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.
All long-running competition reality television shows fall into the same trap. The longer the show is on the air, the more qualified the contestants. Potential competitors watch every episode of the show that exists, they study how the game is built in order to compete not with heart or passion or instinct, but with strategy. The problem with this is that now competitors on reality television shows are masters from the beginning. The old versions of reality television cannot hold up against this new era of players. On Survivor, for example, producers can never repeat the same puzzle in a challenge, because sickos at home are 3D printing versions of the puzzles and practicing in their garages. No longer are producers casting random hot people at the mall. In this era, there is no failure on reality television because everyone comes in a semi-professional. Everyone is almost too competent for television.
The response to this competency, by producers and show executives, has been uniformly the same across shows: make the challenges weirder and stranger so that no one can practice for them. The fear is, I guess, that if you ask every contestant in the tent to make, for example, pain au chocolate during pastry week, the competition will be unfair because half of the contestants may have been making pain au chocolate once a week for seven years in the hopes that they might get cast on the show.
But in doing this, the show assumes that practice will make perfect, when this could not be farther from the truth in the kitchen. Sometimes I make the sourdough bread exactly the same way I always make it, and it turns out rock hard and terrible. This is just the fate of the kitchen. It cannot be strategized away. But the show also assumes that we, the viewers, crave novelty, when really it is they the producers who are bored with repetition. A lesson all creatives must learn at some point is that you as the creator will tire of your bits far before the audience will. Novelty!! More Novelty!! We need it!! Even though audiences don’t really seem to care that much about the framing of the episodes being novel as much as they care about the episodes themselves being good.
This is how we end up with theme weeks like “Back-To-School Week” on The Great British Bake-Off. The content machine of the show desires new topics, and it will get them even if they need to be made up. And this is how your Defector idiots ended up making some British concoction called “School Cake” for this week’s technical challenge, an important reminder that just because a dessert has never been made on The Great British Bake-Off does not mean it necessarily should be.
Chris Thompson: Hello Kelsey, and welcome to Back-to-School Week! Is there a baked thing that you most associate with your own school experiences?
Kelsey McKinney: Hello Chris! Wow! I had not considered this question until this very moment, but instantly I knew that there is a treat I associate with my childhood school experiences, and it is Little Debbie’s Nutty Buddy wafer bars. Do you know these? Do you have a treat that reminds you of school?
CT: I do know the Nutty Buddy! A delicious thing. I associate those with road trips—a time for eating junk food. The baked—or "baked"—thing that I most associate with school is also a Little Debbie product: the Honey Bun. They sold these from an automated dispenser thing in my middle school cafeteria and they were incredibly popular with the sorts of kids who always seemed to have a couple bucks in their pocket. There was one kid in my lunch period who I think only ever ate Honey Buns and french fries. I was insane with jealousy.
KM: God, I also loved the Honey Buns. Little Debbie really knew what they were doing. Good bakers over there!
CT: They should put the Little Debbie bakers into the Great British Bake Off. They'd show those Brits a thing or two. Although probably the Little Debbie bakers, nowadays, are robots. Terminators!
I would like to ask you now, what is your impression of this School Cake business? Had you ever heard of a School Cake before? And do you generally serve a bowl of warm custard with your cakes?
KM: Okay first off, no I had not heard of School Cake. What the hell is this? There is a cake I kind of think of as a school cake, and it is Texas Sheet Cake, which is a chocolate cake made in a sheet pan with chocolate buttercream frosting. Sometimes it has pecans in it, if you’re lucky. The British cannot imagine this, though, because that is a flavor. I don’t even know what to say about the custard. Disgusting? Did you know about pouring custard on cake?
CT: Is that how it works? You just pour it on there? I'm looking at the official website now and it just says "serve with custard," which I assume means that British people just know how to eat iced sheet cake with custard. It's just a regular thing over there. I hate to think of this.
KM: I genuinely have no idea. What happened to me in the end was, I made custard and then I immediately looked at it for a few minutes and decided to just throw it away. Custard next to cake is not my business.
CT: This is possibly a spoiler for the climax of the blog, but this whole concoction is so deeply, profoundly unappetizing to me. It's like 75 percent sugar, with almost zero flavoring. This entire recipe, which includes four different homemade components, contains not one single grain of salt. No salt!
