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.
The penultimate week of each season of The Great British Bake Off is devoted to pâtisserie-style baking. The technical challenge for this season's Pâtisserie Week was to produce judge Paul Hollywood's Framboisier. A framboisier, we have learned, is a take on a classic French fraisier cake. A fraisier is made with two layers of genoise sponge, sandwiched around fresh strawberries and pastry custard, and then topped, sometimes with whipped cream, sometimes with jelly, sometimes with marzipan, and then more of that fresh fruit. A framboisier differs from a fraisier, knowers of French will have already figured out, because the former is made with raspberries instead of strawberries.
A fraisier is always good to look at. It's an open-sided cake, and it has a classic line of sliced strawberries ringing its middle layer; the custard—usually either créme mousseline or créme diplomat—is piped carefully around and over the strawberries, giving the cake a nice zig-zag flag look. With a blanket of something smooth layered over the top sponge and then some artfully arranged fruit, maybe some delicate little sugar decorations, it can have a certain elegant beauty. Mary Berry, former longtime judge of The Great British Bake Off, has a signature fraisier topped with white marzipan, sliced strawberries, and "pretty decorations of your choice" made with melted dark chocolate. It has that particular quality of Mary Berry bakes, where it looks unfussy enough to be hauled out of a picnic basket, but also carefully made and lovely. It is hard to make a bad-looking fraisier.
Paul Hollywood's framboisier, by comparison, is pretty gaudy. It's topped with green-dyed marzipan and then a huge pink flower made out of pink-dyed modeling paste, plus piped whipped cream, and then is further topped by a clear glass dome made of modeled sugar. The dome and the flower are technically edible, but anyone whose palate advanced after the age of five will find them revolting. The modeling paste used to make the flower gains its structure from starch and a huge volume of gelatin, which give it a texture that can best be described as "chalk, but chewy." The dome is made of melted glucose syrup, for all intents and purposes a crafting material that tastes like sugar as it might be imagined by ChatGPT. These things are not meant to be eaten; they are only made out of edible things in case you accidentally get any part of them into your mouth while eating the cake buckling beneath them.
That's the spirit of Pâtisserie Week. By this point in the season the remaining bakers have proven that they can make things that taste good and look good. Now the judges want to see which of them can make things that would be eye-popping wonders in the display case of a world-class bakery. Paul's framboisier is gorgeous! It might be the fussiest thing ever made, the only truly tasty thing in there might be raw raspberries, it might be topped by ostentatious decorations that are fit for human consumption only in the very most technical sense, but it looks great. Would our own framboisiers rise to this standard? Would they rise at all? And what the hell is this dome business?
An Important Note From The Extremely Cool Bakers: The prize for Defector's 2025 Tip Jar Drive is the rare and infinitely precious opportunity to join us for one of these bakes, which we ourselves have described as "nightmarish," "hellish," and "the worst thing we have ever done," but also "fun." Read about that here!
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! Good morning to you! How are you feeling today, after yesterday's epic bake?
Kelsey McKinney: Good morning, Chris! I feel tired in my body! What a marathon! How are you feeling?
CT: I feel worn out and achy. I think yesterday was the longest time I have ever spent baking in my life. And this was not one of those sit-around-and-watch-the-timer bakes. We were going full-speed the entire time!
KM: No, you're right! It was a two-and-a-half hour bake, which we have had plenty of this season, but there were so many things to make and so rapidly! There was a lot of pivoting. We are basically in the NBA.
CT: I am Chet Holmgren now. Also, unlike in other bakes, this time we had to do a lot of pre-bake preparation, which turned out to be a real challenge. Kelsey, have you ever made fondant before? And what is your opinion of fondant?
KM: My opinion on fondant is: GET AWAY FROM ME SATAN!!!!! It tastes bad. I don't like how stiff it is, and frankly, I don't think a cake should be that smooth. I had never made fondant before because why on earth would I do that when I can simply make buttercream?
CT: For background: This cake required the use of something that the ingredients referred to as "modeling paste," for the making of a huge pink flower to sit atop our bake. We looked this up and you discovered that there is an edible modeling paste used for decorations, and that it is basically fondant, or very like fondant, in that it tastes revolting but is technically edible.
KM: It was an INGREDIENT! Not in the method! But none of the three (3) grocery stores I went to to try and find ingredients for this bake had "modeling paste."
CT: So we decided to make it! Which, props to us! This was a bold and daring stroke, I thought.
