The Great British Bake Off Series 7, Episode Botanicals

It's Botanicals Week! That seems like a very silly theme and I can't say I have much enthusiasm for it. Mel and Sue inform us that in the tent are six dwarves whose names rhyme with "bakey"...and Andrew. Poor Andrew. Always the Zoidberg. Rav is already telling us that this is not going to be his week. Prescient. Though has any week been Rav's week?

For the signature bake, everyone is asked to produce a citrus meringue pie. Mary says it's sheer heaven and emphasises that she wants crispy meringue. Let's see how many people pay attention to that, shall we?

In honour of Botanical Week, Selasi is dressed in a floral T-shirt, and Jane has come in a floral blouse that apparently only gets an airing once every three years. Everyone else has chosen to show up in plain dark tops. I want to know whether five bakers are ignoring the suggested dress code or two bakers are just incredibly enthusiastic.

Since there aren't all that many varieties of citrus, there are a few flavours going head to head. Benjamina and Selasi are both making grapefruit pies and are also clearly the best friends who ever best friended. At one point Selasi holds his bowl of meringue upside down over Benjamina's head to show just how thick and non-budging his meringue is. That sounds wrong. Anyway. I wonder if there are hours of best-mates footage sitting in the BBC editing room, cruelly cut for more time watching Val being non-specifically wacky. I would have been way more on the Selasi train if that had been his edit. Candice and Jane (also apparently buddies) are both making lime and coconut pies. Candice appears to not be wearing any lipstick, or wearing a lipstick which is less "your lips but better" and more "your lips but a bit dry and worried-looking." Poor show, Candice. You better come out in navy blue or bright orange or something ridiculous next week. Tom the Murderer says he doesn't like sweet pies and so is making blood orange and pumpkin pie. That sounds revolting. Why does he keep doing this?

All the bakers except Jane are planning to use blowtorches to brown and crisp up their meringue, and Mary Berry is NOT impressed. Every time someone says "blowtorch" she pulls disapproving Mary Berry face, and then she stands at the front grousing about all these stupid blowtorches and why can't people do it in the oven and make PROPER meringue, goddammit. It's great. I love when people have really deep convictions about stuff that doesn't matter in the slightest. Most people are piping their meringue onto their pies, except Rav who will just be vaguely flinging his on with a spatula. Oh, Rav.

Candice plans to use a small amount of green colouring in her piping bag to get coloured edges on her piping, which I am quite excited to see until she stuffs it up royally and ends up having to swirl the neon green bits in with the rest of the meringue. It looks exceptionally unpleasant, a fact of which she is well aware.

Judgement time! Benjamina wins Battle Grapefruit, beating Selasi and his dry curd, and Jane wins Battle Lime, beating Candice's green gunk thing (which nevertheless tastes very nice). Andrew's pastry is too thick, Rav went too light on the tequila, and Tom the Murderer's revolting pie is revolting.

The technical challenge is to make two herb fougasse. This appears to be some kind of leaf looking bread thing. Paul repeatedly emphasises the importance of getting the leaf looking bit right, but has only specified "two slashes in the middle and six more down either side" in the recipe, leading to a great debate as to whether the middle slashes go next to each other or on top of each other. A lot of people pick the wrong one, even though Andrew explains the exact engineering definition of "concurrently" which allows him to make the right choice and put his bread slashes on top of each other. (What a sentence that is.)

Since the tight time limit leaves very little time for the bread to cool, we are treated to the beautiful sight of a roomful of people with large paddles frantically wafting their bread. The idea of being able to buy and make use of a bread wafter almost makes me want to take up baking bread.

Selasi and Andrew come last in the technical, followed by Candice and Jane, Rav in an astonishing third place, and Benjamina and Tom the Murder at the top.Tom the Murderer does proper murderer face while his bread is being judged. It's genuinely frightening.

As we go into round three, Paul tells us that all the girls are doing really well and all the boys are in trouble. This does not match up with my viewing experience. I am still quite firmly Team Candice, but she produced an unpleasant green gunk and then came fifth out of seven in the fougasse baking. That's a weird definition of "doing really well".