KM: It is … not good. What we were tasked with making is essentially a yellow cake with a lot of eggs, plain icing with no flavoring, plain HOMEMADE SPRINKLES with no flavoring, and custard with a tiny bit of vanilla extract. This is a dessert for literal babies, which I guess makes sense in the “school cake” sense of it.
CT: I was in a restaurant recently with my child, and there was a family nearby. One of the children, maybe eight years old, when it was time to tell the server their order, asked for something cool. It was a noodle place, and the kid asked for pho, but they pointed to the one that had All The Meat. And the mom just straight up talked the child out of it. Are you sure you want all that? Maxsyn, wouldn't you like the one with just the chicken? You like chicken, right? The white meat? Remember how you always get the chicken tenders? You love chicken. Maybe you should get the one with the chicken.
KM: What!? That’s such an exciting order. I am always inviting the children and adult children around me to try whatever thing I have ordered, because I genuinely believe that one of the reasons for living is getting to try new foods and experience new flavors!
CT: That's because you are a good adult! Good adults understand that children will enjoy lots of different things, and even when they do not enjoy new and different things, there's a way to engage them where they will be glad to have tried, and will feel proud of themselves, and will be eager to try something new the next time! What I am saying is, absolutely do not pass to your children the tradition of eating sugar cake, iced with sugar, and decorated with sugar—just a hideous block of congealed sugar—when you could choose almost literally any other tradition.
KM: It’s also because I’m HUNGRY. I want to eat stuff, just like a child. And I think you’re getting at something that really bothered me about this bake, which is that it’s built off the kind of nostalgia that (not definitely but probably) requires your childhood to have had a really narrow and boring slate of things to eat. Even if this cake had chocolate icing, it would be better. But it doesn’t. It’s just sugar sugar sugar.
CT: The flavor of this cake is sugar. The texture is manipulated sugar. Readers: Do not ever make this thing! The British will take some shit for this because it's a British show and Kelsey and I are rabid anglophobes, but this behavior is rampant in America, too. That a thing is bland is not a reason to find it and order it. It is in fact a reason to avoid it, to discard it forever. Even and especially when feeding children. Live, damn you! And encourage your children to live!
KM: The custard is also there, but only just.
Ingredients and Shopping
KM: Let’s talk ingredients, Chris. There were no special ingredients needed for this bake. It was mainly flour, sugar, more sugar, vanilla extract, butter, eggs, and food coloring. Did you have all these things?
CT: I did, yes. It's notable that we had to burn through another two pounds of icing sugar. Also, this recipe, as is often the case, wanted us to find food coloring paste, which as far as I am aware is simply not a thing around here. But we've done fine 'round these parts sticking to the drops. So I did drops.
KM: It’s actually obscene how much powdered sugar I have purchased, sifted, made into icing, put onto some weird baked good, and then five days later, thrown away.
CT: I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that we have probably already spent something like $50 between us just on icing sugar. It has become obscene.
KM: I’m imagining a Defector Tip Jar just for all the damn icing sugar we need to do these challenges. I’ve also been buying my icing sugar at the bodega near my house, because each week when I go to the grocery store I think surely, I won’t need more icing sugar. So now, my bodega man is looking at me a little sideways, like, Why the hell does this girl need a pound of powdered sugar every Sunday?
CT: You should bring him the School Cake. Then he will understand.
KM: I’m sure that man has taste buds, so I will NOT be doing that.
CT: The equipment requirements for this bake were also very light: just a single cake tin.
KM: In fact, according to the instructions your wife sent us, we were actually oppressed. They took AWAY equipment from us. Notably, they stole our beautiful matching KitchenAid mixers from us! I did not like this one bit!
CT: I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it feels more authentic, I guess, to make a cake using old-fashioned elbow grease. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's actually any more valuable as a baking test. Like, it's not like you're doing delicate wand spells. The mechanical advantage of the stand mixer is not from some laser-guided precision; it's from sparing your poor body. Here you're replacing the vigorous whisking motion of a machine with the vigorous whisking motion of your elbow. It's really more of a fitness test, at that point, than it is a baking test.
KM: Yeah, I guess I can respect it from the perspective of a challenge since the cake is quite simple. It did make me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever made cake batter without an electric mixer, though. Even before I had the KitchenAid, I had a garbage handheld electric mixer. You know what mixing by hand seems really good for?
CT: For exhausting my damn ulnar collateral ligament!
KM: Yeah! Giving yourself damn Tennis Elbow!!
