Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
One of the most pernicious lies about baking is that it is a science. There's a misguided belief that by following a recipe precisely, you can control your own future, ignore the rules of the world and create the result you crave despite every other influence. This is not true, of course. Every day is a new day. The ingredients I have are different from yours. The flour we buy in America is not the same as the flour available in other parts of the world, or even in other parts of America. The ambient temperature where we bake is not always the same. The tools we have are different. Our own hands vary in warmth day-to-day. It is a lost cause to try to make everything perfect, and that potential failure is the fear every baker faces every day in front of the dough or the batter or the icing. Will it rise? Will it stay? Will it hold? There's a risk to grapple with always, and no amount of practice or belief or prayer can negate that.
This is the challenge of this series, ultimately: to face our own limitations and imperfections, to enter the kitchen knowing that anything could go wrong (and that many things will), and to maintain the personal strength to believe that we can either weather that potential failure, or fight it. Three years into this series, our bodies have attained a nimbleness. We have learned so much. We know now when to toss a batter that isn't working, and when a dough isn't rising, and when to begin to worry. We know how to make a plan, but we also know that even the best-laid plans can be brought to their knees by a faulty oven or a forgotten timer or one wrong ingredient. This whole series is a test we give ourselves each week. Maybe we do it to see if this too we can survive. Or maybe we do it out of a bravado built of ego, a belief that if we face failure head-on, it cannot and will not touch us.
The last week of each series, historically, is the week when our egos are at their highest and our energy at its lowest: a dangerous if exciting dichotomy. We are exhausted from many weeks of baking, from destroying our kitchens, from trying so damn hard. And also, we are ready. We wait in the starting gates, stomping our feet, ready to race, ready to see exactly what we are made of.
This week's episode is the finale. We have reached the end of the game. Only two bakers remain, and only two will leave. And because it is the finale, the judges have created a ridiculous but manageable task for us. The technical challenge called for us to make "a stunning afternoon tea display, consisting of four individual lemon sandwich cakes, four strawberry tarts, and four plaited egg and cress rolls."
We were given a list of ingredients longer than a CVS receipt. We were given a list of equipment that we did not own. There were no other instructions. The method of the bake was ours to figure out. The tent always builds up to scenarios just like this. We want to believe that baking is a science, a set of steps one follows carefully and perfectly that will lead to great success. But baking, like all art forms, is built on instinct. Do a creative work long enough, and you learn that there is a kind of rare, beautiful zen space you can reach where the body moves and the mind works, but you retain nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing. Call it the muse. Call it a trance. Call it whatever you want. But that's what you seek in the end, really.
Or, at least, that's what we tried to seek in the tight three hours we were given to bake all of these things.
Kelsey McKinney: Hello, Chris! Welcome to the finale of our season! How did you feel coming off of Thanksgiving and into the tent?
Chris Thompson: Hello, Kelsey! After Thanksgiving, I felt well-fed and content. And then coming into the tent, I felt like this:
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
You?
KM: Wow, that is a lot of AAH! I felt similarly, except that I also felt kind of locked in. Thanksgiving is a very logistics-heavy holiday for me, and so I was already kind of on a military schedule in the kitchen, which turned out to be very helpful for this bake.
CT: We weren’t too sure we were going to do this bake, initially. My poor wife sent us a very guilty, sad, and ominous warning about this challenge, and then there were three different sets of ingredients and each was long and included equipment. When I saw this, I sighed so long and desperately that I think my ghost left my body for most of an entire day.
KM: To be honest, when you sent the list of ingredients and equipment, I was ready to bail. It was so long, and the bake was timed for three hours, which is a very long time. And I was tired! But then I remembered that it was the FINAL and now was the time to get game-ready. It was not time to quit!
CT: I was impressed by your resilience! You seemed exhausted but then in a matter of minutes you turned it around and were raring to go. It was like the end of Gravity, but without the ham-fisted tear-jerking.
KM: I got locked in, Chris. I had to. I was not going to abandon you to this bake in particular. It has so many moving pieces. Honestly, I think it would have been easier for me if we did these in the same room and could gab and stuff. There’s something kind of grueling about doing these alone in your very messy kitchen. Especially when they are this long and complicated.
CT: Oh yes, I feel exactly the same way. Even failure would be fun if I could gab along the way. It gets very lonely during these long and complicated bakes.
KM: To be honest, I'm not sure I would have been able to talk during this bake. Of all the bakes we have ever done (and there are many of them now), we sent the fewest messages to one another during this one. There was no time!
CT: There was no time! No freakin' time at all.
I think what ultimately convinced me to do the bake was a closer inspection of the ingredients and the descriptions of the components. Like, a bake that has one zillion ingredients and steps is inherently complicated and stressful. But as I looked this over, I was able to talk myself into it being not quite as complex as it seemed. Like, it's one bread thing, one sponge thing, one pie thing. I may not know how to make this specific bread, but I remember how to make bread. The same goes for the tart crust: I have never seen pâte sucrée before (I think) but I know how to make pie crust. I understand the basic principles. So I just told myself that if I make bread and sponge and pie crust, and then fill them with things, that at the end I will have food, and that will be fine. This calmed me down a lot.
KM: Do you know what convinced me? This is one of the only bakes we have ever had on this show that calls for spices. The ingredients included spices! Finally! You're right, though. For the most part, this bake was not all that complicated. It was more of a time management problem than an actual baking problem, which as I have already noted, I was very prepared to do coming right off of Thanksgiving.
CT: Whereas all I did for Thanksgiving, cooking-wise, was make a huge pot of history's most excessively creamed spinach. Still, I had a pretty clean kitchen going in, which is something!