KM: Well, your beautiful wife did allow us to see a photo of the insane cake we were required to make this week, and the flower was really prominent. It's a big fondant flower that sits on the top of the cake, (theoretically) under a big sugar dome. It felt like we needed the flower.
CT: There was no faking the flower. It's the highlight of the cake. So the morning before the bake—we baked Monday afternoon—we each had to make a batch of this weird fondant paste.
Pre-Bake: Making Fondant
CT: The recipe you found for this stuff wasn't very weird, in that it is mostly just icing sugar and corn syrup. There were a couple of optional weird ingredients, though: cream of tartar (not super weird) and something called Tylose powder. I have no idea what the hell that is. The internet seems suspiciously light on genuine information, but I gather that it is synthetic, and I suspect that it is From Hell.
KM: The recipe I found came from Robert's Cakes and Cooking blog. Thank you, Robert, whoever you are. It seemed easy enough. MISTAKE. But he really explained it very thoroughly.
CT: I liked Robert's blog! Robert is a good blogger, in my opinion.
KM: I agree! There were several points in this recipe that I would think this must be wrong. But then in Robert's blog it would say that that part would be particularly hard and I would feel better. Thank you, Robert!
CT: Robert gave me confidence to just stick with it, which was crucial because the substance that you encounter when you make this modeling paste feels like it should not exist on earth.
The first step is just to melt gelatin with corn syrup in water.
KM: Everyone is going to be mad at me immediately, here. But I could not find any light corn syrup. That is why I had to go to three (3) different grocery stores and one (1) bodega. So I didn't even have corn syrup. So I melted gelatin in water with agave syrup? It didn't seem like it would be that different to me.
CT: Whoa! I feel like my grocery store has so much Karo Syrup, all the time. Maybe my store hijacked all the Philadelphia-bound Karo Syrup? Investigate?? I-Team assemble???
KM: I know! It was crazy!! It's the first time in my life I have not been able to find Karo Syrup in the light flavor. There was plenty of dark syrup!
CT: I have never used agave syrup. I assume it has basically the same properties as light corn syrup? These things are all science.
KM: It's kind of like honey? So it definitely has sticky and sugar in it. Whatever, I used it. Weirdly, though, it disappeared. After I used it, I could not find it again! So later when I wanted to make my sugar dome (lol; lmao even) it was nowhere to be found. Reader, if you stole my agave syrup, please give it back.
CT: Speaking from my own awful experience, no amount of syrup was likely to produce a sugar dome. But we'll get to that later!
For now, I would like to note that our modeling paste was supposed to be "fuchsia pink." For this reason, I added drops of pink food coloring to the melted mixture in my saucepan. Is this what you did as well?
KM: No, it was not. That was very smart of you. What I did was wait until the end to add food coloring, which I regret deeply. Once the syrup and gelatin were mixed, we poured it into icing sugar with a little bit of cream of tartar in it and "mix[ed] it together with a knife" according to Robert's recipe. This worked well enough for me, and what it ended up with was a kind of thick icing that we were supposed to let rest for one hour.
CT: My goop, at this stage, was pink, the texture was very slimy, and I really did not care for the melted gelatin smell of it. It reminded me of neon-colored slime that they used to sell from coin-operated vending machines, back when I was a kid. Fun to play with! Very gross! Not something you would ever consider eating.
KM: The smell was unbelievable. I literally thought something was burning in my oven because it smelled so bad. It is what I imagine a chemistry lab smells like if someone fucks something up. Not good at all! So I was happy to leave it for an hour. But then at the end of the hour, I came back and was VERY upset to find that the goop had solidified into a very upsetting texture. How would you describe this?
CT: That moment was so incredibly unpleasant, for me. It was as firm and rubbery as cartilage. Not quite a bicycle tire, but very firm, with a nasty, fleshy give to it. You could imagine this thing flopping out of a fishing net on a deep sea trawler in a Lovecraft story, and the fisherman's hair flashing white all at once. It was impossible to imagine it ever becoming icing, or truly edible.
KM: You know the fat cap on top of like a pork shoulder or other big hunk of meat? It felt like if you blitzed that in a food processor and then stuck it back together using Elmer's Glue that was still kind of wet. Trying to get it out of the bowl, even, was a nightmare. It was so bad.
CT: Yes, it was like aspic, but even more solid, and with a powerful gelatin smell. So vile. And we had to tug it out of the bowl and then knead into it—not stir, but knead—another huge portion of sifted icing sugar. I could not believe how nasty this was. I would like to know about the first person who ever made fondant. That person was very sick in the mind.