CT: The equipment restrictions were so severe for this test that we weren't even allowed to use piping bags. We had to make piping bags out of parchment paper!
KM: I want to admit that I did not read that piece of the instructions until later and I did in fact use piping bags. I apologize for my heresy.
CT: Because I do not view this part of the challenge as at all valuable as a test of baking skills, I do not consider this to have been an unfair advantage. If Prue needs to make her dumb sugar prism into a more challenging bake, simply reduce the time by 40 minutes! Don't make us arbitrarily destroy our kitchens like this!
KM: That is worth noting, I think. We were given two whole hours to make what was essentially an iced cake with sprinkles and a custard. All of the times have seemed generous this season, but this one especially so.
CT: I like it when a long timer feels suited to an ominous set of instructions, or like a very complicated-seeming bake. I like it less when I look at the ingredients and the method and cannot figure out at all how the task is supposed to take two whole damn hours of my life. This one filled the period with busywork.
Stage One: Mixing Batter, Baking
CT: So our first instruction was "Make the sponge batter by hand." What was your first step?
KM: I want to note something important here. Usually, we and the contestants are given measurements. On their little sheet, it tells them how many grams of sugar and flour and everything else to use, and so then we are also told this. This is the first time in the several years we have done this challenge that we were some but not all of the measurements. For the cake, we were only given one measurement: six eggs.
CT: This really fucked me up! I think I might even have felt less frazzled if the method had given us no egg quantities, but because it said six eggs I understood that I was supposed to know some fundamental ratio for cake batter, and to compute the rest in my brain. And buddy, my brain simply does not work that way.
KM: I had the same experience! Six eggs is … a lot of eggs!
CT: Too many eggs!
KM: I want to admit that my first thought here was about pound cake, which I think I misremembered entirely. In my heart, I believed that pound cake had equal quantities of butter and sugar and flour in it, and so I decided to do that. My first thought was that I would do 600 grams of each, because there were six eggs, and that felt nice to me. But then I began measuring my butter, and 400 grams of butter was almost a whole box of butter, and I did not really have enough butter to get to 600 grams, so I decided to do 400 grams each of butter and sugar and flour.
CT: OK, we came at this very differently. I intended to go cuppa-cuppa-cuppa mode for the flour, sugar, and butter, in the sense of using equal amounts of each. But the only thing I was really sure of was that I needed more flour than eggs. Like, a sheet-bake that is made mostly of eggs is a damn frittata.
KM: Hahaha! That’s a good thought. I didn’t even consider this. ALSO it annoyed me that the measurement was “six eggs” because usually they give us the eggs in grams too, since everyone’s eggs are different sizes. I also for the life of me could not remember any of the other cake recipes we had made. Like in my heart, I remember what the cake batter we made a few weeks ago looked like, and how it ended up, but I have no memory anymore of what was in it, or if it even had eggs.
CT: I will do a lot of griping about this recipe, but I do like this, in theory, as a challenge. Often, the challenges focus on the method, but a lot of the alchemical coolness of baking is in understanding not just how to stir ingredients together but the nature of their specific interactions. You can hang onto rules of thumb, but I imagine over time a good baker starts to understand why a sponge recipe that uses six eggs should have X amount of butter, or flour, or whatever, and what will happen, chemically, if it has more, or has less. I doubt I will ever get there, but I admire bakers who know this stuff.
In an effort to approach this thing scientifically, I cracked the eggs into a metal bowl over my food scale and found that six eggs is about 315 grams of egg material.
So then, to be sure that I had more flour than eggs, but lacking any other real sense of ratios, I settled on 365 grams as my target for flour, butter, and sugar. An arbitrary number, sure, but I felt sure that I would not wind up with a quiche.
KM: WOAH. This was so smart. It’s very funny that we ended up with almost exactly the same answer.
CT: Yeah I mean we're pretty close, 365 grams over here and 400 grams over there. As far as method goes, I first mixed the butter and sugar together with a rubber spatula, and then beat the eggs, and then stirred the eggs into the butter mixture.
KM: My method went to shit immediately, even though I did the same thing you did, because my butter was TOO COLD. I hadn’t taken it out early enough to warm up, and then I ended up using more than I originally thought, so it was not mashing into the sugar. It was so bad that I ended up plunging my hand in there and squishing everything around in the hopes that it would warm up a little from the heat of my hand.
