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

oh but they call everyone bake-ineers (bakers, engineers) which sounds like baconears & i hate it

I love Jurgen partly because, like me, he’s Jewish. I’m not sure he’s doing a great job of abating that whole baby-eating stereotype though

lmao he seemed very ok w it

"I haven't eaten babies."

uh huh, sure

Did I imagine it, or Jurgen make a complex filling for the arrangements around his baby, which did not even get tasted?

This is not a post I ever thought I'd be writing.

on extra slice there was a clip of him heading into the woods to practice his trombone.

(he sounds (a bit) like Werner Herzog when he talks)

agreed that Maggie has hit her ceiling. so had this week's boot, in both cases it is sad because I found them very likable. good on Amanda for pulling herself out of that tier with that octopus!

I was surprised George wasn't in the mix to be ejected – was his tsatsiki enough to save him?

i thought his focaccia got a decent-to-good review overall, no? like, some areas to improve but not an outright bust, and at this stage in the season there are still multiple busts to pick from.

I'm loving this season so much already, I don't know if it's from a year's worth of isolation or that this cast seems interesting (last season's cast was great too) or if I'm just a glutton for all things baking now.

it’s a good mix of ages & personalities this year for sure

I love Jurgen partly because, like me, he’s Jewish.

as i understand it his wife is jewish

maggie maggie maggie, out out out

Ha ha. I was chanting that last week. Not that I dislike her. Being a midwife goes a long way in my book

Yes – it’s Jurgen’s family that’s Jewish, not Jurgen, it turns out. I was fooled by an interview where he talked about making challah, and his intense dark eyebrows which reminded me of many of my family members. And the baby-eating, of course.

So Maggie spent several episodes fronting about her love of old-fashioned English cooking, but couldn’t make a… sticky toffee pudding

Leaving an ingredient – even a very obvious ingredient – on the back page seems unnecessarily mean though

but they get everything parcelled up and left on the table for them, don't they, so there'd be a jar of flour there.

I like how she left the biscuits on the side to give a full uninterrupted view of her flourless monstrosity, like a two-page spread in Razzle.

I lolled when her Showstopper was described as "Back to basics" when all her bakes had been v trad and basic and... she kept fucking those up.

I like how she left the biscuits on the side to give a full uninterrupted view of her flourless monstrosity, like a two-page spread in Razzle.

The biscuits looked like watery fox shit

I always feel ungenerous to the "older lady" contestants because I know someone who interviewed for that bracket, and got quite far in the interview process (twice!) and is a better cook and more interesting character (but not upper-middle-class).

jurgen’s showstopper was so thoughtful & incredible looking, and the flavors sounded so good! and giuseppe’s looked so perfect!

george in that mindset of “the judges havent been impressed w me so i’ll do two layers & way more than i need to” tugs at my heartstrings. i love how hard he tries but i wish he’d simplify a little to just give himself more of a chance to really succeed. he’s always in the “tasty but messy” middle range lol

lizzie & that wheelie bin just fangirling about. its a competition not a bloody convention.

mags. leaving out the flour was dumb, but that showstopper, like saying the puree counted as a layer? cmon. like her love of “tradition” kinda reads as “cant be bothered” in a weird way… which i know it isn’t. She reminds me of scottish norman “it’s edible, surely that’s enough”… just insisting on doing the same things out of pass-agg stubborness. but hampered by not being technically skilled enough to pull off the simplicity they strive for.

sorry mags, yr no Nancy.

chigs is so impressive! only been baking for a year, he seems very driven so i can only imagine how hard he has worked on his baking to get to this skill level so quickly. lovely to see.

In fairness to Mags (whom I also disliked for exactly the reasons you say), she had to say the puree was a layer because she had to make her sponge twice, so she was too far behind to do whatever it was she was trying to do in the first place. But I totally agree. Unadventurous palate dressed up as respect for tradition.

she was too nice to dislike on Extra Slice, a good loser.

she seemed quite lovely in her temperament & she never seemed to fall apart, she kept going no matter what which i def liked

i imagine she’s a wonderful midwife - my old roommate was a midwife. to be a good one requires a very specific temperament & skillset

I do love her chipper demeanor, though there’s a weird tragic smugness in insisting on very traditional straightforward bakes and fucking them up relentlessly

Also I think I am in love with Chigs???

chigs is a little crosseyed for me
george is the boy for me <3

Chigs' permascowl was so intense this episode that I was hoping that he'd at least get a handshake so that he'd relax his face. His mom saying, "Does that mean I'm on TV?" was precious.

The time call schticks this season have scraped right through the bottom of the barrel and into the ground.

does it make me a bad bake-off fan if i've come to feel the show would be better off without the cutaways to the presenters? like, happy to have them chat wit the contesrants, when they're not obnoxiously distracting them from what they're tryig to do.. but don't get much out of any of their scripted gag deliveries.

yes

you may leave

please hang your apron by the door on your way out

:-(

(Xpost) Bad Bakeoff fan here, yes I agree, and am finding Matt even more cringe this year. Bad jokes and forced whimsy have also been a (sometimes welcome!) part of the show back to Mel and Sue days, but now I find it Too Much, and I feel bad when the contestants have to interact and pretend to laugh at one of Matt’s bits. And I hate the shots of the contestants laughing in a “well at least someone found it funny” way. Still love the show tho!

worst is when they seem to actively startle the bakers and break their concentration --- shooting rubber bands at them or whatever. i'd be pissed! some people can jump right back into the zone with ease, but for the rest of us that could effectively amount to a minute or two of lost time, which is often make or break at the ends of these challenges. dislike!

So Maggie spent several episodes fronting about her love of old-fashioned English cooking, but couldn’t make a… sticky toffee pudding

huh! i didnt know that

i wish sometimes they could just each make one family style pudding instead of naff individual puddings. no one ever makes those. but i guess they look good on tv

Turns out I’m wrong about Werther’s Originals. Although they arrived in the UK with a fake old-timey grandpa advert around that time, Wikipedia tells me they were introduced in Germany back in 1903.

Jurgen accepts yr apology

He’s the grandpa now.

That’s interesting! I assumed sticky toffee pudding was in the venerable tradition of stodgy school dessert sponges, the sort of thing that got served to Henry VIII in a cauldron under a nest of stuffed partridges.

But it also makes a lot of sense as a 70s/80s faux trad dish, for boomer chefs nostalgic about sinking everything in Bird’s custard

Thinking about it, the episode before, in bread week, also featured a recipe that’s got the veneer of being very trad but is actually very recent: ciabatta.

Maggie was just not up to scratch. It's right she went out this week.

George is very amiable and I love his hard work. He's also the archetypal "good flavours but terrible presentation" baker, and 14 years or whatever of watching this show means he'll never dig himself far enough out of this ditch.

Prediction: Chigs, Jurgen and Giuseppe for the final, one of the Europeans will win.

Chrystelle, one of Jurgen and Giuseppe (there's almost certain to be a SHOCKING EPISODE where one of these guys face plants and is bumped), and then a wildcard

^^^ this seems pretty otm. Chigs seems like the logical wildcard. but I could easily imagine an episode where he hits something weird that he hasn't ever baked before, or has a disastrous freezer failure or something, and Amanda slips up past him --- she's been quietly doing really well the last few eps after the first couple being kinda rough iirc.

Freya seems a likely wildcard too

Freya's fun but seems like a classic mid-season dropout, who doesn't seem to improve as quickly as everyone else

they like having a youngster in the mix is my thinking. and this one's a vegan!

Is Amanda the cop?

Freya's great but at some point I reckon she'll come unstuck when the vegan alt ingredients aren't up to scratch.