There are several aspects of this episode that upset me, but the two that need immediate attention are tiramisu and white chocolate as they are both garbage. There is not a dessert under the sun that I won’t eat except for tiramisu. (Flan I need to get a good look at before I decide to eat it, but it at least has a 50-50 shot.) It’s all just glop and coffee flavor, and I don’t really care for either of those things. Italians do a lot of things well, but their signature dessert needs to go the way of the Roman Empire, fallen and obsessed over by people on the internet who will never get to experience it again.
And white chocolate (blech) isn’t really chocolate at all. It’s made from only the butter and fat of the cocoa bean, not any of the solids. That’s like calling a caprese salad a pizza because it has tomatoes and mozzarella. The thing that makes it pizza is the crust, and the thing that makes it chocolate is the cocoa. Duh! Both of these elements appear in numerous treats this episode, and like a runaway bus barreling toward a kindergarten classroom, they need to be stopped.
During the signature, the bakers must create mousse cups, which are solid chocolate cups filled with chocolate mousse and a baked element inside. I like that in all of the challenges it wasn’t just chocolate work that the judges were after, but also some sponge, cookie, brownie, or biscuit. These are bakers after all, not Mary See trying to invent the greatest mall store known to man.
Lesley, Aaron, and Tom are all making the dreadful tiramisu, and both Tom and Aaron have decided to put the coffee-flavored dessert into little coffee cups, which is a bit of genius. It’s so simple, but perhaps it was also too simple for them to have seen coming. This creates a mini-narrative in the episode about Aaron and perfect Tom having a perfect rivalry, even though one is perfect, the other is not, and they’re both gay and secretly lusting for Paul Hollywood’s approval (and maybe also his body).
Aaron’s looks better, not only with a dark-chocolate cup but also a white-chocolate lid that resembles something you would find at any Starbucks along with a tiny croissant-shaped biscuit to dip in the chocolate. The only problem is that the mousse doesn’t set, and Paul and Prue both say it’s Terrible with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Paul Hollywood. Perfect Tom’s cups don’t look nearly as photorealistic as Aaron’s, but they are, in a word, perfect. He doesn’t have a lid, but he did put a perfect little stencil of a perfect coffee on top in cocoa powder, which is totally effective. Paul says he finds the perfect balance of sweet and bitter (which is what people tell me about my humor) and gives Tom the perfect handshake that he has been perfectly craving. Point one for Tom.
Also in the top with Tom is Toby, who makes a white-chocolate (gross) shell made to look like an orange with a chocolate-and-orange mousse with an Earl Grey sponge inside. Paul says the mousse needed a bit longer to set, but both judges give him a “well done.” Iain, who makes Belgian beer glasses out of chocolate and fills them with his take on Black Forest gâteau, also gets high marks, even though he doesn’t finish the cream to go on top of them in time. The judges still take a dollop out of his measuring cup and mixing bowl.
Nadia struggles with a strawberry mousse with pistachio cream, which Prue says is far too loose and messy. Loose and messy! Sounds like my kinda mousse. JK. It sounds like fruit soup, or, as Paul says, a fool. Lesley tries to make 16 different elements fit into her cup, but they don’t all come together, including the split ganache on top, which looks like doggy diarrhea. Paul says the whole thing is too busy. Would you rather be busy or loose and messy?
The maddest I have been at the Artist Formerly Known As Bake Off is when they all unveil the “gingham pantry” for the technical challenge. The bakers are supposed to make a white-chocolate (barf) tart with a shortcrust-pastry shell. However, they then have to go to the gingham pantry and select different items for the toppings of their tarts, but everything they take from the pantry must be used.
This is like looking at the bottom of a cow breeder’s boots, because it is utter bullshit. This isn’t a technical at all. To go meta with it, the technical is the least important of all the challenges. No one has been sent home or saved because of a disastrous technical. If you left it out of the competition entirely, I don’t know that anyone — bakers or viewers — would really miss it. However, it does something integral to the competition, which is to let the judges evaluate the contestants as they all try to make the same thing. It’s about comparing apples to apples so they can say that this tart is better made than that tart. The only way to do that is if all the tarts are the same. Now they’re encouraging bakers to create a chocolate tart that stands out. You know what that is? It’s a signature challenge! You’re just doing the same round twice!