KM: Oh my god, that sounds incredible. I want to eat it. I also had a clean kitchen going in because I went away for Thanksgiving to a different house! Literally all my baking things were in the dishwasher because the last thing I had made in my kitchen was the opera cake, which was kind of funny. I wonder what my kitchen thinks of me only making these excessively complicated, under-salted desserts that I don't even like to eat.
CT: Definitely our kitchens think that we are crazy people. And they're not wrong!
KM: It is nice to have made it to the finale again. I felt very proud of us when I looked at the list of ingredients with no instructions whatsoever and didn't even feel terrified. I knew we could do it! I believed in us! We have really improved so, so much.
CT: It's true! Although this was not one of those bakes where I convinced myself that I would do PERFECT confections, I did go in—somewhat chemically assisted—with the feeling that barring disaster I should be able to make four bread rolls, four mini sandwich cakes, and four tarts, of edible quality. Which, again, if I'd tried to do this without instructions two years ago, there's a more than reasonable chance that my home would've exploded and I would've died.
KM: To be honest, I was convinced I would be perfect. This seemed fine to me. We are not novices anymore. We are finalists for the third year running!!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: Finalists who, unlike our competitors, have to schlep to the grocery store and buy one jillion ingredients. I found this very psychologically debilitating, even if in the end I didn't actually need to buy very many things. Frankly, my pantry has been overwhelmed with baking ingredients for the last two months.
KM: It was not so bad, to me. The ingredient list was VERY LONG and very annoying, but most of it was like … different kinds of flour. I want to admit that because of this challenge, I was forced to buy a bunch more kitchen storage things because I have so many kinds of flour. My pantry (which is a cabinet) has like nine types of flour in it. So I was prepared on that front. Did you get everything? Or were there troubling ingredients for you?
CT: I was not able to buy everything, but I came very close. For example, the recipe for the strawberry tarts calls for a glaze made of two things that I could not purchase: fresh apricots and jam sugar. Apricots are entirely out of season, and jam sugar is simply not a thing around here. We ran into basically this exact issue earlier in the season—and possibly last season, too—but this time I decided instead of using pears, I would simply make a lemon glaze. It is my understanding that citrus fruits are higher in pectin, or in some way replicate the effects of pectin. I am not looking this up! I don't care! But I felt sure that if I put sugar and lemon into a saucepan over heat I could find my way to something glaze-like. And I was not going to allow myself to fret very much over this.
KM: I yet again used pears. I like the pears! They're fun to chop, and they taste good! I also did not have jam sugar, which famously is not my business. But I also did not have nigella seeds (I don’t know her), "cress" (the bodega did not have this), yellow and purple edible flowers (I did not want to spend my money on this), or mascarpone. The mascarpone I just forgot to buy, but it turned out fine. I just used some extra cream cheese, which is delicious.
CT: I assume British grocery stores are just full of different kinds of sugar. Just sugar all over the place.
I do have nigella seeds, but they are not for human consumption. I bought a bag of them at the tractor supply store back in the spring, in order to feed the goldfinches, and the bag is sitting in my shed, where its contents are by now like 80 percent dust. Cress is another thing that is not in season right now, so I bought baby arugula instead (also not in season, but abundantly available, and delicious). I suppose I could've found edible flowers, but to hell with that. I came up with another solution. I did find and use mascarpone.
KM: I used a "leaf mix" that I got in my farmer's market box and that was already in my fridge. Whatever! I did buy strawberries. I felt proud of myself for this. Usually, I would not and then my tart would look dumb. But it's the final!
CT: Yeah, I viewed strawberries as non-negotiable. These weren't the highest-quality strawberries in the world, but it is now December.
KM: December is really not the ideal time to make any of these cutesy little tea-time desserts. An egg salad on a roll? A lemon cake sandwich? A strawberry tart? These are all springtime foods! I want to make cookies!
CT: It was funny to spend three hours frantically preparing a lovely picnic while it was a blustery 27 degrees outside.
There were also equipment issues, for me. The tarts, for example, called for the use of mini fluted tart tins. Absolutely not! No!
KM: I cannot explain how few of the equipment things I owned. Why would we own mini fluted tart tins?! That's crazy!
CT: The lemon sandwich cakes called for "loose-based mini-sandwich cake tins." It is frankly astonishing to me that such a thing even exists.
KM: I don't have those either! It also called for "plain nozzle." Famously I only have one kind of nozzle, and it is the star shape!
CT: What did you come up with for your tart tins and mini-cake tins?
KM: For the tarts, I used a cupcake/muffin tin. I just shoved some parchment paper in there and then squished the dough in. This worked fine, though I wouldn't say well. For the mini cake tins, I decided to just create rings out of tin foil because I know you have done that in the past to great success, but I definitely did it wrong and so that barely worked at all. What did you do?
CT: Wow, for once you did foil inventions and I did not!
KM: WHOA! We are copying each other! Exciting innovations in the tent!
CT: I used little colorful silicone muffin things for my tarts. Muffin cups or whatever.
And for the mini-cakes, I just used a cupcake tin. I reasoned that the sponges would be so shallow in there that you'd hardly notice the shape. This assumed, of course, that I would nail the bake, or come close. But it's what I came up with.
KM: This seems like a good idea to me!
CT: I think this is illustrative of my mindset going into this bake. I just wanted to produce edible things that were reasonably clean. I had to abandon right from the outset the hope that anything would be particularly beautiful.
KM: Same! I wanted to make something and I wanted it to be done. Ideally, I wanted to learn something too!
CT: This is another way we have evolved over the years: We seem to understand our limitations a little bit better. Once upon a time I convinced myself that I would successfully bake and construct four gorgeous, perfect vertical tarts. How sweet and naive I was, in my youth (2022).
