On Your Marks, Get Set, Baaaaake! A Thread for Great British Baking Show / Bake Off & all of its sundry delights

yeaahh bad vibes as soon as watering down the chocolate was mentioned

https://elenasquareeyes.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/oda-mae-brown.gif

the brownie challenge was ;_;

as someone who has made brownies that were so bad not even icecream could save them, i hug every contestant

i love Noel’d BAKING IS FOR LOSERS moment

Matt’s Aussie accent was pretty spot on too, i loled

Y'all. Calm down about the white chocolate. It contains cocoa butter, it is chocolate, it is creamy and delicious.

nah it’s shite

Idk why I thought brownies would be a more American thing? Maybe the ultimate USian thing is a peanut butter brownie. My fave.

Anyway I don't think one person DIDN'T massively overdecorate their brownies thereby ruining them completely. Frosting?? ARE YOU MAD?

things i was not aware of being commonly known in American and lesser known in the UK: babka, smores and graham crackers in general. i gather britishers had other methods of dealing with the horrible masturbation epidemic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-to-quell-sexual-urges-consider-the-graham-cracker/282769/

It's fun to joke about graham crackers and shredded wheat and Kellogg's obsession with masturbation and cold-water baths (a fit subject for mockery imo) but there were parents who actually genitally mutilated their daughters based on his crackpot unqualified medical advice so as usual history is terrible and everything is complicated.

fair point

His sanatarium was in Battle Creek, MI, not far from where I grew up. :/

i guess it never occurred to me that what i consider to be a foodstuff as common as an oreo might never have travelled outside the us

The brownies challenge was so frustrating to watch. YOU’RE ALL TRYING TOO HARD

but, as someone pointed out, it was a SIGNATURE challenge and your signature can't be 'plain brownies'

That’s why it’s a bad challenge, like the fucking rainbow bagels. “We challenge you to mess around with something that is quite perfect in its simplest and most straightforward form”

Matt's bit about how Prue tells you to make a white chocolate cake then always says "It's a bit sweet isn't it? perhaps you could temper it a bit with some mud" killed me

yes that was very otm

Brownies are American and the best ones in the UK are made by Outsider Tart in West London.

My cream cheese brownies are the closest thing I have to a signature bake and if Brexit Pru told me they were inappropriately dry I’d have taken a scimitar to her.

yeah i am not sure that paul & pru are to be trusted on brownies. “gooey center” isnt what i’d look for in a brownie. fudgey/moist but not gooey.

but i’d also not cover them in frosting & italian meringue either so

cream cheese brownies sound amazing, suzy? will you part w the recipe?

they do sound amazing

the pistachio/fig upside down brownie seemed like a great way of fancying it up and adding sweetness without going OTT. nuts are moderately common in brownies, pistachios just a little fancier, and the green of the nutflesh complemented the pink & green of the fig - which ended up one of the smallest toppings of anything in that round? and apparently tasted good enough that they forgot to be mad that it stopped the crisp top from forming!

italian meringue topping sounded like a promising complement tbh, but not as it was done, by putting an entire meringue on top of each brownie slice

I am hopefully awaiting that recipe, too!

Boo at this week's elimination. Far too soon.

I once made a cream cheese brownie that was white chocolate flavoured with saffron (so it turned yellow) and with pistachios. I had a similar problem to Sura in that white chocolate takes ages to bake.

You don’t get a flaky top on marbled cream cheese brownies.

this week's loser charming and funny on Extra Slice. they'll be missed.

i loved sura's sense of humour - did not want to see her go. Nor Lottie.

things i was not aware of being commonly known in American and lesser known in the UK: babka, smores and graham crackers in general.

I had my first smore this summer, i am 45, it was delicious. All the cookbooks I own suggest our digestive biscuits are okay substitutes for graham crackers, but I always loved Teddy Grahams during trips to the US. I want to make babka, have seen it in upscale bakeries and my partner was saying we all split a slice three ways when my daughter was tiny because it was like £4 or something.