This was a mistake, because then my hands were SO buttery, and I had to wash them with Dawn soap to make them not so buttery, and then later when I tried to pick up the Dawn soap it squirted out of my hand because it was so buttery, like a damn cartoon!
CT: So you were off to a roaring start! Five minutes in, and stuff is already flying all over.
KM: Roaring with misery!
CT: I had a somewhat smoother time. I did start to feel, though, as I mixed my flour into the egg mixture, that the ratios were not right. The batter felt very loose and very eggy. I was so worried that I was going to have a gross scrambled egg thing at the end. So I did wind up tipping into the bowl an extra hit of flour, although I did not measure this portion. I declined to top up with sugar and butter, reasoning there was probably some reason I'd creamed the sugar and butter together at the outset.
KM: Oh! I feel like because of my ratios, my batter was very thick, which I liked because I remembered those weird little cakes we made a few weeks ago and that batter was SO thick.
So I was happy with my chonky batter. But then I put it into my 9x13 glass baking tray (I did not have that big of a cake pan), and when I smoothed out the top, you could see little baby pats of butter not mixed in but just sitting there, and I felt a deep and overwhelming dread smother me.
CT: I'm looking at Prue's recipe now, and two things stand out to me: First, she warns against overmixing, so I think you were probably fine; second, Kelsey, you were right on the money with your amounts! 400 grams! Bingo Mode!
KM: Oh my god!!! Really?? WOW!!! SEND ME TO THE REAL FUCKIN’ TENT, BABY. To be clear, if I had had access to 600 grams of butter, I absolutely would have done that ratio, so in a way, I saved myself.
CT: That would've been one buttery-ass cake! It's clear to me, now, that my batter really was too loose, with 365 grams of flour to 315 grams of egg. So I'm glad that I added the extra flour, and I now wish I'd added the extra butter and sugar, too.
KM: Yeah! You were right, too! Your instincts! Okay, so we are geniuses, is what I’m hearing.
CT: The other thing we had to guess about was both the temperature of the oven and the amount of baking powder. I never know with these damn science ingredients, man. I just did a tablespoon of baking powder, and I set my oven to 325, using the dreaded High Bake setting for preheating purposes.
KM: What happened to me is, I tried to do a shortcut where I just tipped some baking powder into the bowl with the flour. But then probably 1/4th of a cup tumbled out, and then I just scooped what I thought was most of it out of the flour bowl and threw it away. So god only knows how much baking powder was in my cake. I set my oven to 350 and threw her in there.
CT: I remembered—thank God—to switch over to Convection Bake when my cake went into the oven. Otherwise it certainly would've burned to a cinder. I cannot stress this enough: 325 degrees under High Bake in my oven is approximately the temperature of the core of the Sun.
I set a timer for 30 minutes and spent the next couple of minutes cleaning up my countertops. It took me 25 minutes to get my batter into the oven, which felt like a very long time, but I couldn't figure out which of the next steps was supposed to take very long. Even with a relatively slow first step, I still felt like I had a very long time left to make a couple of icings and some custard.
KM: I also set my timer for 30 minutes and cleaned my countertops. It also took me a long time to get my butter pat cake into the oven. I was unhappy.
Stage Two: Making Sprinkle Goo, Making Icing
CT: Which goo did you make first? We had to make sprinkle goo, and we had to make icing goo, and then later we also had to make custard, which is goo.
KM: I made the top-of-cake goo because it seemed easy, and it was in fact easy to make. I felt satisfied by how easy it was. I just sifted 500 grams of icing sugar and then added water very slowly until it looked right. Then I immediately moved on to the sprinkle goo. Which did you begin with?
CT: I started with the sprinkle goo. I think my general style in cooking is to always go to the next most complicated thing, unless instructed otherwise. So I cracked some eggs and measured out 70 grams of egg whites. This is such an annoying thing, trying to precisely measure egg whites. Those slimy little fuckers resist! I got tired of trying to divide raw egg white and just went with approximately 80 grams.
KM: One thing I’m always amazed by is how differently we feel about the instructions. Three of my eggs made something like 98 grams of egg white, and then I just plunked my hand in there and pulled some out. Then it was 84 grams, and that was CLOSE ENOUGH FOR ME. My valuation of speed over accuracy is always coming back to haunt me.
CT: I love the image of you scooping out raw egg whites with your fingers. Gross!
