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.
It's nice having Nigella Lawson in the tent. She is cheerful and radiates serenity, and she takes those big glorious bites. She makes you want to bake and to eat. She even makes you want to share the things you bake with others, so that they too can take a huge cheek-bulging bite of something messy and crumbly and you two can giggle together at the decadence of it all.
But! Something strange has happened in the Nigella era: She and Paul Hollywood have combined, through three weeks, to present this season's contestants with precisely zero actual recipes for their technical challenges. For her first ever technical, Nigella asked the bakers to make her version of a Coffee and Walnut Layer Cake, using only a description of the cake and a pile of ingredients. Paul got into the act with his first technical, presenting the contestants with a small plate of Iced Gem cookies and demanding that they be recreated from sight and taste.
For her second technical bake, for this week's confusing, slapdash-ish theme, Nigella upped the ante and challenged the bakers to make whatever the hell leapt into their imaginations when presented with a cupboard full of a diverse selection of ingredients. Annoyingly, this meant that the bakes could not be judged against one another in any coherent way. Even the weekly signature and showstopper bakes present a set of criteria, or a basic outline. This was just a pantry. What the hell?
We here at the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off are a freedom loving bunch, but it turns out we have been trained and conditioned to perform to the traits and contours of a model. Now we are like art students who show up to paint a vase and are instead told to just make something compelling, something arresting, a visual tour de force. But what if our brains don't work that way? What if, like a recent advice-seeker, we have been pursuing one mandate, steadfastly and virtuously, to the extreme detriment of our potential along an entirely distinct developmental vector? What if we have no imagination left? You did this to us, Paul Hollywood! How dare you alter the program now!
After a short period of intense garment rending, we calmed down a little and looked in our pantries and realized that the answer was simple enough—was, in fact, simplicity itself. Since we are being judged by no one but ourselves (or at least, no one we cannot ban from the comments section) the question was, really, what do we want to eat? And could it be made in two hours? You're damn right it could.
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! Weird challenge this week. It is starting to feel like Paul and Nigella simply do not want to write down recipes anymore, and will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid doing so.
Kelsey McKinney: Hello Chris! I genuinely thought that we would not be able to complete this challenge because the haters and losers (my dear friends who love this series) reached out to me to say that they were "concerned" and "worried" about how we would be able to manage. Because of this, I assumed we would have to make something like a caramel sculpture. Boy, was I wrong!
CT: The theme this week was Audience Choice, and the technical bake was, uhh, to open a cabinet and observe the ingredients within and then to make something out of them. Less a technical challenge than a test of improvisation. In fact, not really a technical challenge at all!
KM: It was basically Chopped, which is actually a completely different show.
CT: Very confusing to try to reconcile a challenge that is Baker's Choice with a theme that is Audience Choice.
KM: I also found it a little daunting because to me, so much of what I dislike about baking and what people harp on is how precise it's supposed to be. I have a bad memory! And part of why I am an inconsistent baker in general is that I'm not very precise. This challenge has made me a lot better at that, but now what? Now I'm supposed to just remember a recipe and make it? What is this? My regular life?
CT: Yeah I struggle a lot with rules of thumb for, for example, ratios of flour to baking powder, or flour to fat, or flour to sugar. I do not always have the ability to just reliably recall these wisdoms, or really any other wisdoms. If you tell me I have to make a cake, that gets me somewhere. If you just say "open your pantry and go off," the first thing I experience is complete overwhelm.
KM: Yeah, to be honest, I don't have any of those things memorized. It's just not how my brain works. I also can't memorize, for example, conjugations in another language. I have to just learn them the slow, terrible way of living.
CT: So, Kelsey, peering into your pantry, what did you have, and what did you decide to bake?
KM: Well, what I had were apples! The apples came last week in my CSA box, and even though we had eaten many of them, there were still so many left. One of the only things I have baked consistently for my entire life is apple pie, so I decided to do that because I know it tastes good and I thought I could do it within the two-hour time limit. What did you have and decide to bake?
CT: I also had apples! My daughter loves green apples. Or rather, she loves the idea of green apples: She loves to take three bites of a green apple and pucker her face and say, "Whew, that is a sour apple!" And then to leave a partially eaten apple in some random place in the house.
KM: She's just like me, for real. I also love to do that. As her lawyer, it seems like she's just sharing her apples with you, which is generous if you think about it.