This week's showstopper is a three-tiered floral cake. Mel does an exceptionally dorky floral dance to go with it. I love her. Several people know they need to pull the stops out to save themselves.

Paul and Mary do their tour of the tent to find some interesting decisions going on. Candice is going to make four tiers instead of three (because she does this) and make four different cakes relating to the seasons, Tom the Murderer is going to make tea-flavoured cakes because there is something wrong with him, and Jane isn't going to bother using any floral flavours at all and is just going to cover it in floral decorations instead. This seems unwise. Rav is planning to pipe his own buttercream flowers for the cake, even as he admits that's not a thing he can really do, he hates doing it and he doesn't know why he chose to do it, good luck Rav.

Jane tells us that speed is of the essence for her since she's decided to ignore all the possible flavours that would have fit the theme and will need as much time as she can get for decorating. She then immediately messes up her cake and has to throw it out and start again. Well done Jane. Cake checking abounds. Candice is pleased with her chocolate cake, while one of Andrew's has a wet-looking centre. Tom the Murderer decides to check the smell of his various cakes by lining them up and then bending at the waist to stick his nose into them like a drinking bird. What a strange little murderer he is.

Everyone starts decorating their cakes and... hmmm. There are a LOT of janky-looking cakes in that tent. Candice says her tier placement is intentionally higgledy-piggledy "like the seasons" but it doesn't look intentional, it just looks like she couldn't do it properly. Benjamina's intentionally semi-naked cake also just looks like she couldn't do it properly. Andrew and Rav appear to have done hardly anything to their cakes, and Jane's OTT decorations look a complete mess, especially her melty chocolate collars that don't look like flowers at all. Tom the Murderer is doing some okay piping that looks a lot more impressive than it is next to everything else, and Selasi is the only one making anything of any note whatsoever with some amazing piped flowers. Thank you, Selasi, I was beginning to despair.

Showstopper results in brief: Candice's "looks fun" (I thought it looked bad enough to put her in trouble, but eh) and three out of her four cakes taste good; Andrew's cake looks unambitious and none of his cakes are good; Benjamina's cake looks unfinished and only one of the cakes is good; Rav's is messy and uncreative, and his one flavour of cake is overbaked; Jane's looks insanely bad and mashed potato-like and her cakes are overbaked; Selasi's cake looks AMAZING and all three cakes are good; and Tom the Murderer's cake looks okay and all three cakes are good, which surprises Paul. It surprises me, too. I am not on board with tea-flavoured cake.

Star Baker this week is Tom the Murderer, for the second time. At first I was really confused by this, but if you look back at the challenges everybody massively screwed up at least one of them. CANDICE was somehow in contention to win this week. Again, I love her, but come on. Going home, finally, is Rav. Bless him, he was very sweet, but also quite rubbish and probably ought to have gone home weeks ago. By the end I found him quite endearing, I'll admit. Andrew considers himself a lucky duck and will have to step it up next week. I am concerned that Andrew might have some kind of meltdown.

Next week: Desserts week! It looks incredibly nerve wracking. There is nothing quite so intense as looking at a pudding that might possibly break or fall at any minute. Just one of the many lessons this show has taught me.

The Great British Bake Off Series 7, Episode Pastry

It's Pastry Week! To welcome us in, Mel and Sue invent baguette and Batternberg-based yoga poses. I don't know what this has to do with pastry but I really want some Battenberg now.

For the signature bake, everyone is asked to make 24 breakfast Danish pastries in two different flavours. Mary reminds us that breakfast pastries have a very high butter content and if the butter melts out during baking, you're left with a sad, dry heap of rubbishness. But I'm sure that definitely won't happen to any of these guys. Nope.

There are some interesting flavour things going on in the tent for this one. Benjamina is making peanut butter and banana pinwheels, which sounds horrendous, but not as bad as Tom the Murderer who is making one granola-based pastry and one Weetabix-flavoured ("wheat biscuit" if you're the BBC) one, apparently taking inspiration from the taste of the milk at the bottom of a cereal bowl. A couple of months ago I had a cocktail that tasted of Weetabix and I do not recommend it. Except that it came in a giant brass ant, which I absolutely do recommend. Tom the Murderer has been going in a really odd direction with his flavours the last couple of episodes. Candice is making a croque monsieur that looks super tasty, and is also wearing a necklace that I WANT. Is there a website that tells you where you can buy things seen on reality show contestants or judges? There must be. I am not going to look for it, because that way lies owning way too many lipsticks I will never wear.