KM: I know I would instantly be hated on the actual version of this show, because I am constantly doing stuff the stupidest way possible, because it’s faster. My hands are clean! I’m washing them constantly while we do this, maybe even too much. But it is not visually very delightful to watch someone dunk their hand into a mixing bowl and then return from it with goo that they throw into the sink before darting away.
CT: Just ribbons of raw egg white trailing everywhere while you twirl around in the kitchen. Powerful stuff.
We did so much sifting, once again. Would you say that your sifting method is improving with practice?
KM: They should really call this the Great British Sift Off. No! The only thing that has changed is I’m using a wider bowl now, which does catch more of the powdered sugar when I pour it into the sieve and then hit the sieve on the side of my hand to knock the powdered sugar into the bowl below.
CT: I wish I had a bigger sieve. I used to have a large one, but I killed it, and now I only have a medium one and a small one. Because of this, I can only sift about 250 grams of icing sugar at a time. But I do think that my method has gotten pretty good, to the point where I can load that sieve up and not worry about flinging icing sugar all over the place. I use a kind of rolling motion, controlled by my shoulder and elbow, and I can do it entirely one-handed.
KM: How does one kill a sieve? My sieve is probably seven inches in diameter.
CT: That's about the size of the one I killed. As I recall, I used it in a pinch for some sort of outdoor application and then left it outside, and then later stepped on it. It's all a bit hazy, now.
KM: RIP to your big sieve. I want you to send me a video of how you are doing this rolling motion so I can try it when we inevitably have to sift 1,100 grams of icing sugar next week.
CT: The sprinkles are made of whipped egg whites, sifted sugar, and food coloring. The whipping was arduous but satisfying, if you can get into meringues and so forth. I divided this goo into five bowls.
My colors for the sprinkle goo were red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. I had to concoct the green out of blue and yellow.
Also, you will notice from my photos of this bake that I got blue food coloring fucking everywhere, so that even my little squares of butter had blue fingerprints all over them. I hate food coloring, and I remain deeply annoyed that we have had to use so much food coloring and extract already this season.
KM: I found in my pantry, a little box of EASTER DYES which were light pink, light blue, and bright green. I used these to make a nice purple, and then I used the yellow from the normal box as an accent.
Incredibly, I also got blue food coloring on me, but what happened was I tried to peel that little seal off with my teeth, and then my mouth and my lip were covered in blue food coloring. HOT! FASHION WEEK! This is the trend for winter!
CT: All the TikTok kids are doing blue face! Get in on it now!
I also found the making of the icing to be pretty simple, apart from my arm just getting kind of stiff and tired from all the sifting.
I think somewhere in here I removed my cake from the oven?
I remember that at 30 minutes it was not finished baking, so I spun it around in there and gave it another maybe 10 minutes. How long was your sponge in there?
KM: My cake was also not done at 30 minutes. At 40 minutes it was almost done, but I gave it five more minutes because I wanted it to be a little more golden.
By the time it came out of the oven, I had finished mixing all the colors for my sprinkles and piping them onto butcher paper. I decided to pipe lines that could be cut into straight sprinkles and also dots that could be round sprinkles. I really wished that I could pipe star sprinkles, but we did not have this kind of time.
CT: Did you have any trouble getting your shapes right? Because I was using little loose parchment paper bags, my setup was a bit sloppier than I would've liked.
KM: No, because I used the piping bags and cheated by accident lol. How did you make the parchment paper bags?
CT: I was surprised by how easy this whole sprinkle-making process was, in the end. I just kind of put two loose folds into a sheet of parchment to create a point. My first couple of tries were no good but I got the hang of it once I started using smaller cuts of paper.
I didn't load up the parchment bags for quite a while, actually, because there would be nothing to stop the sprinkle goo from oozing everywhere.
KM: What’s so funny is how scared I was. The only other time we have piped something and then put it into the oven to “dry” was the caterpillar challenge, when all of my decorations burned to an absolute fucking crisp. This is how you know we are learning. After my cake came out, I put the sprinkles on their sheet trays just on the open door of the oven and turned the oven off. I did this because the instructions said “3. Remove the cake and leave the oven door open.” Once the oven was maybe 100 degrees, I put them in there. This worked great!
CT: That's about how I managed it, as well. I put parchment on a baking sheet and piped some lines and dots down on there.