KM: The instructions (thank you, Robert) said "this will require quite a bit of effort and the mixture will be a bit rough and lumpy, but keep at it, it seems like it will not all combine, but it does … eventually." I did not realize how ominous this was until I tried to work the first bit of icing sugar into my fondant and it took a dozen kneads to get a tablespoon of icing sugar to mix in.
CT: I had tripled the recipe, on Robert's recommendation, and so I was at this kneading stage for more than an hour, sifting sugar onto this disgusting pink brain and then slapping it and smushing it and stretching it and squishing it back into itself, afraid all the time that it would dry out if I walked away (or, worse, skitter into the crawl space of my home and undertake some unholy metamorphosis) and I would have to start over.
KM: I had doubled the recipe. I also consider myself a really good kneader because of my history of making bread and also my history of kneading clay. This was unbelievably hard to knead. The tendon in my forearm that is always getting sprained was popping out after like 20 minutes. So I (an athlete) put on my ice sleeve and continued kneading.
What was crazy is that it was all impossible and felt like it was not getting any better or easier until the very end when all of a sudden, it was fondant? Did it feel like this to you?
CT: Ha! I had the same experience. Every few minutes I would laugh or sob and think that it was just never going to work, and then the words of Robert would echo in my mind, and I would just keep going, and then toward the end I was like, Shit, man, this is becoming fondant!
I should note here that I swiped a couple tiny measures of Crisco into my fondant along the way, also per Robert's recommendation, and each time I did that it bought me a few minutes of peace because, thus fed, the blob would loosen up just a little bit.
KM: Oh! I did not do this because I was worried about the timing and Robert warned that adding the Crisco might slow the drying time.
CT: I also worried about this, and I wasn't going to do it, but then the kneading was just so outrageous that I felt like I had to. I'm glad I had the tub of Crisco nearby.
KM: The real problem was that once my fondant became fondant, I needed to add food coloring to it, so then my whole counter and also both my hands were COVERED in pink food coloring.
I tried to warn you to wear gloves for this to help you avoid my hell, but you had avoided this entirely. Because of this problem, though, I did learn a cool new hack which is that shaving cream takes off food coloring.
CT: What!
KM: I know! Exciting hack I learned because my hands were ENTIRELY pink.
CT: My hands were not dyed pink but they were pretty well covered in sticky pink slime, and there was a huge mess of semi-dried pink pebbles all over my counter and floor. After I got my fondant into a sandwich bag I had a hateful cleanup job, which was super disheartening because I had already done so much cleaning in preparation for this intense bake. That's part of what made this such a long bake: The cleanup job, throughout, was unbelievable.
KM: The cleanup was ridiculous!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: Shall we finally discuss the other ingredients for this bake? There were so many ingredients.
KM: After several bakes in a row where all we needed was like sugar and flour and baking powder, this list felt humongous. We had acquired the molding paste by sweat, blood, and tears. But I also did not have another important ingredient for this bake: raspberry liqueur.
CT: Which is a pretty big deal, when you consider that the cake is called a framboisier and is meant to feature raspberry flavors!
KM: Yeah, well listen. Pennsylvania has stupid liquor laws and I did not want to go to the state store after my three grocery trips, so I DIY'd my fake raspberry liqueur by simply smashing up some raspberries in a little boiling water, and adding vodka and a little bit of raspberry vinegar to that and letting it sit on the counter. This seemed fine to me! It tasted like raspberries!
CT: When you first told me of this, I laughed out loud and shook my head and thought that you'd gone insane. But now, having done the bake and thought it through, I actually think this was fine and good.
KM: To my credit, the recipe called for TWO TABLESPOONS of the liqueur, which is really not that much, and it was turning into a syrup. Also I made a lot of my weird vodka liqueur and I had some mixed with soda water afterward and it tasted good.
CT: Right, it's not like the raspberry liqueur was some central ingredient. A very little bit of it went into a syrup, to be used to soak the genoise sponge. You made a little raspberry cordial of your own, and it tasted raspberry-ish, and that's good enough, dammit!
I, on the other hand, have a bottle of Chambord on my little liquor stand thing, and it is mostly full, and this was a nice excuse to open it and smell it and to have a small nip.
KM: I was so jealous when you told me this. I would like to have a bottle of Chambord. No! I would like to go to your house and drink your Chambord.
I also did not have "pistachio extract." What is this? Does it exist in a normal world? I did find pistachio oil! And the pistachio oil tasted so, so good. I love having bought this oil.