Everyone starts bashing their butter into thin rectangles to layer up their pastry, and Andrew is measuring thicknesses with a ruler and making sure he has good corners on his butter. This is either endearing or annoying and I'm not yet sure which. Jane sings the intro to No More I Love Yous as she waits for her pastries, sadly without the Annie Lennox crazy face and other contestants popping up around her to do backing vocals. BBC, get on that.

Rav is constructing a "plaittice", in the words of Mel, who goes on to suggest that it looks like a cigar. Yes, let's go with cigar, just in case Rav's mum is watching this. In typical Rav fashion, he notices when his pastries are in the oven that he's forgotten to make his 12th one, so he just plops his last piece of untouched pastry on the side of his basket and laughs at it. Bless. I almost feel I'm softening a tiny bit to Rav, in spite of the fact that he's rubbish.

Judgement time! Val's flavours are nice but her pastry is underdone and falling apart (which she yet again claims was her intention all along); Selasi's pastry isn't quite done and Mary isn't sure about the rhubarb; Tom the Murderer's pastries are super dry on the granola side and completely inedible on the Weetabix side; Rav has one dry set of pastries and one tasty set; Andrew's look great but have been cut too thin to be proper Danishes; Benjamina's are raw and have no butter left in them; Jane has overfilled her sweet pastries but otherwise done very well; and Candice has two tasty sets of pastries with a slight loss of butter in the savoury ones. Undeterred by this, Mel picks up a pile of Candice's croque monsieurs (croques monsieur?) and runs away with them claiming she has a hungry family to feed.

The technical challenge this week is a Bakewell tart. I once spent AGES trying to get that feathering thing to work, and I couldn't, probably because I was about eight at the time. Still, I've never attempted it again. Mel and Sue helpfully inform everyone that a Bakewell should be baked well rather than baked badly. Mary explains what a good Bakewell tart should look like, takes a bite and is SO THRILLED at the taste of it. It is adorable. Paul then says "well done, Bezza" because he is terrible and she responds by tartly (hey-oh!) inquiring after his diet. Mary Berry's unimpressed face is a thing of pure joy.

Previous Bakewell tart experience in the room is varied. Selasi speculates that the more successful bakes will belong to "the aged" (which is a really odd and not entirely pleasant way to phrase it), Benjamina calls it "retro" and gets corrected by Jane, and consensus is that Val will walk away with this challenge. Cut to Val, who has been entirely making shit up as she goes along and has only just noticed that there is a second page of instructions having already started baking. Apparently she thought the instructions started at number 5. She claims she makes a Bakewell tart every week using her Making Shit Up method. Hmmm. "You're only allowed one teaspoon of almonds," she complains, "I'd have put two in." "Of course you would, Val," says Sue, "what's a recipe for if not to just totally ignore?"

Selasi makes the icing for his feathering incredibly neon pink, and Benjamina pisses herself laughing at this for some reason. I feel like we missed something (presumably either that they're best friends or she hates him, and either way I don't know why they'd edit that out).

Val starts flinging her piping bag around and assures Sue she isn't going to hit her. Sue, with an expression of calm despair on her face, assures her that at this stage, being hit with a piping bag would almost come as a blessing. I don't know which way to take that comment.

Andrew is watching his oven intently for fifteen minutes, wondering why his tart doesn't seem to be baking very quickly, before noticing that he hasn't actually turned the oven on. Yikes. But also it is slightly funny after watching him measure the corners of his butter earlier. Having now lost quite a lot of time, he starts rushing and panicking and turning the colour of Selasi's apparently hilarious icing. Despite not even being able to get most of his icing onto the tart, he still manages to come sixth out of eight because Rav's tart collapses on one side (last in the technical for the third week in a row, well done Rav) and Val has a crazy thick pastry and the dreaded soggy bottom. At the top are Selasi, Candice, and winner Jane.