KM: God, what a blissful joy it was to be young (two years younger than we are now). We did not know then what we know now: that every bake will get the best of you in the tent; that you will always know you could have done a little better than you actually did. That most of the time, confidence comes from ignorance and ego.
Stage One: Doughs and Batters, Proving, Freezing, Shit Flying Everywhere
CT: Here is an accurate encapsulation of my state of mind at the start of the timer for this bake: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
KM: HAHAHAHA! I am actually really excited to find out how you began this marathon bake.
CT: So after I lost eight or 10 seconds just standing still and vibrating with anxiety, I took a crucial page from the Kelsey McKinney Baker's Toolkit, and grabbed a pad of paper and a pen. I then spent approximately four minutes writing out a plan of attack for the bake, complete with timing and overlap and total time spent.
KM: Wow! I'm thrilled to hear this. When I was making my plan of attack, I instantly became anxious that you hadn't done this and that it would lead to you having a panic attack and giving up halfway through. There were so many pieces to this bake. We needed to make: plaited rolls, egg filling, lemon sponges, lemon curd, cream cheese icing, pâte sucrée, crème pâtissière, and an apricot glaze. All of this had to be done in three hours and assembled. To do this without a plan is the idea of a madman.
CT: It's wild to see it all listed together. Those aren't steps! Those are finished components, each of which has its own set of steps! None of which were explained or referenced in any way!
KM: Yes! Without the instructions, my very first step was to write down what my guess was for the instructions for each step, so that I would at least have some frame of reference. This took about four minutes. And then I sorted things that needed to rest to the top so that they could be done first. These were, for me, the bread dough (needed to proof), the pâte sucrée (needed to chill), and then the cake batter. Is this what you did?
CT: I think mine was a little bit rougher than yours, but then I am a novice planner:
The times are approximate (you might notice that I gave myself zero minutes to actually make the dough before proving). I took the proving times from our experience with Paul's Plaited Wreath. I feel pretty sure that this bread could've used more proving time, because it's an enriched dough, but I wasn't going to fuck around with that. The thing was to just 1) have a plan, and 2) stick to it. I can't say that I followed this plan exactly, but just having a plan written out, and the experience of having considered how much time I'd need for each step, really did calm my mind.
Well, that plus the THC gummy. But still!
KM: This looks good as hell to me. I'm really happy for you for having a plan. Even if you don't stick to it, it feels less stressful to me to at least know where I am going. I also planned to proof for 45 minutes for the same reason! We are becoming too powerful! Here is mine:
CT: Hmm Kelsey, gotta say, your handwriting—while lovely—might possibly be in no human language.
KM: Listen, I'm aware. I did not choose to be sharing this! You were the one who started it! We were on a time limit! Genuinely, it thrills me that the children are no longer learning cursive, because soon I will be writing in basically Cyrillic and no one will be able to read it.
CT: I did have some anxiety about devoting time to the non-baking task of writing a list of steps, but I really now feel that this was the decision that made any level of success possible in this crazy-ass bake.
KM: There was a lot to do! I do find it interesting that while I always count DOWN in my planning, you counted up!
CT: That's a good observation! I think if I’d been in a less frantic state of mind I might’ve done it your way but it only occurred to me to start adding up the time after I'd already made most of the list. At any rate, I'm so glad I did this. This is just good home-baking behavior, I think. I plan to carry this forward to other bakes. And possibly to blogs?
KM: The one note I would like to point out is where I have written "eggs??" and circled it. That’s because halfway through, I realized I would have to hard-boil eggs, but we will get to that.
CT: So it looks like we both started with the bread dough, anticipating that it would need so much time to proof. How'd you launch into that?
KM: I was a little confused by the bread ingredients to be honest, but I was so happy to be using two spices (turmeric and curry powder) that I blissfully moved forward. I mixed all the dry ingredients, then the wet ones. I didn't end up using all the water called for because my dough was plenty wet already, and then I kneaded it for three songs, which I assume was about 12 minutes. What did you do?
CT: About the same! I used the big metal mixing bowl that is NOT for my stand mixer.
I also did not time my kneading, I just aimed for something soft and dough-ish and smooth. A funny detail of this bake is at various points I had my main timer running, and as many as three other timers going for other tasks. But at least here I decided that I would go off of feel rather than a clock. I guess that I kneaded my dough for something like eight minutes.
KM: There were so many timers. I really do not like using my phone timer because I don't trust it. But I only have one physical timer, so it was kind of a nightmare and my phone was just constantly ringing. Beneath the timeline I posted, on that page, are just 100 words that were what the timers were for, that I crossed off when they went off.
CT: Oh God. That sounds like a lot. I'm glad no one ever calls me, because if my phone had rung at any point in this bake, my head would've launched up into the air and exploded like a firework.
I went microwave mode for my first round of proving. I used a tall candle to warm up the interior and I used a digital thermometer to keep track of the temperature.
I also used a refrigerator-mounted timer for this process, but this timer ticks noisily and I discovered after a few minutes that this sound can be enormously stressful under these circumstances. I wound up turning my music up very loud just to drown it out.
KM: I had an interesting problem here, where I have successfully proofed this season on the stovetop by turning on the oven and setting the heating pad on top of it. But now it is winter, and this did not work! So I TOO ended up proving in the microwave by putting a cup of boiling water and a candle in there, and then taping it so that it was open enough to hold the thermometer. It looked deranged. I also wasted 15 minutes with the dough on the stove top before I realized it was too cold. Awful!
CT: Oof, that's so stressful. My home is also very cold now, but I think I was throwing off enough body heat that I raised the temperature a solid 10 degrees.
KM: I was so sweaty. My house is like 65 degrees, maybe, so I started this bake with a sweatshirt on and the oven on, and by like 15 minutes into the bake, I was in my exercise tank top sweating buckets. There was not a minute of rest. I went straight from the dough to making my cake tin spirals, to making the cake batter.
