Peter’s pasties and Laura’s lime tart take the biscuit

Pastry week and, aptly for 2020, flakiness highlighted the blus ter, dear th of substantial filling and ultimate lack of substance here. Could it be that Bake Off, sent to Earth to keep we malcontents from storming the streets, is actually a complex allegory for our times? This series is in danger of being blown away like a millefeuille in a snowstorm, so slender is any compelling narrative.

Halfway through it seems there are no star bakers but I’m rooting for Peter, a lovely Edinburgh guy resembling Ellen DeGeneres. His kedgeree pasty in the guise of a flat fish was inspired and his eclairs made him the worthy winner of the technical challenge.

The technical was set by posh Prue who wants us to believe she comes with a benign whiff of the Women’s Institute but really has an impenetrable heart knitted from steel wool. Bestriding the studio like an ambulatory piece of post-modern Memphis furniture she pronounces that she “has hope if not faith” and that it’s “all about refinement”, displaying an hauteur most of us left behind when we discovered empathy.

Lovely Linda didn’t have a great week; her attempts to make a karma sign from nigella seeds ended in her stars becoming unaligned whilst her eclairs looked better suited to dipping into taramasalata or clearing a blocked pipe. Unlike our PM, she admitted defeat with resignation, movingly channelling Leonard Cohen’s line, “I did my best, it wasn’t much”.

Others rallied round some what in the showstopper, with some great creations, most notably Laura’s delectable key lime tart. Lottie’s confident, flirtatious demeanour took a hit from slugger Prue who declared that her endeavour looked a mess; Prue’s “interesting” frock quietly died of shame as her stylist resigned.

Star baker was Laura whilst Linda went

Could it be that Bake Off, sent to Earth to keep we malcontents from storming the streets, is actually a complex allegory for our times?

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