Going into the Showstopper, Paul and Mary speculate that Jane and Candice are up for Star Baker, and that Tom, Benjamina, Val and Rav might be in trouble. Paul appears to notice for the first time that Rav has been doing quite badly for some weeks now. Never slow on the uptake, that one.

For this week's showstopper, the bakers are making 48 amuse-bouches in two different flavours - one sweet, and one savoury. Rav is already sure he's going home, because apparently he hasn't been paying any attention to Val this week, but is going to fling himself headlong into the challenge anyway.

After we learn that Andrew is making baklava, we take a very oddly-placed history break to learn about the origins of baklava and watch Mel try to roll out filo pastry. She claims she's going to eat ten trays of them and I believe her entirely.

A couple of the contestants are making tartlets. Tartlets. Nobody is making anything too weird this time, except Tom the Murderer who is making steak and chocolate pastries and pear and ginger pastries. I don't get it. Selasi's parma ham and asparagus, Candice's banoffee and whisky and both Rav's pastries sound delightful and now I'm hungry.

Pastry rolling time and Jane and Candice appear to be sailing through it like they've sailed through the whole episode, though Jane's complicated cone-shaped things do keep falling over. She also uses a bottle of alcohol to make sure her pastry is thin enough, which gets her a point. Candice is using a pasta maker to roll her pastry (smart girl), and Val is using a broom handle because the internet told her to. She's misjudged the ingredients in her pastry and it's misbehaving horribly. She is so far behind that she can only get half of her parcels into the oven, and has to take them out before they're done in order to present the judges with anything. Tom the Murderer is also having a bad time of it and is convinced he's going home, because he hasn't been paying attention to Val either.

Showstopper Results in Brief: Benjamina has done well with both pastries; Selasi's savoury pastries are dry but the sweet ones are tasty; both of Andrew's pastries taste good; Tom's look "informal" and Paul doesn't like the taste of either of them; Jane's look and taste good but her cones are too big to be considered an amuse-bouche; Val has failed entirely on all the levels; Candice has done so well that Jane starts chanting "Star Baker" at her; and Rav has miraculously redeemed himself by producing two sets of pretty and tasty pastries. Go Rav!

Star baker this episode was between Jane and Candice all the way through, and it goes to Candice for the second time. Team Candice! Or Candeeece, as Mary calls her. Going home this week, finally, is Val. Tom the Murderer tells us that had Val been able to bake all her pastries he'd have been the one going home. There seem to have been a LOT of people dodging bullets this series.  I'm not sure. Andrew tells us that Val apparently played games between bakes, like making everyone guess the prices of her shopping from 1977. I am torn between wishing they'd shown footage of that and wondering why on earth Val was keeping shopping receipts from 1977. Did she anticipate this would be a good game in 40 years' time?

Next week: it's Botanical Week! Wait, Botanical Week? I am not at all sure about this as a concept. It's fine to do something twice, guys. You can just do pies or puddings or a more specific variety of cake; nobody is watching this show for the innovative episode themes, I can assure you.

The Great British Bake Off Series 7, Episode Batter

So, before we start, we have to acknowledge the Big Thing What Just Happened: the BBC have lost the rights to Bake Off, it's going to Channel 4, Mel and Sue are not going with it, and Bake Off is essentially ruined forever. Whatever goes out on Channel 4 will be a very different and almost certainly much worse show, and unless a minor miracle happens it will probably die a very slow and embarrassing death. Ugh. But for now, it is our duty to aggressively enjoy the small amount of OG Bake Off we have left. Batter Week, show us what you got.

It starts with Mel and Sue singing a version of Ten Green Bottles where they pronounce "overworked" in a proper Accrington Stanley way in order to make it rhyme with "yurt". Oh, they will be missed. Then Sue comes as a cricket batter for Batter Week and jumps up and down on it in an adorably bad display of frustration when it turns out to not be that kind of batter. The BBC could basically knock together any show with Mel and Sue, some nice people for them to gently rib, and a setup that allows for terrible puns, shove it into the same time slot, and people would watch it. I know I would. I would possibly watch a channel that was just that, all the time, and have it running constantly in my house. Maybe Mel and Sue could live in my house. I'm sure that wouldn't be weird.

