Week Seven sees the Great British Bake Off literally make history, as the Bake Off TARDIS – sorry, tent – lands the remaining half a dozen contestants in the Victorian era. With only days to go until the reappearance of Downton Abbey, the timing of the period theme seems to fit in quite perfectly – but rolling out 19th century classic bakes requires more than just a love for all things period.

The Signature Challenge is a raised game pie, served to non-upper classes only on special occasions. But while a meaty pie may have been the wet food dream for your standard Victorian, the excitement of stuffing pastry with a range of meat does not really translate onto 21st century TV screens (and when Ian confesses to picking up roadkill that has been only been “bumped but not pancaked”, my appetite is further reduced).

Despite the majority of the variation in the pies coming in the, quite frankly, boring form of different combinations of meat, I am game for some of the more exciting ideas. Tamal brings a Middle Eastern kick to his pie with minced lamb, apricots, and almonds, while Mat has managed to borrow a genuine 1850's retro pie tin from his “mate, Dangerous Dave’s mum, Sheila” (as you do). Ian’s decoration, on the other hand, is a disgrace given how much time the bakers have for the visual aspect of their bakes: sticking a pastry wing on a vaguely bird-shaped pie hardly matches the ornate designs the Victorians were used to.

Style rises even more over substance when the bakers are asked to set up a tennis court on top of a fruit cake – what the point of a Tennis Cake is exactly, I do not know, but it does make a decent technical challenge where one really must keep one’s eye on the ball. Not many contestants score an ace (mental note – do not attempt to build a tennis net out of icing), but the ball is really not in Mat’s court: his first round of green sugar paste looks more like a tennis court caught in a tsunami than anything even remotely resembling Wimbledon, and he is the only one to put his decorative net and rackets into the oven, leaving the poor boy wondering why they look yellower than his fellow contestants' sports kits.

What I thought could be shrugged off as genuine confusion in the Technical Challenge turns out to be nothing less than – and oh, how I hate this in the Bake Off – genuine ignorance in the Showstopper. A Charlotte Russe, a.k.a. my idea of dessert heaven in the form of lady’s fingers, bavarois cream, and jelly, screams out a mélange of different flavours to me; but apparently not to Mat. He decides on doing a strawberry jelly, strawberry bavarois, and yes, even strawberries as his sole decoration. This disgraceful Showstopper simplicity is somewhat compensated for by Ian’s 3D crown beautifying his rather more regal concoction, and Flora’s overload of ingredients ranging from champagne jelly and truffles to white chocolate bavarois and gold leaf. Now that is adequate for a Week Seven Showstopper, I must say!

Compared to Week Six's elusive flaounas and mass-produced vol-au-vents, the Challenges, and even the bakers (apart from the unfortunate incident that goes by the name of Mat) are spot-on. However, the initially promising Victorian theme is lost in the use of electric whisks and all the rest of state-of-the-art baking utensils; just being from a bygone era does not really make meat pies and fruit cakes interesting enough Bake Off material even for the most dedicated Victorian aficionados among us. This leaves Week Seven much like the pastries from last week: a nicely flavoured competition with a soggy bottom of a theme.