CT: Oh wow, we've already parted ways! After I made the bread dough, I went straight to making the dough for the crust.
KM: Yes, I could see this in our handwritten plans, since I could read both of them, unlike you.
CT: My thinking with the tart crust was that—another Kelsey wisdom—this dough would only improve from spending lots of time in the freezer. So I thought there was a chance I could get it out of the way immediately. I gave myself 30 minutes for this, but I think it actually came together much more quickly.
KM: I don't really know why I did the cake batter first. I just wanted something to be baked, I guess. And I knew that there were three things that needed to go in the oven, and I wanted them to be spread out. Your reasoning, which is technically my reasoning, makes much more sense to me. I did the tart crust third, and it did sit in the fridge for an hour because I simply forgot about it.
CT: I'm not sure how long my unbaked tart crusts sat in the freezer but it had to have been more than an hour, and possibly something like 90 minutes.
KM: By the time my first proof was done, I knew I was in some trouble. The tart dough was in the fridge, and my cakes came out of the oven, and the rings had not held the batter! Some of it had seeped out!! Also I think they were too big to begin with!! So I had these kind of dinky short cakes. I really considered redoing them, but I was already behind, and the idea of redoing anything seemed like a nightmare.
CT: Did you bake eight separate lemon cakes?
KM: No, I baked four! I planned to cut them in half, which I think would have worked if I had used the cupcake tray like you. But because I used the rings, I lost a lot of batter and they were rather short. Did you bake eight?
CT: I did. I was concerned that if I baked four in those cupcake holes, the shapes would be so conspicuous. I also had the thought that it would be quicker to bake eight very thin sponges than to cook four thicker ones, and I was very much into saving time.
Another reason I did the tart dough first: It seemed more complicated, to me, possibly because I am not familiar with pâte sucrée, like as a combination of syllables. It felt like the kind of thing that I would want out of the way, rather than looming on the horizon.
KM: Yeah, I had no idea what this was. I rubbed the butter in like it was pie dough and then added the wet ingredients. It was so wet, but I was like Good enough! and threw it in the fridge.
CT: I had the same thought: It just seemed way too wet, even with pretty cold butter in there. I did the rub-in method and then started adding the other ingredients.
I was worried that I'd used too much water, but I actually think I was on the low side: Prue's ingredients call for one to two tablespoons of water, but as far as I recall I never made it to the second tablespoon. Maybe my egg yolk was larger than called for?
At any rate, I brought this stuff together in a mixing bowl, slapped it down onto the counter, and immediately rolled it and cut it. I had the feeling that I could've devoted a few minutes to cooling it, but I was in too big a hurry.
KM: Wait, you cut it into what? I didn't cut mine! I just put mine into the fridge forever and genuinely forgot about it until there was one hour left.
CT: Well, I cut the dough so that I could fit it into the four little silicone muffin things. Then I put those into the freezer. I didn't bother to trim the little cups, again because I was just moving too quickly and trying to shave minutes. I talked myself into these eventually having a charmingly rustic appearance. I think any experienced baker will look at these and understand that I was setting myself up for failure.
KM: Oh! That's smart. I was much too busy beginning my other things, and then suddenly the timer that my proof was done was going off and I felt like I was gonna die. I honestly feel frantic even trying to remember all this stuff.
CT: It's funny to note that even at this point, having gotten bread dough into a proving space and tart dough into the freezer, I did not start on the sponges.
KM: Wow. That is interesting! My "sponges" were done and just sitting on the counter. I meant to put them into the fridge, but I forgot and by the time I remembered, they were already cooled off.
CT: What was your method on the sponges? I think part of the reason I felt confident pushing those back a little was because all I planned to do was to throw all the stuff into the stand mixer, whip it around, and then pour it and bake. I don't understand the nuances of sponge-making well enough to formulate any better plan of action.
KM: That's basically what I did. I whipped the wet ingredients first, added the dry, then poured and baked. There were two rising agents in this cake (the self-rising flour and the baking powder plus lemon), so I wasn't too worried about keeping air in the batter. It would have been easy if my stupid little rings worked. How do you get your rings not to leak batter everywhere? What did I do wrong?
CT: Yes, well, it's true that I’ve done remarkable (read: psychotic) things with foil, parchment, and acetate in the past, but in almost all cases they've leaked some. I once tried to do cheesecake in weird foil rings and it was an absolute fiasco. And when I tried to do a delicate pastry crust in improvised foil rings my entire bake went to shit. I think you can safely improvise a wobbly but adequate cake frame from foil, but I think it's time to accept that baking inside of foil shapes is largely a crapshoot.
[One year from today] "I am baking a nine-tier wedding cake entirely inside a foil sculpture I made in seven minutes."
KM: The thing is … I believe that you could do it!
CT: Only one way to find out!
I did run into trouble with the sponge batter. I think my butter was not quite soft enough, but I told myself that the beating would break it down. It did not, so that when it came time to pour it into the cupcake tin, I noticed big floating bergs of unmelted butter. I had to quickly change course, which in this case just meant getting it back to the stand mixer and slowly mixing it at ambient temperature for another few minutes, and then smashing it around with a rubber spatula.
KM: I also had that problem!! The butter wasn't soft enough, and my kitchen was so cold that I just let it beat in the stand mixer for a very long time and then gave up.
CT: I truly did not anticipate any issues at all with the sponge batter, so I became flustered by this hiccup. It didn't cost me a ton of time but it was a wound to my psyche.
Stage Two: More Proving; Glazes, Custards, Curds, and Icings; Just Absolute Chaos
CT: This was a chaotic enough bake that I really do not remember the order of things. I know that at some point during the first proof, I made glaze from caster sugar and lemon, and also boiled my eggs.