Signature this week is Yorkshire puddings. Mary tells us we need "a lovely dip to take the filling". Of course we do. I'm not sure about the idea of fancy-ass gourmet flavour Yorkshire puddings. The whole point of Yorkshire puddings is to fill them up with gravy, not to be bursting with delicate Thai flavours and tofu, Rav. Most people are just putting some form of miniature Sunday roast into their puddings, which I think is the right way to go about it.

What is not the right way to go about it is producing hard, flat discs of biscuit, which is what most of the bakers seem to be doing. Several people throw their first attempt out and start again, except Tom the Murderer, whose puddings are arguably the worst. He just shrugs and starts balancing curry on top of his weird Yorkshire discs. Mel appears behind him to say "Mate, you gotta raise your game a bit", and her tone is oddly serious - it's as though Tom the Murderer is an old college friend who's gone off the rails a bit, and by "raise your game a bit", she means "stop drinking so much". Tom the Murderer ignores her, as is so often the case in these sad situations, and continues defiantly arranging rice on his batter biscuits.

Jane says that she can't make a Yorkshire pudding to save her life, and Val worries that her home town will chase her away for good if she screws up Yorkshire pudding on national television. The stakes are high. Rav points out his single most successful Yorkshire pudding to the camera and declares it his favourite. Bless.

Judgement time! Paul likes the way Andrew has toasted his nuts; Jane has done everything well except the actual Yorkshire pudding which is awful; Candice's Yorkshire Wellingtons taste lovely but look incredibly vaginal (they don't say that, but it was all I could see); Val will not be kicked out of Yorkshire; Paul is so thrilled that Selasi has given him some crackling that he doesn't even care about the pudding; and Tom's weird curry discs are met with the disapproval they deserve. He says he will fixate on it "for at least a few hours" and I can almost hear Mel yelling at him. If I ever get to the stage where I can royally screw something up in front of millions of people on national television and only fixate on it for a few hours, I will have become everything I ever wanted to be. My brain still finds ways to fixate on stupid things I did when I was seven years old.

Also, I think I want Mary's jacket. Is that weird? I know Mary's jackets are a bit of a thing and M&S sells out of them within five minutes, but it's never been a thing for me before. Mary Berry is in her eighties and is wearing a white zip-up vaguely biker jacket-looking thing and deserves a round of applause from all of us.

For the technical challenge, everyone has to make twelve identical heart shaped lace pancakes, "like a doily you might find in Carol Vorderman's guest bedroom". They can make one test pancake, but have to present all subsequent pancakes to the judges. The instructions are minimal to the point of non-existence, so everyone is guessing, assuming, making shit up. Since there is no set design to pipe, the pancakes range from intricate latticeworks of beauty (Benjamina, Candice) to can't-be-bothered vague criss-crosses (Rav, Selasi), and it may or may not be coincidence that those contestants end up as top two and bottom two respectively. Apparently Selasi is still most people's favourite, but what is he even doing anymore? In the first week he was hilariously laid back in a really endearing way, but since then he's just been a bit half-hearted and dull. Sorry.

Showstopper time! This week Paul and Mary want 36 sweet churros. I love churros so much, but they're so often disappointing that I've stopped buying them. I expect this challenge to make me both hungry and a bit sad that the hunger will go a long time before being satisfied. Sue says "Churross Kemp" and I temporarily love everything and everyone.

Most people aren't going too mad with the presentation this week (it's been a bit of a toned down week, all in all), though Andrew is making flower-shaped churros in a window box and Tom the Murderer is making some kind of fennel flavoured snake. Fennel? Paul reminds him that the challenge is to make sweet churros and fennel isn't especially sweet, and Tom basically just shrugs. I don't know what's up with him this week. Also in Questionable Decision Corner is Rav, who is making matcha tea flavoured churros. Someone else definitely made a matcha tea cake the first week and got told it was terrible and just tasted like grass. Let me check my notes. Michael! Michael made a matcha tea cake. And look where that got him. Learn from others' mistakes, Rav.