CT: I had all the usual baking stuff. But, crucially, I did not want to make apple pie. I am in a bit of a pie rut, I think. The last two fruit pies that I made came out kind of poorly. So, because I was feeling gun-shy about pies, I decided to make a cobbler. I realize that cobbler is not exactly pâtisserie-grade baking, but a good cobbler can blow a person's hair back, and I felt reasonably confident that I could make a respectable one on vibes.
KM: God I love cobbler. It's the best!!! I think it's pretty funny that when given free-range and opportunity we chose quite American pastries. Our culture is real!
CT: U-S-A! U-S-A!
So there was no shopping for this week, for me. I had apples, I had baking stuff, I had a lemon and some cider for backup liquids. It was nice not to need to do a grocery run.
KM: No shopping for me either, though I only had red apples. I usually use green apples for apple pie, but I decided that it was probably whatever. The only other things I needed were basic shit like flour, 100 kinds of sugar, apple cider vinegar, some spices, butter, and oatmeal. I had all of these things.
CT: I have been curious about your apple pie stylings for a while now, so I was very excited to have this opportunity to follow along. The famous apple pie of Kelsey McKinney!
KM: I too am excited to follow along because I love cobbler and never make it. It doesn't exist in my subconscious, so I don't think I actually know how to make it. I'm not sure I ever have! We will learn together, which is beautiful to me.
Stage One: Kelsey Makes Pie Dough, Chris Preps Apples
CT: I assume your first item of business, after the start of the timer, was to begin making dough?
KM: Yes, correct. I immediately began my dough. Luckily, I do have the double pie dough recipe memorized because I've made so many pies in my life. But it's funny because I always use the kitchen scale for our challenges, but I don't in my mind. So I threw 2.5 cups of flour, some salt, some sugar, and two chopped up sticks of butter into a bowl and smushed all the butter in with my hands. Then I got some ice water and poured the apple cider vinegar into it, and doused that into my dough until it came together.
CT: I love this. I love the appearance of vinegar in this recipe.
KM: I think at one point my pie dough recipe was baked off the Four and Twenty Blackbirds cookbook, but it has since evolved to vibes. I also definitely put more vinegar in my ice water than they do.
CT: I do not think I've ever put vinegar into pie crust!
KM: Well you don't end up with actually that much in the crust, because it goes in the ice water and then you use as little of that as possible. But I don't like my desserts to be so, so sweet and this pie has so much sugar in it. What did you do first?
CT: I knew that I was going to make my cobbler topping from drop biscuits, and the whole appeal there is that you rough the dough together quickly, so I didn't have to start on that for a while. My first task was to core, peel, and chop eight apples.
Next I mixed the chopped apples in a bowl with sugar and more sugar and some spices and salt. I wanted my apples to be very spiced and for them to be sort of caramelized in the cobbler, really dark and soft.
KM: God, that sounds so good. What kind of spices did you use for your sugar mix?
CT: Nothing very surprising. I grated some nutmeg down in there, and then I threw a whole stick of cinnamon into the spice mill and chucked that in there, and then I also milled some cloves and dumped that as well. Then there was a little splash of vanilla extract.
I learned something cool about cobbler, within the last year or so: Cobbler is basically the opposite, culinarily, of shortcake. Shortcake is made with the freshest fruit at its absolute peak of ripeness, the best, highest quality fruit you can get. You don't cook the fruit in shortcake. But cobbler is specifically something you do with, like, last week's fruit. Which is why it's so sugared and spiced and softened. So when I've made cobbler I've really run wild with that permission.
KM: Whoa! This makes sense to me because I feel like I often think of cobbler as being made with canned goods. Like my grandmother made cobbler with canned peaches, which is just a different kind of baking than shortcake. That's a fun revelation and also an exciting one!
CT: Another decision I made early on was to use a cast-iron skillet and do a lot of the cooking on the stovetop.
KM: Wow yes! This feels like home to me, hearing you say this. I feel like cast-iron skillet cobbler on the grill was a very common thing where I grew up, and now I never ever have it. Very unfair and hurtful. Also, a cast-iron skillet just looks SO good on a table.
CT: This skillet method was related to my recent pie failures: I just did not feel confident that I could get the textures I wanted inside my oven, so I wanted to be actively cooking the apples. I also read in a recent edition of Buffet Magazine something that stuck with me: Soft things should be baked in round vessels. And I find that I completely accept and endorse this wisdom.
KM: Wow. I love that. I really find a square pie off-putting, so this makes sense to me. I agree!
CT: So the Slack record says that you had your pie dough chilling after just 12 minutes of work. You're a machine!
