed to eat some of the meringue with the dessert, but we only see them do it once. Also, they have to make the meringues in the shape of a sphere, which is really just begging for a big fat disaster.

I was a little disappointed that the pun patrol didn’t give us even one, “That’s the bomb,” or something like that, though Paul says that Cristy’s is so messy inside that it looks like the bomb already went off. The pun winner of the week is my girl Saku, who puts holes in the bottom of her choux buns so they don’t collapse. “Little bun holes,” she says, and it’s both gross and adorable and I love our Saku so much. Protect her at all costs.

There are two real triumphs this round. Josh makes a giant tennis ball that looks like a green Fabergé egg, an ode to Wimbledon and its famous strawberries and cream that is served at the tournament every year. The cake inside looks divine and matches perfectly with the ball. The other triumph is thanks to Daddy Dan and his big beautiful arms. He makes a globe, though it looks more like a green-and-blue striped ball, with an inside that looks like one of those models you see in earth science class with the different strata of rock and magma, except everything is desserts. There’s a chocolate Génoise sponge followed by an orange crème pat, strawberry bavarois, and a raspberry jelly as the earth’s core. Paul says it’s delicious and Daddy Dan wins not only our hearts but star baker. When he calls his wife for a congratulations she doesn’t even answer. Oh, Dan. I would never. I will answer all of your calls.

The bottom two come down to my girl Saku and not-my-girl Cristy, which is odd because they have the best-looking bakes. Saku piped her yellow beehive-looking dome right onto the mold. She also didn’t make a sphere, but rather a spherical top with a base she could rest it on. This seems smart to me because there’s no way it would topple over like Tasha’s did. Sadly the base breaks, and they don’t like her passion fruit and pistachio profiteroles inside.

Cristy not only made a dome, but one of multicolored kisses on the outside so that it looks like a quite delicious coronavirus. (Too soon?) Inside she tried to build a croquembouche, which is a tower of choux buns, but sadly she just chucked a few in there at the last minute and called it a day. In the end, Saku gets the chop because her buns have less flavor than Cristy’s. I’m so sad to see my girl Saku — no, our girl Saku — go home. There will be no more joy in the tent, no more laughter. I looked forward to seeing her every week, and not even Daddy Dan’s haircut is going to make me forget her.