Kate is making "hot cross bunny" churros and it's just not even cute anymore. The "bunny" is basically a charity ribbon with a couple of raisins stuck on it. It feels like such a reach for a gimmick that she might as well have not bothered. Especially as it all starts to go quite wrong quite quickly, and she takes them out of the oil saying, "I think I might have mucked it up." Sue watches Kate throw her churro bunnies into boiling oil and calls it "Kate-al Attraction". Which, ouch, but also I love that there is no pun too awful for this show.

Rav and Tom are piping their churros straight into the hot oil, which is apparently the traditional way, but it looks unsettling and reminds me of things I'd rather not think about in a dessert context. Val piping chocolate into the middle of her churros isn't much better. This is making me a lot less hungry than I expected.

Mel and Sue tell the bakers their time is running out while Mel tickles Sue under the chin for no discernable reason. Put them in more shows, BBC. MORE SHOWS.

Showstopper Results in Brief: Andrew's flower churros look good, if a little penis-y (again, they didn't say that, but it was all I could see) but overcooked; Tom's fennel snake doesn't look like a snake, is overdone, and isn't sweet; Rav's matcha tea churros are misshapen and fatty and matcha tea still doesn't work as a flavour; Candice's peanut butter churros haven't held their shape and are a bit fatty; Kate's bunnies look bad and are basically nothing but oil; Benjamina's coconut churros are well-presented and delicious; Selasi's lemon and anise churro bowls manage to be both burnt and raw at the same time, which is quite an achievement; Jane's pistachio and white chocolate filled churros are actually very tasty; and Val's chocolate orange filled churros look good but are too doughy on the inside.

Star Baker this week is Benjamina, and well deserved it is too. Maybe they'll actually remember to put her on camera occasionally now.

Going home this week is Kate. She takes it well, and she seems nice, but she was far from being one of my favourites and I'm glad I don't have to deal with any more of the twee. Tom acknowledges that he dodged a bullet. Rav tells Kate he feels guilty, and tells the camera he doesn't know why he's still here. Nor do I, really. He's spent the past four weeks being a little bit shit at everything but also so anonymous that they keep forgetting to eliminate him.

Next week: pastry. Last year for pastry week we made little pastry bites - some with brie and some with chocolate - and I really want to do that again. They all exploded and looked terrible, but NOM.

The Great British Bake Off Series 7: Episode Bread

It's bread week! Mel and Sue (returned in one piece from her penguin expedition) get us off to the most appropriate start by standing on a bread roll and informing us that they're both wearing loafers. Ah, Bake Off.

The signature challenge this week is to make a bread with chocolate in. I like bread, I like chocolate, but I've never been sold on chocolate bread.

Kate makes a cobbled loaf inspired by her husband's grandmother, whom she claims was known as “Nanny Cobbles”. This may be the most twee thing to happen on Bake Off yet, beating out the last thing Kate did (make a gingerbread Brownie camp). I'm not really feeling Kate. Elsewhere, Selasi is waiting for his bread by lying on the floor with his hands behind his head, Val is counting to five hundred kneads of her bread and has reached seven, Candice informs us that “nobody likes a small unfilled ball”, and Sue refers to Michael's “manually explored bread”. Both the latter two are innuendo I could have done without, to be honest.

Time's up and the finished breads... don't really go down that well. Basically only nine-year-old Andrew and Tom the Murderer get completely positive feedback for their bread, despite Andrew's risky decision to only prove his bread once. At least half the others are underbaked, including Candice who breaks down in tears and says she's really embarrassed. I'm slightly worried about Candice.

The technical challenge this week is Dampfnudel, which I spelled almost right without looking it up. It's apparently some kind of steamed dumpling thing, or as Mary puts it, “an iced bun without the icing”. So... a bun, then. We learn a bit of Dampfnudel history, with a story about how a baker made over a thousand of them in order to broker a peace or some such, and then a German quartet in full performance dress shows up to sing a Dampfnudel song. The fact that there is a special Dampfnudel song makes me quite happy.