KM: Yeah, I knew I could do it fast because I didn't have to think, but my arms were tired when the pie dough went in the freezer. I knew I wanted to prioritize the dough being in the freezer for as long as possible on this first sit. Usually, when I make pies, I make the dough at night, and let it freeze overnight before I deal with it the next day. But I did not have this kind of time! I had two hours. So I decided 30 minutes would have to do, and in the meantime I peeled all my apples with a knife.
Now I will tell you something insane, are you ready?
CT: I love insane things.
KM: As I cut my apples into little slivers, I threw them into a bowl of liquid to sit for five minutes before removing them onto paper towels.
Do you want to guess what the liquid is?
CT: Could it be ... vinegar?
KM: WRONG! It's Sprite! Sprite keeps the apples from browning too much. I don't know how, and it's not my business. I've done this forever and I'm sure there are better ways to do it, but this is what I do. This was also nice because then I got to drink a Sprite, which is so good.
CT: Whoa! With 1,000 guesses I would never have made it to Sprite. What I love about this is how vibes-forward our baking maneuvers already are in this challenge. We do not understand the science of the Sprite soak, but we know that it works, dammit.
KM: They left us alone! Without instructions! Chaos mode!
Stage Two: Kelsey Confronts Saggy Lattice, Chris Takes Two Whacks At Biscuit Dough
CT: So at this point you have dough in the freezer and apples soaking in Sprite.
KM: Correct.
CT: What's next?
KM: I then throw together my spice mix to toss the apples in when they are ready to go into the pie dough (not yet). That's just sugar with cinnamon, nutmeg, a little allspice, and some ground ginger. I was feeling fancy so I did put lemon zest in there, but to be honest, you can't taste that at all and I think it was a waste. What did you do next?
CT: I was stirring a huge pile of apples around in my skillet, keeping the heat pretty high and waiting for them to soften.
At one point I squeezed some lemon in there, and at another point I poured half a glug of cider.
KM: Did it smell so good? I imagine it smelled really good. Wow, I love cider.
CT: I adore the smell of cooking apples. It's one of my very favorite smells. What I wanted in the pan was for there to be a pretty decent amount of liquid, because I planned to add a slurry toward the end of this phase and hopefully come out with something thick and sort of caramel-ish to coat all the apples.
KM: Can you explain to me what kind of texture you were looking for at this point? Like did you want the apples to begin to mush?
CT: Not quite mush, I still wanted them to hold their form, but kind of like that translucent stage of cooking onions, the not-quite-halfway-point on the road to caramelization. My theory was that an eventual 30 to 40 minutes of baking would get them from there to a nice dark caramelized mushiness. I know this is somewhat offensive to true apple-pie connoisseurs but one of my guilty pleasures is really smushy caramelized apple filling.
KM: Yeah, I do not prefer a super mushy apple, personally, but I understand that cobbler is different and I would like to eat this smush carmelized filling! I was personally feeling very chaotic because at some point in the first 30 minutes while my pie dough was freezing, I realized that my pie would need at absolute minimum 45 minutes in the oven, and that meant that I actually only had one hour to work and get everything done to go in the oven.
CT: Yikes!
KM: I don't know why I didn't consider this earlier, or why, knowing that, I continued with my plan, which was to do a double topped pie: a crumble top underneath a lattice top. Probably, I should have not done this, but whatever. I was going insane.
CT: I really dig the theory of this pie, because while I sincerely enjoy a crumble top I have a real romantic love for the lattice top.
KM: Me too! And in my opinion, we can have it all. So I made my crumble top, which was just melting a stick of butter and then adding brown sugar, salt, and oatmeal to it until the felt the correct texture to me in my heart, and then setting that to the side to firm up a little bit.
CT: Am I correct to assume that you did not do any pre-cooking of your apples?
KM: That's correct. My Sprite apples were now just sitting on the counter, on paper towels. I did not even mix them with their sugar mix because I didn't want them to get too soft, and I had cut them pretty thin.
CT: One thing I would like to ask: How do you go about managing the moisture content of a fruit pie? This is where my pies most often fail, and I have never settled on a reliable method.
KM: Well my apples were sitting on paper towels, so they were becoming dryer by the minute, and they were sitting out for maybe 20 minutes. I do think this helps. Also because I am making a lattice top, that allows more moisture to escape the pie, instead of getting stuck in there inside the heavy top crust. I do have "pie birds," and I use those when I want to make a full topped pie.
CT: Pie birds are super cute. There should be more food birds, in my opinion. Why can't we have baked potato birds?
