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

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.

Really loving that there are no straight white uk dudes left in the game already

Years of watching reality shows has taught me that whenever a contestant tries to make up for their deficiencies with a ton of busy work, you know that they're pretty near their ceiling and they aren't log for the competition.

Betting on Lizzie to be out in next couple of weeks, work is nearly as sloppy as Mags

(not a spoiler, just started watching the show)

oh noes!

Stevie jinxed her

h not s! can anyone fix that?

would eat all those German biscuits (apart from the marzipan ones)

I think that was a fair 'out' this week, though Amanda has probably been weaker overall? Loving Giuseppe's work.

I wonder what happened to Noel? I guess he just got hot.

yeah the german biscuit challenge was one of the most noshable in a while. ditto the regentstorte, mmmm. those fruitcakey bready things were not my bag at all though.

*Prinzregententorte

i love that jurgen tutored everyone in german baking <3

yeah would SUPER eat everything this week especially the technical omg
except maybe freya’s cake that dripped blood/wine D:

got v teary w this weeks elimination, caught me in the feels unexpectedly

I lol’d at Guiseppe’s legs-akimbo baking stance. Love George but he’s so out next week

yeah its either george or amanda next week

I still think Lizzie goes before Amanda. But yeah George-Lizzie-Amanda constitute the next tier to go, always with that wildcard factor where one of them could really nail it in a week that someone else blows it.

oh yeh lizzie too

I’d like a Jurgen/Chrystelle/Giuseppe/Hermine semifinale to rectify last year’s great bollux. Bakeoff multiverse of mystery

it’d be cool if Chigs made it to the final w jurgs and giuseppe

Chigs is such a gentleman. I'd happily see him win but think he's a tier below Jurgen and Giuseppe.

The German thing was a bit shit maybe? I wonder if they had already decided before the series and Jurgen was an (un)happy coincidence?

The Kraftwerk thing was awful and given Matt's recent, uh, issues with accents and blackface etc you'd have thought they would have avoided the shit accents and stereotype bullshit.

They virtually had an Italian week earlier with both focaccia and ciabatta rounds in bread week. I thought that was weirder.

they had a Danish week when Sandi was a host… nothing is off the table

recall the hilarious travesty of the stroopwaffel technical that literally everyone failed

Let us also remember when they had Manon on for French patisserie week oh wait.

George's brainfart over what anniversary it was was hilarious though.

that was v funny

can I just say how cringe I find the mythologizing of the Hollywood Handshake, and how incredibly fucking smug it is and how everyone like gasps and oohs and ahhs and claps, it makes me like… embarrassed.

Yeah, the first rule of Hollywood Handshake is: don’t talk about Hollywood Handshake. It’s all got too much. Though, like many things about this show, I like it in spite of myself. This doesn’t generally extend to Noel and Matt’s bits, however.

Star Baker doesn't mean anything either if you think about it. You could be out next week.

What does any of it mean, ultimately? It’s all just built on sand. Life is just a soufflé.

solid episode, peaked with the technical in terms of stuff i would LOVE to eat. i bet some of those sausage loafy things are in fact delicious but i've not really had too many meat pies of this type so my taste buds had trouble fully connecting the dots. i could think of some of them as being sort of samosa or sausage-roll-esque, but it was still a mental reach.

i know the handshake is overblown & mythologized… but crystelle’s genuine reaction was quite funny & charming. and her pie sounded uhmazing

amanda’s pie sort of looked like in medical dissection exams where you have to show an exposed internal organ lol.

still no idea what jurgen purple donut filling was but it sounded good!

glad i get george for another week but he’s definitely hanging on by the skin of his teeth ~prays for george~

when i first heard the baklava technical i was expecting across the board stroopwafel-level disasters but it seemed like they were given additional instruction in the method & not fkying completely blind, which was good. still, cruel enough.

still no idea what jurgen purple donut filling was but it sounded good!

Ube, it's a purple yam used in Filipino deserts

Guiseppe’s “huge hassle” was like a never-heard Peter Sellers accent gag, super guilty lol

Massive hassle, sorry

yes! that was hilarious

the innuendo in this week's ep was off the charts! (george's rock hard sausage, prue's squirting with two holes comment, etc.)

baklava seems like an absolute pain in the ass to make even if you know what you're doing, so i thought they all did a good job considering

also belatedly agreeing with stevie d upthread re: chigs, major crush!

yeah innuendo-wise this week was like “Carry On Up The Pastry” lol

lowkey in love with Chrystelle but Giuseppe’s gonna win this

Chrystelle is so boring! I feel a bit bad for saying this, but I cringe every time she tries to loosen up and be “fun”.

She works at Goldman Sachs as an analyst.

Excellent Double-Entendre Week.

George really is kind of adorable, isn't he?

I really wish that Freya had made it to this week, I'd have loved to see a vegan take.

I've also been thinking more generally about the missed opportunity of exploring or featuring vegan baking more, and if the fault lies with Freya or the show -- I'd assume the show.