Yet again there's quite a bit of raw bread on the judging table. Rav is last, followed by Jane and Kate, and at the other end of the scale are Candice, Andrew, and Val in first place. She suggests that this is because she's old and has made a lot of dumplings in her life.

Finally we go into the Showstopper, which this week is a savoury centrepiece made of plaited bread. Some of the shaping is a bit half-arsed this week, particularly Selasi who is making a tree and a ball for some reason. In the “more effort” category are Kate, making a plaited corn doll because she is too twee for words; Tom the Murderer, making Thor's hammer and using lava to do so because of course he is; and Val, who is attempting to make Noah's Ark out of bread plaits. Good luck with that, Val. At least it seems unlikely that anyone will be getting a stupid special commendation for a not-that-impressive bread lion this time.

Sue tells Tom the Murderer that his bread looks “...very male.” “Yeah,” says Tom the Murderer, “it's Thor's hammer, you know? Also, T for Tom...” Sue pulls a face at him and he says, “I'm not being led. My mum's going to watch this.” I am possibly being won over by Tom the Murderer. Send help.

Val's ark is looking less than ark like. Also she's cut some corners on the whole “the animals went into two by two” concept.

“Why is there only one elephant?”

“They've argued.”

“Why is there only one dove?”

“One's flown off.”

Oh, Val. She then cuts her finger minutes before time up and both Mel and Sue have to wrestle a plaster onto her while shouting “Health and safety, Val! Take the plaster!”

Showstopper Results in Brief: both the breads in Jane's plaited flower are good; Val's ark looks completely bonkers and nothing like an ark, and also isn't baked properly; Tom the Murderer's hammer looks and tastes good but has a slight problem with uneven distribution; Andrew's woven basket looks great, tastes great and makes an excellent hat; Benjamina's bread heart tastes good; Rav's Diwali centrepiece has something wrong with each bread; Selasi's tree thing has no visible plait and is too half-arsed in concept; Michael's Cypriot bread looks messy and doesn't have enough flavour; Kate's twee corn doll looks and tastes great; and Candice's plaited dome has one good bread and one bad bread. She's completely convinced she's going home.

Star Baker this week is Tom the Murderer and his incredibly nerdy bread. Go Tom the Murderer! Going home is Michael, which I'm quite surprised about because he didn't seem to do any worse than several other people. Candice and Val are both surprised it wasn't them, and so am I, though obviously I'm pleased it wasn't Candice. Michael is sad about leaving, and I'm sad for him, though I can't really remember anything he did. He seems sweet, though.

Next week: the first ever Batter Week! Churros for all! Mmmmm... churros.  

The Great British Bake Off Series 7: Episode Biscuits

It's week two! Due to a malfunctioning TV I missed the first few minutes of the show and so spent about half of it being confused as to why Sue didn't seem to be doing anything this week. I still don't know where she was; I could of course go back and watch the start of the show on iPlayer but I sort of prefer being able to come up with my own explanations as to where she was. I'm currently going with “penguin-saving expedition”.

The first challenge is to make 24 iced biscuits. Mary advises not to be too ambitious as making each one identical is a bit of a headache in its own right. Candice's response to that is to make 48 biscuits. I love her. 

Everyone gets one additional line of introduction this week, for some reason. Among other things, we learn that ginger nine-year-old Andrew is into musical theatre and Candice has a PUG (I get very excited when reality show contestants have comedy dogs). She is also planning to wear a different statement lipstick for every episode she is in, which is an excellent plan.

Val and Louise's biscuits both have unfortunate meetings with the floor during the first challenge, which sets up an unfortunate precedent for both of them this episode. At judging neither goes over too well, as Val doesn't have enough biscuits and Louise's are far too soft. Several people have trouble with sloppy-looking biscuits, leaving only Tom, Selasi, Michael and Benjamina getting good feedback for both presentation and taste.

We take a brief break from the competition for Sue to go and learn the history of biscuit-dipping, where she is made to eat what appears to be dwarf bread. Then the biscuit-dipping historian brings out the biscotti and vin santo and the two of them look like they're having a great time. I would like to join them to get drunk and eat biscuits.