KM: I agree! I realized that I needed to hustle a little, so I pulled my bottom crust out of the freezer after it froze for only 20 minutes, and rolled it out, and put it in the pie pan, and threw her back in the freezer.
I then rolled out the second dough to turn into strips, for the lattice.
I had all my stuff to assemble, but I knew it would take a minute to do the lattice, and I was stressed. What was happening with you?
CT: Once I was happy with the texture of my apples, I stirred a slurry in there and gave the mix another couple of minutes of strong heat to thicken up some.
I then began to make the dough for the drop biscuits. One thing I want to note is that the last time I made cobbler it was a berry cobbler, and I had a recipe in front of me, and it was tasty but not exactly right, so I was feeling very nervous about this phase of the bake.
KM: Did you have any flour or cornstarch in your mixture? Any thickening agent this time?
CT: Yeah the slurry was cornstarch and cider, whisked together. The drop biscuits obviously have flour, and I knew they would have baking powder, but this is one of those things where my brain simply will not retain the appropriate ratio of baking powder to flour.
KM: Yes, OK. That makes sense to me. What exactly was wrong with the berry cobbler that you made?
CT: The biscuits wound up unevenly baked and took long enough to finish that the parts that finished first got pretty dark, to the point of burning. Paul would've used the word "caught" and I would've retreated to a restroom and sobbed.
This time I at least knew that I would need to rotate the cobbler pretty regularly to keep an eye on uneven baking, but I had also guessed at the oven temperature. I figured the skillet would at least make it somewhat easier to actively manage the bake, because it is shallow and circular and easy to maneuver around in there.
KM: Yes, another point for the round things argument. Also it's fun to spin a skillet around.
CT: For the drop biscuits I started with a cup of flour and I decided that a teaspoon of baking powder looked like enough. I added some granulated sugar to make sure that the biscuits were a little sweet, and some salt.
I then chopped up a stick of cold butter and started adding it a bit at a time, doing the rub-in method and just sort of waiting to see what happened, texturally. I wound up using a little bit less than a full stick to get to the clumped-sand texture that I remember from other baking adventures. I added little splashes of milk at this stage, to make it into a sort of clumpy, sticky, butter laden dough that could be spooned.
KM: I genuinely don't know what happens if you add too much baking powder. It feels like an imperfect science to me, and this seems like it should have worked great to me. Did you taste the dough?
CT: I did not. It honestly didn't occur to me to taste it, because I was more concerned with texture and with, like, science things having to do with making biscuits rise. When I was done forking the dough together I looked at it in the bowl and it was obviously not nearly enough.
KM: Noooo! Nightmare!
CT: I was feeling quite frantic at this moment. I spooned the first batch of dough into another bowl and quickly repeated what I'd just done, but without measuring anything or even carefully eyeballing it, just in a tremendous hurry.
I'm glad I'd been going vibes mode the first time because it was possible to just say, "Ah, yeah, that seems close enough," and not confront the feeling that things had gone far off the rails. I combined the two blobs and prepared to gloop the dough onto the apples. I was somewhat concerned that the apples had basically filled the skillet to the brim and there was little room for biscuit topping, but it was too late to do anything about that except place a baking sheet under the pan in the oven.
KM: Yum! Gloop!
CT: Were you now working on your lattice? Or, when in the process does that start?
KM: Yes. Once I had cut out all the strips, I removed the bottom crust from the freezer, tossed my apples in a bowl with handfuls of the sugar mixture until they looked evenly coated, and then dumped those into the pie crust and smushed them down with my hands.
Then, I spooned my oatmeal situation on top of the apples. Now the pie was full and I could begin my lattice.
A lattice, though, is always kind of a nightmare in that I have never once cut the right amount of strips at the right lengths and always end up having to smush some of them back together and re-roll them back out and cut them again. So I did this all very frantically, and by then my lattice top was kind of saggy because it was warm! No!
CT: No!
KM: We hate that! So I put the whole damn pie in the freezer and set a timer for five minutes because that was literally all I had before it absolutely needed to go in the oven.
CT: Re-doing any step in a two-hour bake is terrifying. They should make the opposite of a hair dryer, a little hand-operated freezing gun, so you could just blast ice-cold air onto the top of your pie.
KM: WOW GOOD IDEA. I want one. Because I knew I was going to be tight on time, I also upped the oven temperature to 425 for the first 15 minutes of the bake. While my five minutes of freezing were happening, I made an egg wash and stared at the bag of Demerara sugar. Should I put it on top of my pie dough? I was not sure. I had never done this before but I do love demerara sugar.