CT: This was sort of a heartbreaker, for me. The recipe wants us to make, from scratch, pistachio paste. I ate a genuinely inadvisable amount of pistachio paste back in the spring, I love the stuff so much, and in fact I have a small jar of pistachio paste in my pantry even as I sit here. But this recipe is not telling us to make the sweet and ultra-delicious pistachio paste that is sold in every possible Sicilian commercial establishment. It is asking us to make a crude mud that tastes and smells like raw pistachios. Two of the three ingredients on the list—pistachio oil and pistachio extract—are very hard to find, and I could not locate either.
KM: Chris, will you send me the pistachio paste recipe? I now have so much pistachio oil and so far, all I have done with it is drizzle it on tomatoes (good!) and make the weird pistachio paste for this recipe.
CT: Stella Parks over at Serious Eats has a recipe for pistachio paste that seems to produce something very close to what you taste all over Sicily. You do not need pistachio extract to make it, thank God.
KM: Wow, perfect!
As previously mentioned, I did not have any corn syrup. And after my fondant, I also did not have any agave syrup because it disappeared. There were also many pieces of equipment—23cm (or adjustable) mousse ring, 17cm pastry ring, 6cm acetate, heatproof sugar work gloves, heatproof clingfilm—that I not only didn't have but didn't know what they were for.
CT: This was a very equipment-heavy challenge. And that was all very daunting because the instructions were so sparse, so we did not know how some of these implements were meant to be used. It's bad enough to not really know what a pastry ring is, without also having no clue in the method for how it is meant to be deployed.
There was another Science Item on the ingredients list that required extra effort: Glucose. I take it you were not able to track down any glucose?
KM: No! I don't know her! I was planning to substitute it with corn syrup, but … see above.
CT: I did find glucose, and in a very unexpected place: Michaels! And when I got to Michaels and located the glucose, I discovered that they also sell isomalt, which is another sugar-like thing that is used to make fancy sugar structures, like glass panes and domes. In fact, that whole aisle of Michaels kicks a fair amount of ass.
KM: WOW! I want to admit that I did go to Michaels, because you told me that they had glucose. But then I got there and completely got distracted and forgot what I was there for and somehow left with only colored pencils and a few new paintbrushes. Oh well!
Stage One: Making Genoise, Making Syrup, Baking
CT: Kelsey, on a scale of 1 to 10, how anxious were you at the start of this bake? With 10 being a literal nervous breakdown.
KM: So I am #blessed in that I do not get anxious very easily. That said, I was probably about a 7. There are just so many things to do in this bake, and the photo you sent seemed almost impossible for us to make. Where were you?
CT: I was at 8, I think. I have not mentioned yet in this blog that my wife was so concerned about us after last week's awful bake, and was so shocked by what she'd seen from this episode of the show, that she came very close to insisting that we use the full instructions from the website instead of the pared-down instructions provided to the contestants. She was very worried that we would lose our minds, or that we would somehow hold it against her personally if our bakes failed as badly as expected.
KM: I also want to say that my dear friend Hannah texted me to tell me that "literally none of the bakers successfully make every part of the technical this week." AND Kristin texted me something ominous too. I was very concerned about everyone texting me. That's never a good sign.
CT: My wife warned me that at least one baker on the show seemed to be near tears at various stages of this technical. I was extremely anxious. I had loaded up my usual weed gummy, and I had taken extra care in choosing my playlist and setting up my workspaces. I even boiled water in a teakettle, for the purpose of having mugs of hot water (hot water calms me like a damn opiate, I have found) throughout the bake.
KM: Our colleague Jasper sent me a playlist called "Songs that make millennial white women go apeshit on a dance floor." So this is what I queued up for my bake.
CT: Ha! I'm not sure I could handle anything that would cause anyone to go apeshit, during such an intense project. What was the first thing you did after starting your timer?
KM: It felt like I was immediately running around. I pre-heated the oven to 350. I put the eggs and sugar for the sponge into the KitchenAid on medium-high to whip them forever. Then I melted a bunch of butter and used it to line the cake tins. You will notice I said tins and not tin. This is because I do not respect Paul Hollywood or his stupid games. Genoise sponge, we have made before. It does not really rise. It is very hard to cut without it just crumbling, in my experience. So instead, I simply buttered and lined two cake tins. I knew from the picture that we would have to cut the cake in half, so instead I just didn't do that.
CT: Oh wow, this was so bold of you. This is the fierce and bold Kelsey who put Campari into her first ever Bake Off bake. I love this.