The technical challenge this week is Viennese whirls, which of course leads to many innuendo-laden shots of contestants squeezing piping bags and talking about extreme stiffness. Rav is too stiff and Mel offers him “a pair of warm hands, either on your bag or on you”. She then pulls a face that I want to find a gif of and use constantly. Mel and Rav seem like mates this episode, which I like because I can't for the life of me remember anything else Rav has ever done. It's of course entirely possible that Mel is just missing the presence of a comedy partner and both she and I will forget about Rav again when Sue comes back. I'm assuming Sue is coming back. I'm sure I would have heard if she'd just quit Bake Off in a fit of rage. I honestly never thought missing the first few minutes of a show like this would make any difference.

The final Viennese whirls are mostly pretty good, except that Selasi, of all people, completely tanks it. The whirls collapse and they taste oily. He comes last, followed by Louise and Michael, with Benjamina, Jane and winner Kate at the other end of the scale. I feel like Benjamina has been doing remarkably well for someone we hardly ever see doing anything.

For the Showstopper, everyone is asked to make a 3D gingerbread “story” with at least eight “characters” or “props”. I actually enjoyed this challenge way more than I thought I would when they announced it, probably because the idea of calling a biscuit a “story” makes me feel slightly sick. However, the gingerbread displays are really bloody impressive, with Val planning to make Yorkshire AND New York AND Holland AND her sister, Tom planning a display of punting in Cambridge with a bicycle Mel mistakes for a platypus, and Candice making a pub with a sticky ginger cake carpet and a lime jelly pool table. Louise is making a gingerbread wedding (another phrase I didn't know I needed to hear in a Welsh accent) with a bride, a groom, a vicar, and... five gravestones. Prescient. If you think that's morbid, here is Tom the Murderer to tell you about his recreation of when he and someone called Pod nearly died on a mountain. Made of biscuit. It turns out that my boyfriend knows someone who went to uni with Tom, which is few enough degrees of separation to make me question writing this stuff, but I also think that if I went on national television and made a gingerbread recreation of when my friend and I nearly died, and then I found out that someone on the internet had nicknamed me “The Murderer”, I would fully understand.

As always with the building challenges, we then enter into Collapsing Bake Time, which is a nightmare to recap because I keep flinching and shrieking whenever anything falls or wobbles or slips. This is actually a really stressful show. Val and Louise continue to have a terrible time of it, with Louise's church tower and Val's Statue of Liberty breaking, and then both sculptures completely falling apart when the time is up. Louise looks completely defeated and it's horrible.

Showstopper Results in Brief: Andrew's Cambridge sculpture is immaculately constructed but one of the gingerbread men is winking at me and it's disturbing; Val's is collapsed and not well finished but “your sister tastes lovely”; Benjamina's Chrysler building is messy but tasty; Tom the Murderer's Death Mountain is still weird but well-constructed and tasty; Kate's Brownie camp (of course she made a Brownie camp) looks good but is insufficently gingery; Jane's garden is too soft; Rav's Christmas fair is both messy and burnt; Michael's Lapland sculpture has become “Santa's workshop from Hell” but has the best tasting gingerbread; Selasi's church is a nice design but also insufficiently gingery; Louise is warned not to get married in that collapsed church but her gingerbread is good; and Candice's pub gets raves all round. Not only does it look completely amazing, but it's the undisputed innuendo winner of the episode: first when Mel asks Candice if she needs any help moving the sculpture and Candice replies “Yes, could you grab my jugs?” (cut to a shot of Andrew sniggering, which earns him a spot on my favourites list), and then when Mary Berry says “I'll eat a bit of carpet”. Sticky ginger carpet, no less. It's joyous.

This beautiful marriage of appearance, taste and innuendo means that Candice has thoroughly stomped the competition and has won Star Baker. Yay! She's my favourite. You can keep your Selasi; he's alright, but he's not won me over the way he has the rest of the country at this point. Things may change, but right now I am Team Candice. Going home, sadly, is Louise, who was another one of my favourites. She did have a terrible week and it was inevitable that she'd be sent home, but I will miss her delightful Welsh accent very much.

Next week: bread! I totally didn't get round to making gingerbread for this week, and I fully intend to outsource the breadmaking next week. Sorry about it.