Then, after my cake came out, I turned off the oven and left the door cracked. I didn't wait for the temperature to come down. I just put the baking sheet in there, but I kept an eye (and a nose) on it in case there was any burning.
I do not think people should start making their own sprinkles at home, because it's messy and silly and pre-made sprinkles cost the same as 400 grams of icing sugar and 70 grams of eggs, or less.
KM: I was also mad about this. I have so many sprinkles at my house, because I love sprinkles and think they are fun. And instead I made these janky sad sprinkles that were ugly and didn’t even have the nice crunch that the sprinkles I used on my donuts have.
CT: The sprinkles I have up in my pantry are so much more fun to eat than the ones I made for this bake. I guess I feel satisfied that I know how they are made and that I made them without incident, but this is not something I will be doing again, except maybe to entertain my child.
Stage Three: Making Custard
CT: At what point did you start in on your custard? I will admit here that I was not having a great time during this bake. I started at almost 9 p.m., I was very tired, the cake did not seem like something I would enjoy eating, and I weirdly had "The Raven" stuck in my head, so I kept muttering little cracks to myself about wanting some respite and nepenthe, and driving myself crazy.
So I started on the custard basically as soon as the icing was finished, before the sprinkles were out of the oven.
KM: NOT “THE RAVEN.” The custard pissed me the hell off. I did not want to make it. I did not want to eat it. I knew that I was just going to be throwing it away at the end. All of which contributed to me being GRUMPY McGRUMPERSON. But I also did it before my sprinkles were done. I warmed the milk on the stove, poured it slowly into the egg yolk/cornstarch/sugar/vanilla bowl, and then put the whole thing back over heat until it thickened up. This worked fine, and then I threw it away, so I cannot know whether or not I did it right. The only nice part about this was I got to use my beloved copper pot.
CT: My method was reversed very slightly: Instead of pouring milk into egg mixture, I poured egg mixture into milk while whisking furiously. I briefly lost control of this process and spilled some shit on my stove, but it was otherwise fine. Also, I made the decision here to use vanilla bean instead of vanilla extract, because I really have become sick of all the extracts. I consider vanilla extract to be the most upstanding of the extracts—this was merely an act of desperation.
KM: I want to admit that I did not even put vanilla extract into the custard because I knew no one in my home was going to eat it, and I did not want to use any more extract.
CT: The custard came together pretty nicely. I ate a few spoonfuls of it, because I was far more into the idea of eating custard than I was of eating this damn cake. It was custard. But I would say 90 percent of it was later thrown away.
KM: I just don’t care for custard.
CT: Once my custard was finished, I put my sponge into the freezer for a few minutes, to finish cooling it.
I think I still had almost 40 minutes left in my bake, but I wanted it over with. I realize this sounds downer-ish to fans of this series, but man, I was tired and I am not into Sugar Cake.
KM: What’s so funny about my bake this week is that I did it earlier than we usually do it, because I had worked Sunday Shift. So I started my bake at like 6:30 p.m., which meant that right around the time my custard was done, I was becoming very hungry. So while my cake was cooling and my custard was cooling, I began cooking my dinner. So hysterically, I made the assembly much harder for myself because I was also babysitting a nice garlic tomato lemon sauce for my orecchiette, whose water was beginning to boil.
CT: That could absolutely never have been me. For all my talk of mastering the art of sifting icing sugar, by this point in the bake my kitchen was a goddamn disaster area. Flour and sugar had gotten all over, I'd used so many bowls and spatulas that I had started to pull out random serving spoons for backup, and I had elements of this bake stashed all over the place. There was a gross pool of spilled orange sprinkle goo, and there was a spray of yellow, and I'd left blue fingerprints fucking everywhere.
KM: Oh to be clear there was still icing sugar EVERYWHERE. But I figured it wasn’t going to get cleaner when I began icing the cake, so I just continued forward. I was so hungry, and I knew the cake would not satisfy me. I even at this point trimmed the cake on the edges because the glass tray flared outward, and that didn’t seem correct for the school cakes.
I tried to eat these little edges because again, I was starving, but they were kind of dense and also I didn’t want them.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: Do you recall how much time you had left when you started the final assembly?
KM: I do, because I wanted to put the orecchiette into the pot, but they were going to take 14 minutes, and I only had 20 minutes left. So I began final assembly with 20 minutes left and waited until I was done to put my orecchiette into the pot.
