Hello. I am writing this from beyond the grave. The afterlife is fine. You get all the desserts you want, you never gain weight, and the Hollywood handshake does not exist in heaven (or wherever it is I ended up). I am sorry to report that I died of lust. As soon as I saw that my lover Sandro was wearing leather trousers, every neuron in my body seized at the same time and I spontaneously combusted and ruined a whole Crock-Pot of turkey chili I was making. (For the record, “trousers†means pants, and “pants†means underwear, so it’s a very tricky thing to mistake.)
I’m not the only one my lover Sandro was pandering to this week. When the bakers have to make 12 vol-au-vents, Sandro decides to make his Key-lime-pie flavored because he knows it is Paul’s favorite dessert. Next thing you know, he’s going to start telling Matt that he donates to the World Alopecia Society and Noel that he once made out with Boris Karloff. I was going to say that he’s going to put booze in all his bakes for Prue, but, too late, he’s been doing that since day one.
The vol-au-vent (French for “windsweptâ€) proves to be quite a challenge for the bakers. They’re made with rough-puff pastry, where cold butter is folded into dough so that it will make crispy layers — or lamination. The finished pastry sort of looks like a really tall Danish with a central well that has to be filled with something sweet, per the episode brief. (Way back in “series six,†the one Nadiya Hussein won, the bakers had a showstopper where they had to make savory vol-au-vents, which is the only other time I have heard of such a creation.)
Even as the bakes are happening, you can tell it’s a disaster. Maxy is using room-temperature butter and bread flour to make hers, and you can tell that Paul and Prue think it is an imminent disaster. Matt even pulls out the “Maxy, you in danger, girl†GIF, and she still doesn’t pay attention. Sandro didn’t have his oven on while he thought his dessert was cooking, and next thing you know, the butter is running out of his creation. Abdul is also losing all of his butter, but I can’t even notice because Sandro’s piping bag busted a hole and he’s oozing cream all over the place and I seized up and died once again.
Sandro’s vol-au-vents are short and stubby and have all of his Key-lime pie slapped on top. Paul loves it, but, unlike the leather trousers, no one is incredibly excited about it. Maxy’s are worse. They don’t just look like the dog’s dinner, they look like the dog ate the dinner, threw it back up again, and then took a dump on top of it. To make it even worse, the dough isn’t baked at all. They do love her gooseberry and cloudberry jams, though. (Yes, they have totally different varieties of berries that you have never heard of here.) The worst has to be Abdul’s strawberry and coconut confections. They are short, pale, and dry, and the flavors, Prue says, are murky. Paul jokes that they can’t say one good thing about them, but it’s not really a joke when it’s the truth. That’s just saying something mean with a laugh at the end.
Janusz managed to get his pastry to rise, unlike everyone else, but he still can’t master a custard. When his crème pêatissière turns out just as gloopy as it did last time, he substitutes it for whipped cream to go with his strawberries. Paul and Prue think that the substitution is too simple. The real winner is Syabira, who got hers to rise but also knocks the judges over with her orange-and-mandarin-cream-cheese fillings.
On to the technical, where the bakers have to make eight spring rolls. I wouldn’t say this is baking as much as cooking and deep frying, but I do love it when they do a savory challenge. I know I bitched when they made s’mores about how no one makes marshmallows, but I enjoy a challenge where they have to make something we would usually buy in the freezer section or order from a local restaurant. Mostly I just want to see how spring rolls are made, and now I know: They are made with love and just enough water for the crusts to look like Frankenstein’s monster had an acne outbreak.
Noel is badgering Maxy about going foraging for mushrooms in Sweden and maybe getting kidnapped by her neighbors. I have no clue. I usually like these guys, but this week it seems like Noel was sniffing stronger glue than usual. (Maybe it was Sandro’s leather pants?) The only real mystery is what happened to Janusz’s missing spring roll. I bet the ghost of Mary Berry, who is still alive, is enjoying it somewhere in peace and telling him he is a very good boy who did a very good job.