I felt very confident making the genoise, because it's a sponge that I understand, and one that plays to my interests as a cook/baker. It has no rising agents, so it gets all of its structure from whipped eggs. I love that, it feels analog, like there is no hidden science in there. Like meringue, it uses sugar to maintain the structure of air bubbles. I love meringue—I love making it and eating it—so this is right up my alley. I whipped the shit out of my eggs, by hand, in a mixing bowl, and then I added the sugar, and then I used the bowl like a double-boiler, over simmering water, to melt the sugar.
KM: BY HAND!!! Whoa. I really think this was the right way to do it. I’m mesmerized by your knowledge, Chris!!
CT: I really felt great about making genoise! Once the sugar was all melted in there, I moved the substance over to the stand mixer and turned that sucker on high, with the idea that I could not whip fast enough by hand to get the whites blown-out in a reasonable space of time. The stand mixer did it in like five minutes.
KM: Wow. Meanwhile I (baking casual) was just whipping my egg whites with the sugar like a loser for ten whole minutes!
During this time, I did make my syrup really fast on the stove. Very easy to do. So by the time my eggs were whipped, my syrup was done and back in a bowl, and my tins were lined and the oven was preheated! Pretty good!
CT: My sponge batter slowed somewhat when it was time to add the flour, just because I had this luscious foam and I really did not want to beat it up. I used a rubber spatula to fold in the flour, which I sifted in a little bit at a time. I felt that it still had pretty good structure at the end of this. Then I stirred in the melted butter and very quickly got it down into the tin and into the oven.
My oven was at 325 degrees, but you can never actually know the heat of my oven due to it being possessed by several demons.
KM: I also used a rubber spatula to sift in the flour mixture. It was so beautiful. It felt very opulent to me. Then I put my batter into my two illegal cake tins and put them in the oven.
I set a timer for 15 minutes to check them. I think in total they ended up baking for 22 minutes. The minute they went in the oven, I also set up my freezer station with its baking sheet and wire rack.
CT: I set my timer for 15 minutes, as well, but my sponge went a little bit longer than yours, probably 26 or 27 minutes in the end. When it came out, I felt just great about it. It appeared to be the most evenly baked thing I've ever made. I was soaring.
I liked that this bake front-loaded relatively simple things, like making the syrup. It's so straightforward, even if everything else is going sideways you can take a little confidence from just stirring together a nice syrup.
KM: Yes! I also liked that! It felt good to have a few things done early! The sponges, the syrup! Everything was looking up.
Stage Two: Making Pistachio Créme Mousseline, Making Marzipan
CT: The instructions then said to make pistachio paste. This is when I first encountered some trouble, in my bake. For one thing, I felt bummed because I was having to use walnut oil and almond extract in place of the described ingredients. For another, I do not have a functioning food processor, so making a smooth paste is not exactly possible for me. How did you approach this business?
KM: OK. I made a mistake here. I ground the pistachios up in a nut-and-spice grinder I have.
This worked well. Then I just added the oil. This did NOT work well. It kept getting stuck underneath the blades. But I felt so stubborn because there was already a mountain of dishes, so I kept having to stop and scrape it out and then start it again over and over again!
CT: OK, so this is exactly the same thing that happened to me. I used my spice mill, and it was able to make a loose gravel of the pistachios, but once I added the oil and extract, it became just sticky enough to lodge above and below the spinning blades. A nightmare.
KM: I had some almond extract to use as a substitute, but when I tasted the pistachio paste, it tasted really good and really pistachio-y, so I decided not to add the extract. I did not want to lose the pistachio flavor.
CT: I was picturing the smooth, incredibly rich and beautiful pistachio paste that you get from a jar, and then I was looking at this lumpy browning mud in my spice mill, and really feeling bad. But I knew there was not time to be finicky, nor would there be even one minute for taking a second pass at anything. So eventually I just scooped this stuff out of the mill and into a bowl, and moved on.
KM: I was pretty disappointed that it didn't feel lush. I wanted the paste to look kind of like a beautiful ice cream, which makes no sense.
CT: The next task was to make créme mousseline. We really cannot get away from custards, these days.
KM: I genuinely don't know what that is, or how to do it. But hysterically, I did make a custard probably out of just muscle memory. I was like, I'll make a custard, and then I'll simply whip it for one million years. Was this right? I don't know!
CT: As I understand it (or sort of inferred from the ingredients) créme mousseline is like créme patisserie in that it is a custard that is thickened with starch, and then you, like, stir stuff into it?
So I made custard the normal way: milk and vanilla in the saucepan, egg yolks and sugar in the bowl.