And I know that somewhere in there, I also threw together the cream cheese icing for the sandwich cakes, and dumped it into a sealed piping bag.
KM: There are a ton of numbers crossed off on my sheet, but I have no idea what any of them mean! I know that I made the lemon curd in there somewhere on the double-boiler, but genuinely I'm not sure how I made it.
CT: Ooh, double-boiler mode! I did not do this. I think the very last one of the various goops that I made for this bake was the lemon curd. This was another area where I had unjustified confidence, because I've made lemon curd once or twice before.
KM: I want to admit that I used the double boiler for both the lemon curd and the other goop (crème pâtissière) mainly because it only makes bowls dirty and bowls can go into the dishwasher, unlike the beautiful copper pot. This turned out to be a good idea, because I could also multi-task with this by hard-boiling the eggs underneath the lemon curd. I felt very genius for this move. It satisfied me.
CT: Yes, that strikes me as pro-baker stuff. Judging by the photo evidence, my order of goops appears to have been glaze, then icing, then crème pâtissière, then egg salad, then curd.
KM: I did the opposite! I did curd and crème pâtissière, and then did the egg salad, then glaze, and then icing at the very end. The icing, I knew, did not need to be heated, so I was less worried about it.
CT: I think I did the icing when I did because I was looking for something that could be done in like five minutes or less, during the last few minutes of the first proof. So I just kinda jammed it in there by putting all the ingredients into the stand mixer and whipping it around for a few minutes.
KM: This really wasn't a baking challenge. It was a time-management challenge, which in a way is the ultimate baking challenge, because you have to work off intuition. How did you decide to braid your rolls? We knew they had to be plaited, but we had no other information!
CT: OK! Yes, this was interesting to me. My experience of plaiting Paul's wreath gave me confidence that I could manage it, but when the time actually came to make these little buns I couldn't remember the exact method, and I became frustrated. I pulled my dough when the mechanical timer sounded, and it looked poofy but maybe not doubled.
I first divided the dough blob into four parts. And then I tried dividing the first dough part into three strands, but as soon as I started the plait it became obvious that this was entirely wrong and would produce a long rope instead of a bun.
KM: I decided that because I knew it was braided and I knew it was a bun, I would make it like a hot dog bun because I was craving a hot dog. So I assumed it would be kind of an oval loaf that was split down the middle, as you can see in my bad drawing on my notepad.
CT: Yeah, that's how I pictured it, as kind of oval-shaped. But with three strands this seemed impossible. So then I reformed the blob and cut it into five parts and made five strands.
I think the wreaths had seven strands, but there was not enough dough for that, unless I wanted to be braiding yarn-like strands of dough. Five seemed to hit the mark, and also seemed like it should be easier than seven. But then I couldn't figure out how to braid them into a coherent shape. I believed in the ability of my hands to form an attractive plait, but I still needed a method!
KM: Famously, I love to braid! I did six strands for no reason other than I meant to do four but I cut the first one pretty unequally and ended up with six. This was a mistake. Braids should have an odd number of strands! I don’t know what I was doing, but I did it very fast and then put my dough back into the microwave with the candle and the heating pad, because it really did not proof well the first time.
CT: Oh wow, six! Five seemed like a good number to me. But I couldn't figure out the pattern, at first. I tried to cross the far right strand across the other four, but the strands seemed too short to me for that to work, like I basically used the full length of the strand just to get the first move.
KM: Five is definitely a better number. What's funny is I did the first of my plaits perfectly and then messed up each of the next three in different and unknowable ways. Whatever!
CT: I wound up going from the outside in, and crossing the outermost strand across to the middle, and then doing the same from the other side. I realized after the first bun that my strands were too short, so on subsequent buns I did them longer, probably about seven or eight inches in length. This also wasn't great, because the three buns made that way wound up thinner than I wanted, but the plaiting was easier and cleaner and I felt better about the tight look of the pattern. Whatever!
The important thing was to get them braided and back into a proving space as quickly as possible. This could not be my microwave—I have a very small microwave and the buns were now on a baking sheet—but I successfully proofed in a dishwasher for Bread Week, so I tried this again. Things went poorly.
KM: God. Whenever you use the dishwasher, I become unbelievably stressed.
CT: For starters, because my home is so much colder now, I had an incredibly hard time bringing the interior of the dishwasher up to any kind of reasonable temperature. I used two tall candles and still couldn't get it warm, so I eventually put a bowl of boiling water in there. But then when I tried to check on things a little while later the jostling of the door caused the bowl to tip and pour water down onto my buns. Disaster.
KM: Our homes are too cold for this! I do think the boiling water was a really good idea, but it pouring on your buns makes me want to cry. Did they get upset?
CT: They did get upset, at least in the sense that they were swimming in water. So I had to withdraw the buns from the dishwasher and pour off the water (which had also doused the candles) and then reset the proving space, this time with a much more modest and much more carefully placed coffee mug of boiling water. I think this ultimately cost me 15 or 20 minutes, but I managed to regain my composure by checking my timer and seeing that I would still have plenty of time to bake the buns at the end, even if I had to extend the proving.
KM: Oh no. Chris! No wonder you were panicking!
CT: It got pretty hairy! And it did not help that by this time my kitchen was like Pompeii or some shit. Just an unfathomable level of disarray and disaster.
But! My goops went very well, overall! The crème pâtissière was a bit of a challenge, in the sense that we haven't made it this season and custards can be very tricky, temperature-wise. But I think I invented a new cooking method along the way, and it worked.
KM: I actually just remembered that at some point in here, I dumped my whole lemon curd on the ground by accident while trying to take a photo of it, and made it again. I had totally forgotten that! I really do not have enough counter space for these challenges. I have about the same as the contestants, and I have no idea how they do it.
