Week two in the Great British Bake Off (GBBO) tent really brings on the crunch. It’s biscuit week, and the bakers start to crumble and snap under pressure.

The signature challenge seemingly follows the ideology of simpler bakes established last week, asking for 24 iced biscuits “as crisp as Paul’s hair”. Surprisingly, though, the real successes are the slightly pie-in-the-sky – some would say dodgy – signature ideas that make your taste buds cringe. Kate’s bergamot and lavender creations smell, if Mel’s description is to be trusted, of a mixture of medicine and skincare but end up tasting much better (although icing “a little bit informal” – you’ve got to love Mary’s way of putting things); Tom’s spiced chai frappelatteccino biscuits with coffee, cloves, and cinnamon bring back not-so-happy memories from his over-boozed bakes in cake week, yet he manages to earn the Hollywood handshake; and Candice’s double-layered salted caramel hearts ask for success both at tops and bottoms, requiring double the amount of biscuits to be perfected, yet the apparently suicidal mission is deemed a delicious, if slightly messy, success.

It is the simple and safe options where the cookie crumbles. Louise’s sheep-shaped ‘Baa Bara Brith’ biscuits with fruit soaked in tea end up scone-like, and not even uniformly so; “We all come in different shapes and sizes, don’t we?” works as a nice attitude to life, but unfortunately GBBO is not about accepting diversity in bakes. Similarly, Val’s “ice creams aren’t meant to be identical anyway” does not save the unfinished effect of her Neapolitan biscuit cones from doom – sorry, darling, on GBBO even ice creams are uniform. 

And when it comes to the technical challenge, there is even less of an excuse to produce anything that stands out as individual; only the Viennese whirls have many bakers going around in circles everywhere but not on their biscuit patterns. Speaking from the safety of my gyp room, I like to think that producing well-defined whirly biscuits sandwiching jam and buttercream does not sound like too technical a challenge; it’s a matter of realising that fridging the biscuits before baking will help them hold their shape in the oven, and that being able to squeeze any dough out of a piper requires it to be of a consistency other than rock solid. Yet only Kate manages everything spot-on; the rest of the class is subjected to the horrors of ‘raw’, ‘broken’, and ‘lack of definition’. For poor Rav, not even Mel’s offer of warm hands “either on your bag or you” saves him from being judged as mysteriously small – for his biscuits, that is.

Unlike in cake week, where the showstopper reinstated some faith in the bakers after their Jaffa cake-induced technical confusion, the biscuit showstopper allows for no mistakes; the brief is nothing less than a 3D gingerbread story, 30cm in height, featuring at least eight objects, and depicting something personal, all completed in four hours. Who am I to complain with even pre-baked, glue-it-together gingerbread houses consistently failing me every Christmas – but on GBBO, you’d expect some basic gingerbread engineering skills. Granted, the ideas are all fantastic (and rather fancier than the DIY gingerbread reindeer I spied in Tiger), from Jane’s Hastings Old Town to Selasi’s childhood church completed with stained glass windows, and from Kate’s brownie camp to Tom’s slightly more morbid bake of a near death experience on a mountain recounted in garish icing colours. But the ensuing stories are wobbly both in structure and neatness of decoration. The real gingerbread horror story is Louise’s collapsed future wedding church; a sweet idea, but I really hope she won’t be baking anything gingerbready for her wedding cake.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as two bakers manage to stop the show not with disaster but with skill. Yes, I’m probably a tad biased, but Cantabrigian Andrew’s punting scene is sheer perfection in biscuit form (and I bet he can handle that pole as well as he can handle his dough…). And Candice’s childhood pub turns out to be a small baking miracle: when she pulls off a glazed pool table, sticky ginger cake floor, and glassy windows all in a perfectly stable biscuit house, it really makes one wonder how Val only manages to complete an undecorated scene that ends up collapsing in the same time. I guess someone has to take the biscuit.

The thing I love about GBBO is how a sticky pub carpet can become a real hit. But other than that, biscuit week will leave me with memories of wobbly houses and Viennese whirls lacking whirls. It’s time for the bakers to pick up the crumbs and get their dough together for bread week.