CT: I love a coarse sugar crystal. I'm not sure I've ever used Demerara? Is it the same as turbinado? In any case you cannot go wrong with crunchy sugar on a baked thing, to me.
KM: I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same as turbinado, but who knows. I decided: I like the crunch and I shall use it, so when my pie came out of the freezer I brushed it quickly with egg wash, sprinkled the fat sugars on top of it, and into the oven it went. Goodbye, girl!
Stage Three: Baking
CT: So we're both in the oven now. My oven was set to 400 degrees but you really never know how it will interpret these commands. I used some of this time to clean up a pretty wrecked kitchen. The other thing I did—and this is a trick I learned from someone else's berry cobbler recipe—is I made a little syrup on my stovetop, using cider and granulated sugar.
The idea is to brush this stuff onto the biscuit topping at the midway point of the bake, so that when the cobbler is finished it'll have a kind of shiny, crackly top coat that is good to look at and good to eat. This was my only gesture at presentability.
KM: My kitchen was covered in flour. Just a ridiculous amount of flour. I don't even really know where it came from!
CT: You had about, what, 50 minutes or so for baking?
KM: I had 54 minutes when my pie went in the oven, and I knew I was going to need every fucking one of them. I decided to leave my pie in for 30 of those minutes at 425 checking it pretty frequently to make sure it wasn't burning. And then I dropped the temperature to 375 for the last 24 minutes.
CT: I first gave my cobbler 15 minutes at 400, spinning it a couple of times along the way. Then it needed three or four minutes before the top seemed firm enough for me to interrupt the bake with a brushing of syrup.
KM: You made a smarter choice with something that needed less bake time. I was so anxious while my pie was in the oven for the first 30 minutes, but then my house started to smell really, really good, and then I didn't care anymore.
CT: Yes, OK, a real advantage of this cobbler is that the topping is being heated from the bottom by the precooked apples and from the top and side by the heat of the oven, so it doesn't need quite as much time in there. After I'd brushed the biscuit topping with syrup I put it back in there and set a timer for 20 minutes. My cobbler went into the oven a little earlier in sequence than your pie—I didn't have to do latticework, after all—so I had plenty of time. I knew that the timer would not be an issue. I just had to get the cobbler baked evenly and fully.
Your lattice was doing OK in there? The saggy lattice freaks me out a little.
KM: The lattice was FINE. Once it became cold in the freezer, it had more integrity. And another benefit of the crumble top under the lattice is that it gives the lattice a little more structural integrity than it has otherwise. I also put SO MANY apples in there, because I did not want it to decrease in volume and smush down.
CT: Ah that makes sense, a little gravel base to sit on.
I had also used a lot of apples, and predictably, as the biscuit topping expanded and the apple mixture heated up the liquid started to overtop the sides of the skillet and pour down onto the baking sheet I'd put underneath.
KM: Oh no! Thank god you put the baking sheet under it! I also had a baking sheet under my apple pie because I was not confident that my lattice was going to hold the seep in. Safety first!
CT: How much time was left on your timer when your pie came out of the oven? And how were you feeling about it at this moment?
KM: Dude, I stood in front of the oven, with the timer ticking down, and I removed my pie at the five second mark. I knew it would not need any plating, so I waited until the very last second. Honestly, my pie looked great! I was happy!
CT: Oh my God! Five seconds! My cobbler came out of the oven with almost 20 minutes left in the bake. I'd been stabbing it pretty regularly with a wood skewer, and spinning it often, and the bake was so satisfyingly even. I also felt extremely happy!
The Finished Product
CT: Kelsey, are you prepared to show pie?
KM: Here is my pie:
The lattice is wonkier than I would like, but I am still proud of her.
CT: Oh, that is a gorgeous pie. That is exactly what I imagine if you say to me the words "apple pie." I assume it tastes just as great as it looks?
KM: It tastes really good to be honest. I ate it for breakfast today! Show cobbler?
CT: Here is my cobbler:
KM: OH MY GOD!!!! It looks incredible. Spoon food!
CT: Yeah, it's really good. I'm super pleased with the bake, the topping came out crumbly and delicious, and it has the goo factor that I crave.
KM: I gotta admit, I think we smashed this. Star bakers!
CT: We truly dominated our foes in the tent. And even if we did not, we have delicious apple desserts in our kitchens.
KM: That's what winning really tastes like (apples baked really nice). What kind of hell will we be forced to enter next week Chris?
CT: Roll up your sleeves and warm up those elbows, Kelsey, because we have arrived at Bread Week!
KM: LET'S FUCKING GO! I can't wait.