Then you whisk this stuff together over heat. After it was thickened, I dumped it out into a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and left it to cool.
KM: Yes. I did the same thing! But then I put all of it into the stand mixer for some reason and whipped it a really long time and then added in the immense amount of butter slowly bit by bit. When that was done, it looked pretty thick and lush. And so then, I put my pistachio paste in there. This actually tasted really good and looked pretty, so I just threw it in the fridge. I’m not sure why I didn’t wait for it to cool. At some point in here, I also removed my cakes from their tins and left them in the freezer.
CT: I did eventually move my custard to the stand mixer, once it had cooled, so that I could incorporate all that damn butter.
And then I dropped lumps of my pistachio mud into the mixer until it was all incorporated. Once it had a decently even texture, I scooped it into a piping bag and put that into the fridge.
I have no real sense of how much time had elapsed at this point? This overlapped a lot with the baking phase, so somewhere in here I pulled my sponge from the oven and get it onto a cooling rack. My kitchen was already getting badly out of control, mess-wise.
KM: This was also when my cakes came out of the oven, approximately, and went into the freezer.
Because my pistachio went so poorly, I tried a new method for the marzipan, and I used a different tool. My immersion blender has a little food processor attachment, so I used this to make the marzipan. I don't care for marzipan, and I really did not understand why we couldn't have made this out of pistachio. Like, why did there need to be almonds in this bake and for those almonds to be dyed green with food coloring. That felt dumb to me and I did not like it.
CT: Ugh, the marzipan. I really do not like marzipan, I do not understand why it shows up in so many French bakes, and I would prefer never to make it again.
I also tried to do this with my immersion blender but it was incredibly not up to the task, and I felt like it was going to explode in my hand. So I frantically cleaned out my spice grinder and tried it in there. This was no more effective, but between the two of them I wound up with a mealy, sticky thing that could be called marzipan. I put too much food coloring in there so it was a really garish shade of green, but I was determined not to think very hard about this stuff.
I didn't know what to do with it? I guessed from the photo and from the method that this was supposed to go on the very top of the cake, beneath the pink flower, but I couldn't figure out how? So I just scooped it into a bowl and set it aside, for later.
KM: Yeah that's what I assumed as well. What I did with it was chuck it into the fridge. At this point, there were boxes of beverages on the ground in my kitchen because I kept having to throw things out of the fridge to make more room for more of my stupid bake.
CT: Now that it's over, I wish that I'd spread the marzipan out in a thin layer over a silicone mat and then chucked it into the freezer, but I really did not know what this green slime was supposed to do on my bake other than make me not enjoy eating it.
Stage Three: Stacking and Freezing, Making a Pink Flower
CT: Whew, we had already done so much!
KM: We REALLY had. And fast! I think I still had almost an hour at this point. Something like 50 minutes. It felt like a luxurious amount of time for what was left to do!
CT: I was so worried about the final two steps, though: The making of the pink flower, and the making of a sugar dome. So before I started the soaking and stacking and all that, and long before I allowed myself to do any cleaning, I launched into the making of a pink flower. I figured if I gave myself a solid hour to try this, I could produce something that would look at least semi-respectable.
Did you do stacking first or did you go Flower Mode?
KM: I felt WAY too confident about the flower. Because I used to make clay flowers in high school, I knew the method here: make a little cone for the center, then roll out pedals that wrap around it. I underestimated that my fondant was so stiff and so sticky but somehow not sticky enough to stick to itself. So, I stacked first!
I decided to use a springform pan because this would give the cake a nice high side for me to put the mousse and raspberries against. I was kind of surprised by how easily the stacking went together.
CT: I also used a springform pan, and I lined it with acetate that I had left over from a previous bake.
I'm interested in this cone technique, for the flower. My method was to pinch two balls of fondant off of the large mass, roll them out flat, scrape them off the surface, and then sort of pinch them together to form a center. You can imagine, this did not work great. In fact my first couple of pedals were completely buried underneath the subsequent layers; you would absolutely never notice them if you weren't eating them, which you would obviously not do because fondant is disgusting.
KM: That's a good idea, though! The cone is really just to give the other pedals something to attach to!
CT: It makes sense, as I think about it, because a problem that I was running into is I was just making a lasagna of fondant strips. I didn't have anything to provide a structure. I eventually had to start folding the pedals along the outer edges in order to get them to kind of lift and stand.
KM: Frankly, my pedals stuck so poorly anyway, that I'm not really sure the cone helped!
