Well, wasn’t this week quite full of surprises. I’m not just talking about who went home and who won, but also that no one’s giant Krokan sculptures came crashing down around their ankles, sending Paul Hollywood back to his little man cave to cackle into the darkness of their souls. But seriously, Janusz? Gone? How is that even possible? I had both him and Maxy immediately tapped for the finals, but apparently Janusz cursed both of them by saying it was going to happen before they got to the final three.
For the first bake of Patisserie Week, everyone has to tackle Mini Charlottes, which I thought was an emo band from the early aughts whose members married Cameron Diaz and Nicole Richie, but that wasn’t Mini Charlotte. That was her sister, Good Charlotte. Sorry about the confusion. The hardest part of this bake, honestly, seems to be tying a bow around the sponge-and-mousse construction. Janusz can’t do it without a finger to help, and my lover Sandro uses a ribbon so big that it could be the Gronk’s suspenders.
Sandro has more problems than his giant ribbon, though, and that’s his giant Mini Charlottes, which are about the size of a dinner plate. How is that mini? Has my lover never seen a Fiat Mini? Doesn’t he know it’s supposed to be small? You know, like Minnie Mouse? His have a banana sponge as the base and a joconde sponge around the edges and are filled with peanut and caramel mousses as well as a chocolate ganache. Prue loves the sponge at the bottom (and even takes the rest of it to save for later), but both she and Paul decide that there is way too much happening inside and it all blends together.
Janusz also struggles with his chocolate and plum idea, mostly because he has to shout at Noel, “Don’t touch my plums!†His dessert looks gorgeous, with a custard dome on top kissed by pansies. They like the flavors, which is what the judges always say when everything else is a mess, but his mousses didn’t set and his sponge was too tough.
Abdul got the worst edit of the four, making him look harried and totally unprepared. It’s a little bit of a shock that he’s here, considering he’s never won star baker, but it seems like Abdul does just well enough when someone else has a complete disaster. His Tiramisu Charlotte (Good and Mini’s Italian cousin) doesn’t look great, but if someone served that to me for dessert at their house, I would be properly impressed. The judges say they are messy, but Paul says that the textures and flavors are perfectly balanced and if he could eat it blindfolded it would be a triumph.
Syabira comes closest to knocking it out of the park and once again uses crazy flavor combinations, this time it’s berries with peanut butter–cheesecake mousse. Yeah, that sounds insane, but I would also order this twice off the Cheesecake Factory menu, once to eat and once to make a TikTok about everything I ordered at the restaurant. Prue and Paul are complimentary, but say that the fruit mousses haven’t quite set.
The technical challenge is to make four “vertical tarts,†which is what they used to call me at the bathhouse when I wouldn’t lie in the sling. This is the kind of challenge, with mousse balanced in a pastry circle, that I would normally yell about and say, “This is not a thing! Why are you making them do this?†However, I also watch Bake Off: The Professionals (Yes, America, there is a whole different baking show you know nothing about), and the pro pastry chefs on there make this all the time. Based on that, I am letting it pass.
No one has any idea what this is and what it’s supposed to look like. Syabira is the only one who figures out that you are supposed to put rice in the middle of the pastry ring so it doesn’t fall over in the oven. My lover Sandro cuts his pucks of mousse lengthwise instead of in half, and you see the cogs turning in his mind as he tries to figure out what he’s done wrong. Eventually he works it out. Couldn’t he do that just by looking around the room, which is his usual strategy for the technical.
The results are all a little bit lackluster. The best part of the whole technical, honestly, is when Syabira tells Noel to go away and he saunters all the way back to London, waving at her the whole way. Syabira and Abdul end up as the tops, and Janusz and Sandro are in the bottom. Paul and Prue don’t need to tell us that the former two are competing for star baker, and the bottom two are fighting to stay.
It’s all down to the showstopper, which is a Krokan, a Swedish dish (where’s Maxy when you need her?) made out of biscuits with marzipan and sugar decorations. It has to be 60cm tall (which is just shy of two feet, for those of you in America, Liberia, and Myanmar). These are the challenges I hate. These people aren’t making cookies, they’re making building supplies. They have to construct, and to do that you have to make sacrifices to texture and flavor.
We find out that Syabira is making a double-helix Krokan on a base of cookie chromosomes, and she explains that she is a computational biologist. Wait, so she’s not only sweet, funny, and an amazing baker, she also has a job that requires a bachelor’s degree just to understand her title? Some people have all the luck. Syabira was so darling, fiddling with her construction and pulling out a stool because she was too short to get the biscuits on the top. This was one of those things that was either going to be a disaster or win the whole thing. It was not a disaster.
Abdul builds a rocket ship to celebrate that man went to space. Sort of an arbitrary event to celebrate, but his drawing makes it look amazing. When he’s finished it doesn’t look so much like a rocket ship as it does one of those cardboard Christmas trees that is really a giant X. Yes, there is some color with the sugar windows and some cute stars and a spaceman made of marzipan, but I didn’t love it. Paul and Prue love the biscuits, and Abdul is awarded star baker. I hate to go full Ye in this place, but Syabira made one of the greatest Krokans of all time. Where is her MTV VMA? I think that since they knew Adbul was going to the end, they had to give him at least one star baker when Syabira had just won three in a row. You can’t make her any more of an obvious favorite.
So it’s down to my lover Sandro and my gay brother Janusz to see who is going home, and I wanted RuPaul to stop by with one of her patented double saves and tell us that there is just going to be four people in the final now.
My lover Sandro makes a sculpture that is meant to honor both Africa, where he was born and raised, and the U.K., where he moved. Instead it looks like a giant box made out of frozen pizza dough and slathered in burnt caramel and some icing. Paul and Prue say that the biscuit bake is perfect, the best among the group, but I think that it looks the worst.
But I don’t know. Janusz’s looked pretty bad too. It didn’t look like a Pride Parade as much as the junk-and-glitter–filled gutter after the parade had worked its way through town. His base, with rainbow stripes through the biscuit, was gorgeous, but it got messier and messier the higher it got. Well, getting messier and messier the higher you get is very Pride, so at least he was right about that. I think even worse is that Paul says all the biscuits are either overcooked or undercooked. In the end, the unthinkable happened and taste won out over looks. I’m sad to see Janusz go and happy for my lover Sandro, but is it at all possible that anyone beats Syabira?