With only five people, even those who did okay still end up at the bottom, so the list is Sandro at the top, followed by Janusz (missing one roll!), Abdul, Syabira, and poor Maxy once again at the bottom. The first few weeks of the competition she could do no wrong, and now she’s running around just making up steps to her showstopper like she’s one of us in our very own kitchens.
The showstopper is to make a 3D pie scene based on the baker’s favorite childhood story or nursery rhyme. I would like to know which bottle of absinthe the producers finished when coming up with this challenge, but I really don’t want bright-green vomit that will look like Maxy’s signature challenge bake. Though this is a little bit of a “build something weird†challenge, which I hate, it’s really just a bunch of themed pies together, and I don’t mind that so much.
I think for American audiences the idea of pie might be confusing in this case. Pie in the U.K. is almost never a sweet pie. Yes, they have them (especially mince pies at Christmas, which sound like they have meat in them but are made with fruit), but if you go into a pie shop, what you’re going to get is all sorts of crusts stuffed with steak and kidney or chicken and leek or mushroom and peas. That’s why all of these pies are filled with sausages and fish and all sorts of things I would rather not have anywhere near my pie, thank you very much.
As mentioned above, Maxy seems like she’s just winging it in this challenge. My lover Sandro has an 18-page recipe for all the different pies he’s going to make in his The Very Hungry Caterpillar display, and meanwhile, Maxy is like, “Maybe I’ll add some spinach because my mother likes spinach. How much should I add? Oh, I guess this much.†That is a wild way to approach the four hours they have to bake.
I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the results. Janusz’s is an ode to The Very Hungry Caterpillar as well, but it stars his dog, Nigel, eating a bunch of things. Okay, so where is, you know, the caterpillar? It is, as the kids say on Twitter, the titular role. Paul and Prue say that his fish pie isn’t that fishy and most of his crusts are too dry. Paul says that the interaction between the crust and the contents is off. What? Do they need chemistry? Are they dating? They seem to keep the insides inside, which is kind of the point of the crust, right? Once again with Janusz, we get something cute that no one wants to eat.
Abdul decides to take on Treasure Island using a blackberry-and-apple-crumble pie as the, ahem, titular island. He also makes a pie with aubergine (read: eggplant) curry that the judges like. They think he did a good job, and I don’t blame them.
Sandro actually made a caterpillar that’s really a bunch of round pies, but Prue thinks the pies are too big. He went all out making a tree and all the things that the caterpillar ate, but Paul says most of the elements are more like a sandwich than a pie with a very dry filling and that some of the pastry is “tough as old boots.†What he doesn’t tell us is that “Old Boots†is Prue’s drag-king name. She is also tough. Sandro makes the same sin as Janusz: looks good but no one wants to eat it. And his has some cracks.
Maxy once again puts something before the judges that looks like a pool of barf you’d see in the gutter on a Sunday morning. (Sorry, Maxy!) Her theme is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,†and she has a green-and-blue globe made of filo pastry in the middle, but it really looks like a piñata after it’s been beaten up and robbed of its contents. It isn’t the disaster we were expecting considering the edit she got, but it isn’t great, either.
Once more, Syabira has to show everyone up. She does Jack and the Beanstalk because it reminds her of climbing coconut trees in Malaysia. She has a full-on beanstalk, a castle on top of it made out of pies, and a little Jack and a giant Giant. There’s even fruity clouds, which is also what you call it when someone exhales strawberry-flavored vape in your face. Paul especially loves her chicken rendang pie. Syabira is once again using her Malaysian roots to really surprise the judges.
Unsurprisingly, Syabira takes home star baker for the second time in a row, and Maxy, another two-time star baker, has to hit the bricks. You can tell that Paul and Prue are disappointed with everyone after this challenge, but it was pastry week, and they barely had to make any traditional pastries. I’m sure these are not the skills that everyone has acquired over their baking lives, but if they don’t step it up, I won’t be surprised if Paul sends everyone packing next episode.