CT: Oh my God!
KM: I did also have to take a shower after this bake, because I was COVERED in flour and lemon curd and god knows what other kinds of baking goods. And my kitchen at this point was so messy that I took a photo of it. I was very upset by this.
CT: I had to do the blinders thing where I just resolved to not notice anything in my peripheral vision, ever.
For the crème pâtissière, I didn't go double-boiler mode. I heated the milk and vanilla in a saucepan, substituting about a third of the milk for heavy cream because I needed to save some milk for my child's cereal the following morning.
While this was warming, I creamed together the yolks and sugar and corn starch in the stand mixer. I really do now feel like an old pro when it comes to custard making. I had no fear at all that I could possibly get this wrong.
Then I very slowly used the heated dairy to temper the yolks. And then, when I returned the mixture to the saucepan, I had a bolt of inspiration, and instead of using a whisk I busted out an immersion blender and used that to continue moving the custard around during this final heating process, until it started to thicken. I think I became extra motivated in the direction of efficiency, here, because my kitchen was finally reaching the point where it could not become any messier without me having to agree to couple's counseling.
I had the idea that this method would be cleaner and would buy me some wiggle room on the temperature, because the furious blending would prevent the warming starch from clumping. Also I was inspired by Kenji’s immersion blender hollandaise, which I have made easily a dozen times in my life, and which is foolproof.
KM: Oh my god! Immersion blender! You're a genius! I have never used an immersion blender to bake, but I want to do this. I think you invented it and I cannot wait to try the Chris Method of Crème Pâtissière. I genuinely have very little memory of the bake from here on out. But I did heat the milk and vanilla bean (which I bought! For 14 goddamn American dollars!) in the double broiler, and then tempered it, and then put it back on the double broiler, and this was fine I guess. It turned into something! I just whipped mine with a whisk like a dumbass.
CT: The photo evidence suggests that somewhere in here, I evidently baked my sponges. It's incredible how blurred my memory is of all this, such a short time later. I don't know what happened!
KM: The thing I have genuinely no memory of is putting the tart crust into the muffin tin, parbaking it, and then baking it again. I know I did that because it is done, but I really don't remember touching that wet dough again. Usually, I am able to use the record of our messaging to each other to remember what I did, but we didn't message at all because we were both SCREAMING in our separate and lonely kitchens.
CT: I mean, I really do think that's what was happening. In our own kitchens we were both going completely insane, but the Slack record is eerily silent.
The only reason I remember any of the tart baking part is because I once again went Lentil Mode instead of baking beans, and because I made the fateful and bad decision once again to not trim my tart crusts before blind baking.
KM: I do vaguely remember trying to pinch the edges of the tart to make it look more like a tart and less like a muffin. Wow. It’s coming back to me. After that, I froze them for 15 minutes, because tart dough likes to be very cold. But I still don't remember baking them or removing them from the oven.
CT: My blind bake went OK, in the sense that nothing caught fire.
But things went sideways during the second bake, because there was so much excess dough and it had been so thoroughly exposed to the heat. By the time the bottoms of the tart crusts were baked, the edges around the top were straight-up burned.
Instead of easily and cleanly snipping raw dough at the outset, I now had to saw off chunks of blackened dough, which in places wound up tearing and crumbling the crusts where I needed them to remain intact.
KM: Oh no! I think my oven was kind of low yesterday. Everything I baked took longer than I expected. I do think it helped that I put a lot of parchment paper between the dough and the muffin tins, so it wasn't really touching anything.
CT: That's interesting. What did you choose for your temperatures, for the sandwich sponges and for the tarts? I had a hard time making up my mind on these.
KM: I did 375 degrees for the tarts and the sandwich sponges, and 400 for the breads. I have no clue if this was right. Is that what you did?
CT: Oh my God! Jesus, I was so off. I did 325 for the sponges, 400 for the tarts, and 450 for the buns. And I baked them in that order, in part because of the increasing heat.
KM: Why are you assuming mine was right?! Neither of us know ANYTHING!
CT: Well, I can say for sure that my temperature was off for the tarts, because of the burning. Or, anyway, I think this would've gone better if I'd used your cop-out temperature instead of mine.
KM: Did you use your convection mode again? That seems to be working!
CT: I did! And for the first time ever, I felt like it let me down, although in retrospect it was probably just too much heat. I can say for it that the convection setting continues to at least distribute heat very evenly, unlike my oven's other settings, which apply Hell's Own Heat in a shifting and impossible pattern, such that nothing ever bakes evenly, under any circumstances.
Stage Three: More Baking, But Also One Thousand Other Things, Too
KM: Where even are we in this bake? In this blog? In this life? Just like in the experience of the three hours I spent in my kitchen, I feel lost and overwhelmed and confused about what I am supposed to be doing.
CT: I think we now have baked sponges and baked tart crusts? And you have curd and crème pâtissière, and I have icing and glaze. And my crème pâtissière is underway? Or possibly finished? Also somewhere in here I made egg salad?
KM: OK, that sounds right. At some point after this, I chopped up two pears really small and put them into my beautiful copper pot with a bunch of regular sugar and just let them cook. They were on low, so I kind of ignored them while I made the egg salad, which was very simple and easy to make. Because it is my house and my rules, I added both paprika and dill seed, so it tasted very good even though I am currently in an Egg Phase (where I cannot eat or even really smell eggs) that has been going on for approximately four years. Some are saying I am very brave for making the egg salad and testing it to make sure it tasted good.
