Welcome back to week seven of The Great British Bake Off and it turns out… this week is Custard Week. Custard?! They’re really giving the viewer the Bird’s.
Right, we’re three quarters of the way through the competition now, and it’s clear that the bakers are still reeling from the events of Halloween week.
“Last week was amazing,” Syabira says, telling the camera that she hopes everybody gets their turn at being Star Baker now. All together now: aww.
Needless to say, the bakers are all slightly nervous about the looming challenge ahead: Abdul says his confidence is around the mid-level, while Sandro struggles to think of a relevant bake beyond the humble custard slice.
“I just love making custard,” Kevin says, while Maxy is less enthused. “I thought custard was just custard.” Me too, Maxy.
Paul and Prue waste no time jumping off into the deep end: what they’re looking for are apparently “îles flotant”, or floating islands.
Wondering what they are? Apparently, they’re poached meringues floating on a sea of crème anglaise. Cue a litany of jokes about floaters, as you’d expect from the Bake Off tent.
“It reminds me of baby food a bit,” Maxy says as she gets started. Fortunately, her floating islands sound decidedly tastier than that, incorporating hefty dollops of blueberry purée into her custard offering.
Syabira, meanwhile, is coating her meringues in minty sand and flavouring her custard with lime zest and rum. It’s basically a mojito in a dessert. “Only mojito-lovers can live on the mojito island,” she tells the camera, before saying, “The judges are going to be smashed.”
Sounds like heaven – as does Janusz’s offering, which reimagines his floating islands as vanilla lattes, and Sandro, who’s also adding brandy and prosecco to his Black Forest-esque custard. And Kevin is adding prosecco to his meringue – clearly, they’ve all cottoned onto Prue’s weakness.
As the bakers start on the custard, nerves start to fray – the risk of scrambling the eggs is apparently substantial – and when the time comes to make the meringues, Paul starts prowling the tent, eyeing the bakers with a glare that sets Janusz’s hands shaking.
Then disaster strikes – Kevin has underwhipped his meringues, and they’ve collapsed mid-poach. With no time left, he levers the soggy results onto his custard, but they were never going to get past Paul and Prue and their judgement is brutal. Though the prosecco custard is delicious, the meringues have disintegrated and the general consensus is that it’s all a bit watery.
“Bottom of a pretty good bunch is an okay place to be,” he says philosophically.
Syabira’s floating desert islands, meanwhile, are compared to “deep fried chicken, sitting in a bechamel sauce” by Paul, but her flavours are hailed, as ever, as exceptional. The same goes for Janusz, whose latte-islands are pronounced delicious.
Onto the technical, where Noel and Matt reveal a new twist to the formula: staggered start and finish times for the bakers. When Sandro is singled out to be the first one up, he looks rather like a rabbit in the headlights.
As Noel and Matt tell him, they’ll be making pistachio and praline-dipped ice-cream cones, topped with a pistachio and praline ice-cream. Where’s the custard in that?
“To make good ice cream you need to be able to make good custard,” Prue says sagely, before it transpires that the ice-cream will in fact be made with custard.
The tent is very quiet as things get underway. “I feel like I’ve been summoned into the naughty tent,” Syabira says as she takes her place. Noel and Matt are really milking this – and when Abdul, the last baker in, announces it’s the first time he’s even seen an ice-cream mixer you really feel for him.
But the tent waits for no man, and soon the bakers are adding their freezer-prepped crème anglaises to the ice-cream mixer, waiting to find out if the resulting mixture is thick and cold enough to set.
The second part of the challenge is making the cones, using a deceptively hot waffle maker to cook the batter before it gets shaped.
“Something’s burning,” Maxy says – and that something turns out to be Adbul’s waffle. It’s a disaster, and that’s before he burns the second.
With stress levels peaking, Syabira then discovers that the freezers aren’t as cold as they should be, having been heated up previously by the crème anglaise – which means that their ice-creams might not set in time.
While she stresses, Sandro’s time is up, and his cones are collected by Noel to be delivered straight into the waiting hands of Paul and Prue, who have set up at a table at the head of the tent (not facing the bakers, of course). And breathe out: his offerings are delicious.
Meanwhile, melting ice-cream seems to be the main problem for the other bakers: Janusz’s ice-cream is dripping off the cones, as are Kevin and Syabira’s. Maxy’s ice-cream is set, but her bake is called “mean” for only including one scoop.
Last up is Adbul, who has to endure the stares of the other finished bakers for his last five minutes, before his wafers are pronounced too burnt. And when the judging comes, the usual order is flipped on its head: Syabira and Janusz are last, while Sandro comes out on top.
“It’s terrible, I’m disappointed,” Syabira says, but adds: “There’s always a rainbow after the rain.”
The rainbow in this instance is the showstopper, which is a set custard gateau, layering custard and cake in a sky-high tiered confection that looks very difficult to achieve with what is essentially a jelly.
As Paul and Prue wax lyrical about the delights of custard, the bakers set to work. What they’re looking for is lots of colour and flavour, so naturally Syabira is ready to serve up her usual flavour combinations: today, the recipe is pina colada. There’s plenty of rum in there, of course.
Meanwhile, Janusz is using potato starch in his limoncello-soaked sponge (apparently, it helps to make it lighter), while Abdul is going off-piste entirely by making a millefeuille, something that gets the judges all gooey-eyed – especially Paul, whose recipe he is using. Across the tent, Kevin is making a staggering three litres of the yellow stuff for his three-tiered Valentine’s cake.
And the surprises don’t stop there: as we discover, both Sandro and Maxy are making their cakes in honour of loved ones who have passed on.
It’s a very sweet moment, but in an effort to save time, Sandro also explains that he is making his custards (vanilla, coffee and mango) in the microwave. Paul’s blue eyes narrow fractionally: a warning sign if ever there was one.
As time ticks on, various custard-related mishaps start to occur. Maxy’s refuses to set (in a sign of how bad things are, Paul steps in to troubleshoot); neither does Kevin’s, while Abdul has to remake his slightly grainy custard out of fear of the judge’s keen tastebuds.
What follows is a very nerve-wracking five minutes in which the bakers attempt to assemble their wobbly cakes before the time limit. And unfortunately, Kevin’s three-tiered showstopper become a casualty as the cake starts to collapse- but in a lovely display of Bake-Off fellow feeling, Maxy, Janusz and Syabira step into help him dress up what’s left.
When judgement time commences, Abdul’s millefeuille gets a thumbs-up, but Syabira steals the show with a cake that earns the most sincere “Well done” that I’ve ever seen Paul give.
However, Janusz’s offering doesn’t quite clear the bar. “The custard’s more like wallpaper paste,” Paul says. Ouch – and Maxy has the opposite problem. While her cake is delicious, it doesn’t celebrate custard, and what little there is, Prue explains, hasn’t set.
And of course, then there’s Kevin. While the honey, thyme and bay custard is delicious, as Paul says, “it’s a shame that it looks a mess.”
When the end comes, Syabira’s showstopper nets her the Star Baker prize, while perhaps inevitably, it’s Kevin who goes home at the end of the week, as not even the custard was enough to save him. Despite his tears, there’s one plus: Prue’s admiration.
“I will be sad to see Kevin go but that custard will stay with me for the rest of my life. I’m going to go home and do it,” she says.
Not bad- and next week, we’re full steam ahead with Pastry Week. Roll on some actual baking!
