Week 6: From flour to flower

It’s botanical week, where in the words of Tom, “anything that grows, goes.” I wish the same could be said for judging the bakes. 

The signature asks for Mary’s idea of “sheer heaven”: a simple citrus meringue pie. Yet some of the bakers tempt their fate by swaying too far away from the traditional: Rav’s tequila-infused mandarin margarita meringue pie is not strong enough in its booze flavour, while Tom kills off all the tanginess of his blood orange Halloween pumpkin pie with too much pumpkin – a definite non-citrus ingredient.

Although boring in comparison to Rav’s and Tom’s culinary experiments, staying inside the (cake) box, Jane’s lime and coconut and Benjamina’s grapefruit and ginger pies are feasts for the taste buds.

The technical came in the botanical form of herb-flavoured, leaf-shaped fougasses. A French classic with slits to give it a leaf-like appearance, this rather flat bread is something most bakers have heard of but not made (extra point goes to Tom for having fougasse as a rather classy cinema snack!)

However, the bakers do have to indulge in some semantic exercises, debating whether “consecutive slits” in the recipe refer to having the slits next to each other or one on top of the other (for future reference for any budding Bake Off stars, Andrew puts his transferable skills of that Cambridge engineering degree to good use by deducing that if ‘consecutive’ in engineering denotes the latter option, this must be so also in the science of baking).

Despite some very much non-consecutive slits, the failures of the herby technical are overall less disastrous than the soggy bottoms of pastry week’s bakewell tarts or the upside down Jaffa cakes from cake week; worst off is Selasi, whose bread was deemed “floury bap” – although I’d have that rather than a soggy bottom any time.

Yet hoping for an equally disaster-free showstopper turns out to be nothing but wishful thinking: the view that the supposedly show-stopping multi-tiered floral cakes offer is less than flowery, to say the least.

Jane the garden designer fails to put her job to much use. As her orange-flavoured sponges with white chocolate ganache are not in any way floral in themselves, all pressure falls on her hand-crafted sugar paste flowers and floral chocolate collars; but all it takes for her cake to look like weeds rather than proper blossoms is an oven at the wrong temperature and a re-baking of a sponge, resulting in more than just ‘a bit informal’ flowers and straightforwardly messy collars.

As for Andrew, it remains a mystery to me why on earth the only decoration on his too-subtly flavoured elderflower cake, in addition to real flowers, is blobs of icing. I understand that engineers may fancy the clear definition of simple balls rather than the intricacy of flowers, but surely the very notion of ‘floral cake’ implies that the piping could have at least some blossoming to it?

More of a surprise, though, is how Tom, after pretty much failing the flavourings of his signature, manages to prove to the doubting judges that tea can work in a dessert with his layers of jasmine, green tea and chamomile sponges. Equally impressive is how Selasi rises to be a self-appointed “flag for the lads” (that is, Andrew and Rav) with his very impressively piped feast of carrot, poppy seed and lemon, and strawberry and vanilla sponges.

The final show stopper is provided by Candice who, true to form, slightly overdoes it all: instead of the minimum three tiers, she goes for four, with a different sponge for each of the seasons. The prospect of rainy days and increasingly dark evenings is made so much better by drooling over her autumnal spiced carrot cake.

As flowery as botanical week may sound, fiddly flowers and not-so-leafy leaves of dough prove to be as challenging as the more traditional Bake Off weeks. With many of the bakes resembling overgrown meadows rather than designer gardens, next week’s classic dessert challenges don’t promise to be a walk in a park.

Episode 7: Just Desserts

Dessert week manages to dish up challenges where everything seems fiddly enough to qualify as a technical, but with only six bakers left in the tent, the contestants are also turning up the heat: there are no more Noah’s arks with single elephants nor gingerbread weddings ending up in marital disharmony. Watching the bakers roll out roulades and whip up mousses, I’m starting to feel like my Victoria sponge is not quite the showstopper I imagined it to be, and perhaps not even worthy of being a Bake Off snack…

The signature challenge asks for a family-sized roulade with a neat swirl in the middle and not a crack in sight. These fancified Swiss rolls seems to catch the bakers’ imagination: Benjamina opts for a Piña Colada roulade with pineapple and rum puree and coconut mascarpone, and Andrew goes equally tropical with his bananas and passion fruit curd.

Alas, as always, some bakers’ antics beg the question: just why? Jane rolls her boozy chocolate and hazelnut roulade from the long edge to give more slices. But when you’re trying to impress Mary and Paul, surely you shouldn’t be holding back on your offerings? Always-so-imaginative Tom, on the other hand, proves with his millionaire’s shortbread in roulade form that it is possible to go too far with wacky ideas: his chocolate-covered log looks like a chocolate bar, which is not exactly what you want when the judges are asking you to show them your swirl.

When it comes to the technical, I didn’t think it possible, but the concept of a Marjolaine causes more confusion in the tent than the Dampfnudeln back in bread week. For the uninitiated, a Marjolaine is a French rectangular gâteau with four layers of nutty meringue sandwiched with praline buttercream and ganache, and covered in nuts – all to be accomplished in three hours, which according to Mary “may be pushing it a bit”. But the bakers push back and the gingham altar is presented with a very impressive array of gâteaux indeed. It’s telling that even the worst performance, Selasi’s slightly lopsided take on the classic, is only criticised for having a bit of a soggy bottom and a drunken look. Gone are the days of upside down Jaffa cakes and Paul mushing raw Dampfnudeln back into dough.

As if the first two challenges weren’t showstopping enough, the actual showstopper requests two types of mini mousse cakes, twelve of each. The heat is quite literally on in the apparently sweltering tent, with mousses going melty and the bakers getting a month’s dose of aerobic exercise running to fridges and freezers.

Tom certainly collects all the fun-points for his idea – which makes it even more disappointing that the execution of his “hipster picnic” with carrot cake mousse and apple and white chocolate mousse sandwiches lacks any finesse at all. “Taking something nice and simple and making it ludicrously complicated, which is the hipster way”, as Tom puts it, is perhaps not the best option after all when time is short. Selasi also ignores the finesse, missing out on the ‘mini’ in his chocolate and mint (not-so) mini mousse cakes; the desserts come out as monstrosities with green ganache oozing out of the rather, um, big-boned cakes. I’m a girl who likes her treats big but when the Bake Off requires ‘mini’, it’s got to shrink.

Call me biased, but what the likes of Tom and Selasi lack, Cantab Andrew brings on at a totally different level. His mint chocolate mousse and honeycomb cakes and forest fruit mousse on vanilla sponge, all set on a ferris wheel, are a real engineering feat – take me punting any time soon?

I say I’d like to be poking at Andrew’s sponge and checking the stiffness of his meringue peaks, but quite honestly, weeks like dessert week prove that a tea party invitation from any of the bakers would be a golden ticket. Thank you dessert week, my faith in amateur baking has been restored.