CT: Once I had a few pedals in place and at least felt somewhat confident rolling, scraping, and affixing them, I stepped away from this to begin stacking. The slicing of the sponge went fine, but I made a big mistake in this stage of assembly, because I was moving too fast. I got the outer ring of raspberries on there, and I felt so good about it that I jumped straight to the mousseline, without considering what to do with the other 400 grams or so of raspberries.
KM: So, I also almost made this mistake. Because I piped some mousseline in between the raspberries (look at me, using a piping bag!), and then started to put more of it on top of the cake, when I realized there were a shit ton of raspberries right next to me already chopped a little. So I kind of layered my cake as: cake with syrup, tiny thin layer of mousseline, pile of raspberries, more mousseline, then cake again.
CT: That sounds lovely, to me. My framboisier is like a shallow bucket full of mousseline, with almost no raspberries, just an outer ring, for decoration. But I didn't realize this right away. I piped the mousseline down in there, smoothed it with an offset spatula, and then ran it downstairs to the freezer. It was a solid 30 minutes or so before I noticed the bowl of raspberries I'd measured and then ignored, and everything clicked into place. Alas.
KM: NOOOOOO! Well, now you have a lot of raspberries to eat, which is a huge treat. I love raspberries.
CT: My child also loves raspberries, she's on the record about that, so it is now her job to help me eat all of these raspberries.
So at this point you were underway on your flower? How long did this take you, in the end?
KM: Yes. I spent approximately 15 to 20 minutes trying to get my damn flower to work. I tried putting it on a skewer so I could see it better. But ultimately, the fondant’s texture was too upsetting and too sticky, so I ended up putting little nubs of it between two parchment papers, rolling it out and then trying to stick those together. This, honestly, didn’t even really work. I was mad! But I made something that looked like a flower in the end, and I put it on a plate.
I also at this point, needed to deal with my stupid sticky marzipan, so I rolled that out between two pieces of parchment paper and added extra icing sugar to try and keep it from sticking, and then, VERY carefully and miserably, put it on top of my cake.
CT: I wound up building my flower on top of parchment paper and inside of a bowl, so that the shape of the bowl could help me to stand up the pedals. I think I spent like 45 total minutes on my flower. I was so locked-in during this phase that I didn't even remember to take photos.
I'm amazed that you were able to do this with your marzipan. I think mine was just very wrong, somehow. It was so incredibly sticky. I eventually smushed it out using my fingers and a rubber spatula onto a sheet of parchment, and then put that into the freezer, hoping that the marzipan would freeze so hard that I could just lift it off in a sheet and set it onto the cake. This did not go as planned.
KM: It was so sticky and also, it didn't even taste that good! Imagine if it were buttercream instead.
Stage Four: Making a Sugar Dome, Assembly
CT: I had probably 20 minutes or so left on the clock when I finally put the top sponge onto the mousseline, swiped it with syrup, and set about getting the marzipan on there. To do the marzipan—it had not frozen at all, not even close—I had to just pull it off the parchment in hunks and then use my fingers to lay it onto the sponge. I eventually got a small bowl of water and used wet fingertips to spread it around. This was messy, and it sounds gross, but it was efficient enough and eventually I got it on there to a point where I felt satisfied. Paul would've lifted me bodily and thrown me out of the tent, I'm sure.
KM: Yes. I was about the same, 20 minutes left, when I was done with my flower.
CT: Shall we now discuss the sugar dome?
KM: God. I guess. I had genuinely no clue how to make the sugar dome. Why would you need gloves? What kind of fucking plastic wrap do they have in the U.K.? My method was to cover a glass bowl in foil and then in plastic, and pour the sugar really slowly onto it. This did not work even a little tiny bit.
CT: That was a good idea, I think. It seemed clear to me that "heatproof" plastic film was meant to come into direct contact with the cooked sugar, but for the life of me I could not figure out how this was supposed to result in something dome-shaped. I felt like they would've listed a bowl of a certain size in the equipment if that had been intended to provide the shape, but they did not. Anyway none of my bowls are smooth semi-spheres!
KM: I really wished for a moment that I had a silicone mold, but then I realized I wouldn't even know what to do with that to get it to be an empty dome?
CT: My idea was insanely stupid. I thought that maybe the idea was to pour super-heated sugar directly onto the plastic wrap, and that gravity would cause the wrap to sag and to form a bowl-shape? I even tested this a little bit with a bowl: I stretched plastic wrap across a large bowl, and then used a small bowl to push down on it, and then re-stretched the plastic until I felt it had the right amount of give to it. My plan was to pour in concentric circles and to hope that the sugar would cool and harden fast enough to avoid pooling down at the center of the bowl shape.
