Cream horns, ‘pouf’ pastry... it was like Carry On Baking!
The technical challenges on The Great British Bake Off (BBC1) are now so demanding and ill- defined that, if they get any harder, contestants might need telepathic powers.
Paul hollywood will stand at the front of the tent, his ice-blue eyes boring into the minds of every baker, while he beams recipes on his thought waves. Kitchen timers will stop ticking and spoons will bend while Paul transmits the instructions for making psychic profiteroles.
As it was, of the five remaining pastry chefs, the only ones who stood a chance this week were those who had memorised Mary Berry’s cookery books and remembered what mokatines were. The average viewer might assume they were a cross between macaroons and moccasins, which would make them shoe pastry.
The oldest contestant, Paul the prison governor, didn’t have a clue either. The recipe began with a single instruction: bake a genoise sponge. everybody else grabbed their mixing bowls and got on with it — Paul stood there looking like a man who wasn’t in on a joke.
Gamely, he had a go, and failed, and had another crack, and failed again. he had proved to everybody’s satisfaction exactly what we knew to begin with: he definitely had no idea how to bake a genoise sponge.
By making the rounds so difficult, Bake Off is backing itself into a corner. The challenges can’t get any more testing without becoming impossible. Next year, bakers will be expected to make cakes with invisible ingredients, or to light their stoves by rubbing two sticks together.
The quarter-final started with cream horns, a challenge that offered so many opportunities for filthy double entendres that presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc voluntarily censored themselves, before it turned into Carry On Puff Pastry.
It didn’t help, though, that hollywood kept referring to ‘pouf pastry’.
Travel photographer Ian confirmed himself as the contestant who was getting right up everyone’s nose with his smug comments. ‘Compared with vol au vents,’ he announced, ‘these cream horns are quite easy — there’s not that much that can go wrong.’
Millions of viewers went straight into spoon-bending mode, attempting with the power of their minds to make Ian’s cream horns collapse. And by some mystic coincidence, his pastry promptly fell to bits.
But he didn’t learn his lesson and minutes later he was swankily sifting through a bag of almond flakes, selecting only the most perfect as worthy to decorate his mokatines.
The showstopper was sadistic: the bakers had to build a three-tiered tower out of choux fingers, and then leave it for two hours to see whose masterpiece caved in. According to Sue, this edifice was a religieuse a l’ancienne, supposed to resemble a nun made out of cream cakes, though mostly they looked like Daleks — or ‘a dalleck’, as Perthshire lass Flora described hers.
Flora tried to construct her choux tower using a spirit level. That would have come in handy for the Rev Merrily Watkins as she flattened evil demons in the first TV adaptation of Phil Rickman’s ghostly crime thriller series.
Midwinter Of The Spirit (ITV) starred Anna Maxwell Martin as the diocesan deliverance consultant, or exorcist, in darkest herefordshire.
Novelist Rickman has always insisted that his work isn’t horror fiction, but you wouldn’t guess it from this adaptation, which began with a mad old priest chanting Latin, intercut with flashbacks of a chase through midnight woods.
By the end of the episode, the priest had got his throat slit, the fleeing man had been crucified in bonds of barbed wire and a black magic shrine had been discovered.
The imagery drew heavily on the first series of the gothic U.S. crime hit True Detective. But what’s blood-curdling in the Deep South doesn’t translate so well to the Welsh Marches.
The only really frightening scene saw Merrily praying at the hospital bedside of a dying sex maniac, who clawed at her with his long black fingernails. The nurses who had failed to clean his hands also left Merrily to dress her own wound. If NhS cottage hospitals are actually this bad, that genuinely is scary.