There’s a few great Jewish bakeries in Temple Fortune where you can get a good babka as nature intended (last time I went up there I bought a huge bag of mini sesame and poppyseed bagels for maybe £4 and got through them in about a week).

One of the things I do like about this season is that the bakes are a bit easier and you could vaguely imagine doing them at home. Also, they look like they are worth doing at home, unlike some of the ones (particularly technicals) they've done in the past, where you wonder why anyone would bother when they could just make a nice cake.

Like, babkas look like something you could do yourself at home fairly easily, and you'd be glad you'd bothered.

I'm sure they deliberately dialled it down in response to the strange filming conditions, but it is kind of cool for the audience. I think, anyway.

In previous years people could practice at home and in private (but had to pay for every expense themselves) but this year they have a practice kitchen to use in the week, but there might be a down side to other contestants seeing your progress.

Hendon, where I grew up, is not good for much but it’s good for babka

Still upset about this week’s elimination. Very northwest London vibes there

I think she’s Turkish? Could be Wembley, but also send more inner zones to me, eg. Kilburn/Queen’s Park/Kensal Rise.

we really really liked her and are bummed she's gone ;_;

but agreed that this crew is really enjoyable overall! the baking has generally been less dazzling, i think we can safely blame that on the quarantine conditions, but that actually brings things back down to earth a bit, this is a show about great amateurs after all. still, the brownie challenge was oddly brutal to watch - has there ever been a challenge like that, where EVERYONE tanks it? i liked seeing the sort of morose/gallows humor vibe in the aftermath. obviously raised the stakes considerably for the other challenges.

not into Matt, a few isolated moments aside. but i wasn't into Noel at first (in fact i'm not sure i watched all of the Noel/Sandi seasons?) and i feel like he's settled in a bit. but Noel seems like more of a boost to the contestants' spirits, whereas Matt is constantly demanding their attention during stressful moments. this ep he was visibly annoying Laura (i think that's her name?) (the beautiful blonde woman with the brick pizza oven in her back garden) as she had the oven open to check on her bake, and it was the same thing with Lottie a few weeks ago. i'd be pissed - get out of my space, man!

Yeah, Noel lets the contestant lead the horseplay, whereas Matt just turns up to do a bit, or a silly voice. Reminds me of a lot of insufferable but nice drama kids I’ve met. He’s not too bad, though.

Noel puts people off all the time. Sometimes he points out that he's doing it and says things like 'you'd like me to go away now wouldn't you'

Pru Leith is rubbish. That is all

thats right

Me and Han are unforgiving Mary Berry partisans

I miss the Mary/Paul team. Paul’s a little gentler this year, which suits him

I used to swear by Pru's big generalist cookbook but she's no fun compared to Mary

Mary on drums for Rick Astley at a festival is definitely a vibe, also she’s actual posh rather than whatever the nexus of money, Brexit and London Tory that makes Prue. Mary either voted Remain or didn’t vote at all. As for Paul, he’s the male, god-bothering version of Esther McVey down to his boot cut jeans.

I think she’s Turkish?

Sura? I think she's Persian/Iranian, no?

I thought she said Turkish the other week but not certain

on extra slice she said she liked to add a taste of home and then mentioned iran, turkey and something else, which i didn't catch.

Having lived and worked in Tehran for a few months, my sister retains an inherent pro-Iranian bias... which is a large part of why Sura was her favourite contestant.

"i really wanted to show the world this is iran, and this is iraq, and this is turkey and this is my heritage"

Kurdish. Gotta be - she also has Turkish evil eyes 🧿 on her Insta blurb.

Either way, I'll miss her gentle but ruthless pisstaking, which is the thing that struck me as very north-london-y. Lottie is sort of similar, with the obligatory Sussex hippie edge.

At the start of the episode, I said to my partner, "it's definitely Sura & Lotte in the final this year"

You killed them, Chuck.