CT: Oh wow, I forgot about the egg aversion. This cannot have been fun for you. I'd boiled my eggs way back in the beginning, when I was making the glaze, during the first proof but after making the tart dough. Then the eggs sat in a colander for a long time while I did 1,000 other things. I went ahead and put the greenery into the egg salad, which is not something I would usually do but seemed like the intention, based on how the ingredients were listed.
KM: I also put my mixed greens into the egg salad. It looked fine! Unlike the dough for that little sandwich, which was a very beautiful yellow color. I loved that dough, and I loved the way it looked braided. I really wanted to look at them while they were proving but they were busy in there.
CT: Oh yes, the bread dough was so good-looking, a very attractive golden color. I unfortunately got a very good look at my raw bread rolls when I poured hot water all over them, inside a dishwasher. I think I was at about the 40-minute mark when I decided it was time to get these suckers into the oven? I no longer have any ability to say any of this with confidence, but that feels about right.
KM: I know that I let mine rest until the 30-minute mark, because I knew they were going in at a high temperature and didn't expect them to take that long. They were only a little puffy by that point, so I don’t feel that they proofed very well. I know Paul would say they were underproofed, but I couldn't do anything else!
CT: Oh yeah, I had resigned myself by this stage of the bake to Paul muttering "underproofed" at my buns. But certainly no one could say they were not nice to look at! I brushed them with beaten egg and then I used black sesame seeds in place of Nigella seeds, on the justification that I could not serve my family literal bird food.
Do you remember at all what you still had left to do at the point that your buns went into the oven? As far as I recall, apart from assembly all I had left to do was the lemon curd. And slicing a bunch of strawberries.
KM: It was really thoughtful of you to consider your family and not feed them like birds. When my buns went into the oven, I still had to make the cream cheese icing, and I still needed to slice the strawberries, and my pears were still on the stove becoming something that could be poured onto the strawberry tart. I did the cream cheese icing first by just dumping everything into the stand mixer in the freshly washed bowl. At that point, I had so many bowls and the time was stressing me out, so I went ahead and assembled the lemon sandwiches, just to have one thing done.
CT: I also did the first little part of the assembly of the lemon sandwiches during the baking of my buns. I was happy enough with the condition of the little sponges when I turned them out.
I started the assembly by piping some icing onto four of these little discs in what an experienced baker will surely not consider to be a decorative fashion. My curd was still too warm—I had finished it just a few minutes earlier—so I dumped it into another piping bag and put that into the freezer, to cool.
KM: Yeah, I slapped the second curd on both sides of my freshly cut tiny cakes and then piped the icing on in a spiral. I actually felt it looked kind of neat, because usually my icing looks so unbelievably ugly since I don't use the icing tips and just go with god. Turns out the icing tips are much better to use!
CT: I didn't bother with icing tips this time, even though I have some. This is dumb, but I didn't want to spend the time fitting them into the bags. So I went Kelsey mode and just snipped the ends. It worked fine, where "fine" should be understood to indicate that my home did not fall into a huge sinkhole.
KM: To me, it is beautiful that we are just becoming the same baker very rapidly.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: Assembly began in haste at the point that I pulled my buns from the oven. I think they were under the heat for about 16 minutes, total, which felt fast but I was sure they were baked.
KM: I threw my buns in the freezer! Did you do this? I wanted them to cool off before I cut them in half.
CT: I did not. I just moved them off the pan and onto a wood cutting board, and then set them next to the kitchen door where it’s pretty drafty and cool. I then raced downstairs and pulled my baked tart crusts from the freezer and piped my crème pâtissière into them.
I learned immediately that the custard wasn’t as thickened as I’d hoped, so I then raced the filled tarts back to the freezer, so that the custard would at least become very, very cold, and hopefully more congealed.
KM: It really was so cold in my kitchen, but I was sweating anyway. At this point, my Spotify began playing a ton of Michelle Branch, which was kind of a vibe as I was racing around like a crazy person. I filled the tarts with the custard and it was still warm, so I also put it back in the freezer while I cut up the strawberries.
But I had forgotten something! It was the pear stuff on the stove, which had done its own thing and caramelized! Oops! So I added some water to it, and swished it around and declared it Good Enough.
CT: Right, I mean, this is a damn glaze. I'm only willing to lose so much time to the task of making my fruit shiny.
KM: I assumed its only purpose was to make fruit shiny, and any syrup will do that. Then I spent way too long trying to decide how to arrange the strawberries. They didn't look very pretty to me all sliced up on top of the tart, so I ended up putting one whole strawberry in the middle to make it look kind of like a flower.
CT: Oh wow, that's inspired! I left my tarts in the freezer for a bit longer and completed the assembly of my sandwich cakes. My curd wasn’t fully set, but it was fine.
I piped some into the sandwich layer, topped with another sponge, and then piped icing and curd onto the top. I didn’t have edible flowers, but I felt that I should at least gesture in the direction of festive colors, so I settled for rainbow sprinkles. Not very refined, but I can report that this decoration made the little sandwiches maximally appealing to an almost-four-year-old.
KM: Oh damn! I didn't put anything on the top! I only put the curd and the cream in the middle, which in retrospect was dumb. They looked kind of boring and sad.
CT: I bet they looked a lot cleaner than mine! The issue for me was we had SO MUCH icing and curd, I really felt like there had to be some on the outside. Even after all that decorating, I still had leftover icing and curd.
KM: I also had a lot of icing and curd. I don't really understand why there was so much of it, when this show historically wants us to make the smallest amount of everything to ruin our lives!
CT: I really cannot say how much time I had left when I pulled my tarts out of the freezer for the final time and started in on the strawberries, only that I seem to recall being very calm at this stage. I think I knew at this point that nothing could prevent me from finishing on time.
KM: One crazy thing about this bake is that I was running at full speed and very calm this whole 30-minute sprint to the end. I was so locked in that when I finished and threw the towel down, there were four whole unaccounted-for minutes left on my clock. This made me feel unbelievably cocky, even though the bottoms of my tarts were definitely a little soggy.