CT: I found the icing step to be pretty satisfying. I dripped and drizzled it down on there, and then used an offset spatula to smooth it out to the edges. It looked great! I so badly wish this cake had any fucking flavoring at all. It would've been a delight to eat.
KM: Yeah, I also really liked this step, because the icing was less runny than I usually make it, and so it was easier to manipulate and make look nice. I really wish it had been chocolate icing or any flavor, because there was also something kind of off-putting about the white icing on the yellow cake. Not a beautiful vibe at all.
CT: Imagine if that icing had been, like, overpoweringly lemony. Wonderful!
KM: Oooooh. That is a really nice thing to imagine. OR! Imagine if the CAKE had been nice and lemony, and then the sugary icing was more of a balance.
CT: Instead it's just the taste of sugar. Curse you, Prue Leith!
KM: I also chopped up my sprinkles at this point and divided them into circles and little sticks. But then I decided to use both kinds of sprinkles. I just put them all over, and then put the cake back in the freezer to firm up before I cut it.
CT: I used my daughter's little wooden "knife" thing to chop up the sprinkles, being not at all careful to create consistent shapes.
I then stuck the tray of sprinkles back into the warm oven, because a couple of spots on there had the feeling of soft meringue. Which is funny, because I wound up using not even a quarter of the sprinkles I'd created, in the end.
KM: Oh! I did have one problem with the sprinkles. I cut the opening of the yellow sprinkles too big, so the lines of yellow sprinkles were too soft by the time I was ready to decorate. This was okay, because the yellow circle sprinkles were fine, so I used only the circles for the yellow ones. I made too many sprinkles also, which is crazy because I only piped maybe half of the icing I made because I was so certain I was going to burn the first batch, only for them to turn out fine.
CT: It's hard not to feel resentful about having sifted 400 grams of sugar for just this one step of the bake, and then to have no need for a solid 80 percent of the mixture. I want to hack the Bake Off website and warn other bakers not to waste all their damn resources!
KM: The ratios for icing this season have been WAY off. We’ve sifted so much icing sugar for no reason at all!
The Finished Product
CT: I had so much time left at the end of this bake. I was just moseying along.
KM: I also had a lot of time left at the end! I was all done with my cutting and plating with ten whole minutes left, and I had wasted at least 15 minutes in the middle of my bake making a tomato sauce for dinner and washing arugula for my pasta!
CT: I lost some time with the whole sloppy process of putting icing into piping bags made of parchment, but even then I had 15 minutes left when I was just cutting and plating the cake. I realize I could've spent a lot of this time working to be more precise. But I think everyone understands by now that I suck at precision, and also that I was in a horrendous mood, weak and weary, with nothing to quaff, anticipating no balm in Gilead.
Kelsey, would you like to show your School Cake?
KM: Sure! Here is my School Cake:
CT: Beautiful! I think you were wise to trim the edges, they looks so nice and uniform. Also your sprinkles are lovely.
KM: Thank you. I cannot wait to throw them away. Show your School Cake?
CT: Here is my School Cake:
KM: Omg I love these colors!! They remind me of Fruity Pebbles!
CT: I had the same thought! When they were in a big pile, I really did feel inspired to put them in a bowl with some milk. That would've been so disgusting.
KM: Yum! Sprinkle milk!
CT: Did you eat any of your School Cake?
KM: I took one bite of it with the icing and spit it out. It’s not for me. I don’t like sweets that much! I did NOT try it with the custard, because the thought of that upset me. Did you try yours?
CT: I did not, and I probably will not. I tried each of the constituent elements and learned enough to know that in sum they are: sweet. I did this bake Monday night, and when it was over I tossed the custard and went to bed. This afternoon, I'll give a slice of it to my child, but I have no interest in this thing. School Cake can go to hell!
KM: Another week, another weird British dessert that we don’t want to eat! Nothing is new under the sun!
CT: I have some good news, on that front: The Brits will not be able to avoid flavor next week.
KM: Oh no, is it a racist theme again?
CT: No racism that I can detect, so far. But you will be pleased to learn that next week is Chocolate Week! The challenges will be hellish, I'm sure, but at least we will have some chocolate to eat.
KM: WOW! With all the chocolate tempering we’ve already done this season, I forgot about chocolate week! IT BETTER NOT BE WHITE CHOCOLATE.
CT: You know damn well it will be white chocolate!
KM: NOOO. Well, see you next week!
CT: See you in hell!
