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

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.

A total late convert here - I'm already bellowing stuff at the screen. I was totally team Sura. It'll have to be Lottie from here.

My gossip is that my mate in Cornwall has recently been paired with Marc on Tinder. I will not be drawn on lurid details.

which Mark?

Cornish Marc! The one who's kids turned up last week. Frequently gets emotional.

Mary is champion of home-baking and always had a vein of kindness in her critique, i mean unless you served her beetroot black forest cake she would often find a way to praise the effort or find something positive to encourage them to keep trying

she brought good “grandma energy”

Prue kinda brings boarding-school-art-teacher energy which is not necessarily steeped in kindness or encouragement

Also can i just say Paul is rubbish at judging decoration of cakes like “hurm yes v symmetrical good job” rmde such a bread-dude

was mad that he said laura’s cake looked crap or w/e i thought that big white choc ruffle on top looked really amazing!

Also can i just say Paul is rubbish at judging decoration of cakes like “hurm yes v symmetrical good job” rmde such a bread-dude

lol

I do not like Matt Lucas or find him funny on this show. He is mean-spirited and annoying. I miss Sandy.

Lol @ “boarding school art teacher energy”

was mad that he said laura’s cake looked crap or w/e i thought that big white choc ruffle on top looked really amazing!

Yeah, I felt really bad for her when he said that. It was mean. Like, that decoration wouldn't be to my own personal taste, but you have to appreciate the effort and skill that went into it. Stick to rises and crumbs, Paul, and leave the bow critiques to Patrick and Esme on the Sewing Bee.

Yeah the only fault for Laura's decorations is that they were a little hard to make out, since they were all the same shade.

Goth Baker from last year was on the radio this morning talking about Halloween. She has a new book out

https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2020/10/17/news/halloween-treats-from-helena-garcia-s-new-spookery-book-the-wicked-baker-2098279/

Lovely article! But I got some serious whiplash reading that she was a HS exchange student... in Las Vegas... living with a Mormon host family.

Tonight's show was really stressful. Jeez.

Great misleading trailer though

I hate it when people leave because they've made an absolute mess of things. It's much nicer when people leave because everyone else just happened to be better than them. So I hated both last week and this week's elimination.

It was not very hard to predict last night which of two cages were destined for disaster (my wife says they actually showed a clip of one of them collapsing ahead of time but I missed that bit on the way back from the loo so it was only my engineering acumen that told me)

I don't mind Noel sometimes but I wish he'd ease off on the jokes about Paul Hollywood's buttocks etc. It's a lot funnier if he just does it occasionally.

> my wife says they actually showed a clip of one of them collapsing ahead of time

not the one you're thinking of... google "digital spy bake off pastry" (contains spoilers) and you'll see.

oh, wait, i forgot about the spoiler tag The pie shown being smashed to pieces was done by paul during judging so didn't affect the result but looked terrible in the trailers

The arch/tube was shown collapsing on last week's "in the next episode" montage, the adverts all week and the "coming up later" at the top of the show. Pretty sure they didn't reveal whose it was though.

I'm not a veteran but is it always this difficult to pick a winner? It could absolutely be any of the final seven (bar Lottie, maybe, who as much as I love her, always seems on the verge of a calamity).

linda has seemed the likely boot for some time now; I'm assuming marc e is next.

Final three to be Hermine, Laura and Peter.

Lottie will have a meltdown over something comparatively simple in the next couple of weeks and Dave will crash and burn the week before the final after trying something too complicated, driven there by Paul claiming they were 'playing it safe' the two weeks beforehand.

(hidden text spreading like kudzu, what have i wrought?)

I never click on this thread until I've seen the latest episode, seems a manageable way to avoid spoilers?

making the same policy myself, at least until Flagging incorporates the new hidden text feature. which i appreciate you all using!

Great misleading trailer though

― koogs, Tuesday, 20 October 2020 22:38 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've watched enough Hell's Kitchen to call that one as a lead-in o a disaster.
I've stopped watching the wee spoilery end bits that trail the following week.

lol @ ian rush

my wife says they actually showed a clip of one of them collapsing ahead of time

was this hermine's - a box shape - which collapsed when mr. hollywood grasped at it? the moment was shown out of context in the next-week preview montage at the end of the previous week's ep giving the impression that it might have been one of those exciting baking mishaps.

linda making choux THREE times in the technical — they should have just escorted her out of the tent there

i mean, her making literal samosas instead of pasties had me yelling at the tv so i am not sad she left

she was like a nostalgia vampire, just like an endless stream of Milly Molly Mandy stories, riding to school on horseback, fetching milk from the cow, churning yer own butteh BE GONE

(i used to love Milly Molly Mandy though)

her eclairs looked like churros

lol they totally did!

She must have been encouraged to be that much of a caricature surely? It did become a bit bizarre. (The story about her daughter did break me, mind.)

we found her really sweet and charming, nice smile....but i always root for the seasoned older lady bakers who give a sense of having literally decades of experience building up rules of thumb. iirc she scored big in an early technical on a dish she'd never made, just from working out "hmm, it sounds like it's probably basically like this type of dough...." which i always enjoy seeing.

not that that's ever enough to win the season in itself but i'd rather see those types make it to the mid-game at least, it's a show about amateur bakers after all.

true

i just was turned off by her dottiness this time. though i loved Val & Flo & the other old dears so i think just something about Linda annoyed me this time around

I don't think Linda made literal samosas. She made samosa-type filling, but the exterior wasn't samosa-type pastry. They looked delicious IMO.