CT: Yeah! I had the same sogginess, in the end. I think my crème pâtissière was just too runny. I could choose here to blame the recipe—another five grams of cornstarch would've done it—but I will be honorable and admit that I could've just thickened it for another 30 seconds on the stove. At any rate, once I'd thrown the strawberries on there and lacquered it with "glaze" it was impossible to tell I'd done anything wrong, until biting into the tart. And as we all know, it's what’s on the outside that counts.
KM: My crème pâtissière wasn't even that runny! I think I just didn't bake them for long enough. But yes, same! Once they were decorated, they looked fine! My only regret was that I didn't have a beautiful tea cake stand to display them on, which I feel would have been very satisfying.
CT: Back in the 1950s we for sure would've had tea cake stands in our homes, for hosting. It's a culture in decline!
KM: Wow! Yeah! We need to get them, stat! I only just got a crystal punch bowl, and I've been alive for 33 years!
The Finished Products
CT: Do we dare to show tea, uhhh, displays?
KM: I think, in fact, we must. This is extra exciting because usually we show one another these photos before we write this blog, but in this instance, we have not! Please, show your tea display!
CT: OK here is my tea spread:
KM: OH MY GOD! CHRIS! These look literally perfect! You're gonna win star baker for sure! They looks so beautiful! I'm really proud of you!
CT: There are some structural issues hidden underneath the surface of each of these items, but I gotta admit they do dress up real pretty.
Show tea stuff?
KM: Here is my tea stuff!
CT: Ooh, I love the powdered sugar on the little sandwiches, and the festive toppers on the tarts! Magnificent! I feel like your lemon sandwiches are so clean-looking.
KM: How did you get your breads so glossy?! I wish mine were shiny, too! I'm so envious of your sandwich cakes. I wish I had used the beautiful muffin tin.
CT: I did an egg wash on the buns before baking, I think that's why they're glossy? But maybe I just did A LOT of egg wash.
KM: Wow, that was so smart.
CT: It's in the ingredients! It says "beaten egg, to glaze."
KM: LOL! I want to be clear that I 100-percent put that egg into the bread dough. Whoops! It still tastes fine!
CT: Oh no! NO!
Did you trim the edges of your lemon sandwiches somehow? How are they so uniform in color?
KM: No. They just looked like that because of the tin foil rings. I'm not really sure why, to be honest! I find these sprinkles so exciting. I love them. Your child is correct.
CT: That's amazing, that your sponges baked to such a uniform color. There's got to be science to that.
Did you get a chance to taste your bakes? What did you think?
KM: I did! I really appreciated the little lemon sandwich, because I LOVE lemon and it is very lemony! The others tasted good, but like all British foods, a little too one-note (sweet) for my taste. What did you think?
CT: The lemon sandwiches were definitely the star of the show. We ate the egg-salad rolls for dinner. The bread had an enjoyable pretzel-ness, probably from being underproofed. This is not my preferred way to eat egg salad—to me it belongs on white toast—but it was good. The tarts were basically a flop: They taste good but eating them is so messy, we simply could not come up with a good way to do this. The crust is brittle and the custard is runny and the strawberries are out of season. Not a terrible thing to eat, but a confounding one.
KM: It's crazy how when you … use one spice … it tastes so much better! I prefer not to eat egg salad at all, so I took mine out of one and ate the roll with butter. This was very good.
Chris, do you know what's crazy?
CT: Lay it on me.
KM: For the third year in a row, we have tied as winners of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off! Can you believe it? We did it again!
CT: Incredible! At this point you have to imagine no one will even bother to compete with us going forward. We are simply too powerful, and becoming more powerful every day.
KM: How do you feel exiting the tent this year?
CT: Good question. I feel pretty worn out. On the other hand, I feel like I could definitely take over the baking operation for high tea at the Willard Hotel and no one would notice. If I may safely enter Earnest Mode, it's thrilling to have become truly proficient at something, during my adulthood. I sincerely do not think this has ever happened to me before. How do you feel?
KM: I completely agree. I'm thrilled to get my kitchen back, and to return to the leisurely lifestyle of baking without a ticking clock. But I also feel very sentimental about this project. I am absolutely a more capable baker than I was three years ago. All it took was three seasons of putting ourselves through ridiculous gauntlets well beyond our skill set ,and look at us now! Who knows what else we could learn!
CT: I do think there's a lesson in this—a real, non–irony-poisoned one—about daring to fail in order to really learn. I could've done—and in fact have done—some by-the-book baking over the years, but these crazy moments of having to intuit my way through these tasks, with pressure applied, really accelerated my learning. This is applicable, I think, when it comes to learning (and using) a new language, and possibly other things. Get out there and fuck it up. Force yourself to apply your knowledge.
KM: I think you're right! We have had some mammoth, hilarious, upsetting failures in this series. And that has been really devastating, emotionally and physically (to our kitchens). But you're right! The pressure has made us better. I'm feeling very emotional! We have really tried very hard!
CT: Score one for the try-hards!
KM: Do you think we will return to the tent again?
CT: If you’d asked me this question at the end of our run in 2023, I would've laughed and groaned and possibly sobbed, and you might've taken from that an implied "no." But just a few weeks later I was back to thinking about baking, and by the time autumn rolled around again I was absolutely obsessed with getting back into the tent.
I think we are just hooked, and possibly beyond help.
KM: Is this Stockholm syndrome? Who is to say? All we can know for sure is that when the air starts to crisp, we want to bake now. A Pavlovian desire for torture.
CT: Did someone say "pavlova"? Baking time!
KM: See everyone next year! Maybe!