A few people struggle with making their pastry shells, including Nadia, who makes one so thick that she has to try again but then runs out of time, and her second one falls apart like a teenager who has had their phone taken away for the weekend. She then has to revert to one that is thicker. Iain also makes a good-looking tart with raspberries and white chocolate (gag) on the top but then somehow fumbles it while trying to put it on his display stand. The two of them end up at the bottom with the judges telling Nadia that they don’t like the flavors or textures of her tart and — surprise, surprise — the casing was too thick. In the second round of Tom versus Aaron, they end up neck and neck (though the top of Aaron’s head only comes up to perfect Tom’s perfect shoulder, but you know what I mean). Aaron is in third with two gorgeous lines of passion-fruit purée along the top, and perfect Tom is in fourth with a nest of crisscrossing lines over a blackberry cream.
Lesley’s tart, which Prue says tastes like a Key-lime pie, ends up at the top because the judges say it tastes the most like white chocolate (retch). Wait, does it taste like white chocolate (vom), or does it taste like Key-lime pie? I would plead to make it make sense, but there is nothing about this technical that makes sense. So it’s just better that we move on.
The showstopper is to make a fondue display with an edible pot, a chocolate fondue, and three baked elements to dip into the sauce — but also a cake or something. I don’t know. I was confused by the whole thing. My husband was probably trying to show me Patsy Stone fan-cams while I was trying to watch. It’s clear from the start that this is a two-person race to the bottom. No, that isn’t part of Aaron and Tom’s rivalry over the only bottom in Essex — I mean that it’s clearly going to be either Nadia or Toby who goes home.
Nadia is trying to make her bowl out of a high-heeled shoe, but the chocolate keeps breaking when she takes it out of her mold, which she says never happens in practice. She also tries to make a tiramisu (eye roll) and put it in a chocolate case, but it is too runny and the sides of the case won’t stick together. Toby is trying to make a camp stove with marshmallows, graham crackers, and churros to dip into it, which is a clever s’mores-based idea. However, his chocolate keeps cracking too.
When they go up for judging, they say that Nadia’s chocolate looks great, but, alas, she can’t get a whole shoe. Otherwise, her elements all get good reviews for their taste, including the tiramisu. Toby’s display, overall, looks a lot nicer, but when Paul goes to take a slice of his cake from the chocolate case, the whole thing crumbles to a mess. The reviews get worse from there: His churros are overdone, his graham crackers are hard, and Paul says his cake is both bone-dry and has terrible flavor (which is also something they say about my humor).
It’s a real toss-up, but Nadia is the one sent home, which makes sense given she has struggled for the past several weeks and her three bakes this episode were all bad. Toby has also continuously struggled, and his showstopper might have been worse, but his triumph in the signature may have been enough to keep him for one more week. (It’s gotta be him or Lesley next week, though, right?)
Everyone else does quite well with their displays. I especially liked Iain’s, which is a tree on top of a cake, and the fondue is poured down the tree to pool at the bottom, and the treats, rather than just gathered at the bottom like everyone else’s, are incorporated into the display as stepping stones up the tree. Paul says it looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings, stealing a joke I hadn’t even made yet. So I’m going to say it looks like something out of The Hobbit. Take that!
Nataliia’s also shows imagination: Her white-chocolate-(spew)-and-raspberry fondue is like lava coming out of Mt. Vesuvius and flowing through the ruined columns and buildings below. The various cakes, buns, and sauces all get an eruption of praise from the judges.
There is clearly a top three forming here. The judges gush over Jasmine’s display, which resembles a chocolate fountain, featuring bowls made of chocolate sponge covered in chocolate and topped with a chocolate tree. It looks so perfect you would think that Tom had something to do with it, but it wasn’t nearly as imaginative as the other displays. She earns herself a Paul Hollywood Showstopper Handshake. I hate these and wish they would disappear. Perhaps I can move to an alternate timeline in which Mary Berry is the only judge still on the show and she simply offers kind words and winks when the bakers do well.
Still the competition seems like perfect Tom–versus–Aaron, mano a mano, gay against gay. Tom’s perfect display is perfect with a perfect lighthouse atop a perfect pool filled with perfect pistachio fondue that makes his perfect chocolate sea creatures pop up to the perfect surface. Prue doesn’t love his madeleines, and Paul says that the fillings in his buns overwhelm his dipping sauce, which sounds a little less than perfect.
It’s Aaron who surprisingly takes home the big win with his chocolate-piano display, which, honestly, is the best thing we’ve seen him make yet. It’s intricate, seemingly complex to make, but executed perfectly. Prue especially loves his Chinese five-spice Florentines, and Paul likes his chocolate-sable biscuits. They say that he was the one with the most consistency through all three of his bakes, and that is why he is crowned the winner despite not getting one of the coveted handshakes. It did seem a little like the judges didn’t want to give it to Jasmine or Tom once again, but we can’t take Aaron’s triumph away from him. He did exceptionally well, and I have to give him credit for not using white chocolate (Technicolor yawn) even once.
