To quote the wisdom of Candice, the Bake Off tent with only five bakers remaining resembles “the Spice Girls before Geri left.” Only the quarter final takes the bakers way further back in time than the 90s, turning the tent into a Tardis and transporting week eight to Tudor times. The Tudors gave us Shakespeare and flushing toilets, and the bakers are so set on getting into the semis that they bake us equally great things – the biggest challenge of the week being to decide who is forced to be Geri.

The signature kicks the culinary time travel off with the most Tudor thing of all: pies. The brief asks for a display of shaped pies, with sixteen individual pies forming one centerpiece. From Jane’s Tudor rose and Selasi’s bouquet of flowers to Benjamina’s Mexican adventure, the bakers really reach out for those coveted semi-final places with displays that mix the traditional with novelties that would come across as pies-in-the-sky for the Tudors.

Andrew puts his engineering skills to good use once again, following in the footsteps of Da Vinci: his potato, chicken, pork sausage and apricot pies may be Tudor in substance but very much uomo universale in style, occupying a rotating serving device.

Unfortunately, going all out does not work for everyone equally well. True to form, Candice doubles her workload by making two different types of pastry with two different fillings. Both her ox cheek and oyster and macaroni cheese pies end up in the ‘a bit informal’ category; a macaroni cheese pie sounds like a rower’s pre-bumps carb-overload to me. What puzzles me most about the signature, though, is Jane’s marital situation: the poor baker cannot bake all her pies in one go due to an insufficient number of molds, because apparently asking her husband to make sixteen molds would have been too big a request. But love should know no limits when it comes to helping your partner on the Bake Off.

The Tudor technical really lives up to its name, having the bakers, literally, in knots. The task is to make twelve jumbles, essentially knotted biscuits, half of them Celtic knots and the other half knot balls. The weekly technical baking horror raises to whole new levels as the bakers try to get their head around the knotting manoeuvre and the question of which comes first; sugar or oven? But, quite amazingly, none of the jumbles come out of the oven jumbled up too badly. Granted, there are some pale and unusual shapes, but no soggy bottoms or other horrors worthy of a Tudor-style beheading. And in contrast to weeks where even the top-notch batch hasn’t been quite spot-on, Candice manages to unknot the challenge with real skill, achieving ultimate crispness and goldness on her knots.

The showstopper brings on cake, asking for a 3D, wholly edible marzipan centerpiece with everything made from scratch. It’s Candice again who continues to really fit in with the Tudors, producing a stunning peacock, inspired by a “current tv programme” she quite likes. As if a tail in three flavours of marzipan and a body of four multicoloured sponges wasn’t enough, she also hides a surprise batch of blueberries in the middle. And this time, trying to tick all those extra boxes really pays off.

Alas, the box ticking doesn’t go as smoothly for Benjamina and Selasi. Benjamina gets lost in her cake-topping marzipan maze, with the marzipan hedges puffing up in the oven and becoming unfortunately overgrown. Meanwhile, Selasi’s attempt to represent the six wives of Henry VIII and the Battle of Bosworth in cake form does not turn out to be very illustrative.

None of the bakers deserve to be beheaded based on their Tudor performances; there may be some crumbling marzipan and biscuit-related knots, but overall, it’s all food fit for a king (read: Mary and Paul). Unfortunately, though, the Spice Girls have to be turned into the Fantastic Four; and with that, the heat goes up in the oven that is the Bake Off tent. I’ll also have to up the ante of my Bake Off viewing snacks as the increasingly soggy bottom-free bakes start to cause progressively bigger treat cravings.