KM: WHOA. This makes sense to me. You're a genius?
CT: Kelsey, I am so incredibly not a genius. As I look at the website instructions, I had this exactly backwards. The method—the actual method—is so improbable and insane that I'm not sure how we were ever supposed to guess at it.
KM: What is it?
CT: So I got the part right about stretching plastic wrap across a wide bowl, but then it turns out you are supposed to use that 17cm ring to push down on the plastic wrap, as you pour the sugar onto the film. So like the ring pushes down and creates the lowest part of the dome, and the sugar slides down the sloping sides and hardens along the way.
KM: You're shitting me? That's insane? WHAT!
CT: Hence the gloves, I think? Because the hot sugar is, like, flowing toward your fingers, which are pinning the ring down and creating the dome shape. Honestly, what the fuck.
KM: There's no way we could have done that. There MUST be an easier way to make a sugar dome.
CT: OK, I have found a video of someone doing this, and I am in awe. Holy shit, man.
The thing that is very funny about all of this, in the end, is that my dome was doomed no matter what, even if I'd guess the right method.
For one thing, I lost track of my sugar while it was heating in the saucepan—especially embarrassing because I actually found my sugar thermometer ahead of this bake—and it shot past "hard crack" temperature and went all the way to burned caramel, so that by the time I got it off the heat it was a terrible deep brown color and giving off an acrid burned smell. I had only a few minutes left in the bake so there was no turning back. I still wanted to try to make a dome, though.
KM: I have no idea how long I heated my sugar for or what temperature it was or what could have made it turn into something that might be a dome. Instead I just poured my very hot sugar onto my bowl and it made a puddle. At that point I had five minutes left, so I decided to just make the whipped cream decoration, assemble my cake, and cut my losses.
CT: The bigger issue for me, bigger even than burning my sugar, was that my plastic wrap, despite being labeled as microwavable, was evidently not sufficiently "heatproof." When I poured the burned sugar onto it, it immediately melted right through the plastic.
KM: LOL! Come on! Do they literally have different plastic wrap?
CT: I bet at MICHAELS they have the right plastic wrap, but it seems they do not at my grocery store. So what I had was a rapidly hardening puddle of plastic-tainted burned caramel. That was the end of that experiment.
KM: Yummy! Macro-plastics!
CT: Love to eat resolidified plastic film.
All that was left to do was to mount the flower onto the cake, and to pipe some whipped cream around the rim. I think I finished with 12 seconds or so left on the clock. My kitchen was so bad, I almost could not bear to turn around from the cake and view the mess.
KM: My kitchen was an absolute disaster. Once my cake was done, I put some vegetables and a chicken into the oven for dinner and it took me the whole time that cooked (at least 45 minutes) to get my kitchen back to a usable state. Nightmare!
CT: We finished the bake right at the start of my child's nightly bedtime routine, so I had to leave the hideous mess and then return to it a little while later, by which time I was physically sore from all the frantic baking.
KM: God. That's worse, I think! I threw the rest of my fondant away. I did not want it in my house anymore.
The Finished Product
CT: Now that it's all over, how do you feel about your framboisier? How'd you do?
KM: I actually feel kind of good! I feel like this is the exact type of bake that doing so many of these challenges has prepared us to do. I feel really good about my ability to separate what needs to be done and multi-task within those instructions. How do you feel?
CT: This morning I feel pretty wrung-out, physically, but I had a great time with this bake and I feel pretty good about my framboisier. I don't think I will ever eat any of it—there's almost nothing in there that appeals to me other than a line of raspberries and some diluted Chambord—but it is clearly a cake, it is structurally sound, and it's not even bad to look at!
KM: This honestly makes me feel a lot better about how tired I felt when I woke up. My feet hurt! My SHOULDERS hurt from all the kneading!
CT: This morning I walked a bag of recycling up my driveway and I was hobbling along like I'd recently fallen into a ravine. My left leg is cramping!
KM: Baking … it's exercise!
CT: Would you care to show your framboisier?
KM: Yes! Here is my framboisier! I even put it on the cake plate:
CT: That is a proud cake! Look at your lovely flower!
KM: Show your framboisier?
CT: Here is my framboisier, also on a cake stand:
KM: Wow! I'm genuinely really proud of us! I think we did quite a good job! I wish my mousseline had more structure like yours, but what can we do!
CT: This bake reminded me of some of the first bakes we ever did, when it was possible to feel confident and exhilarated all the way to the last couple of minutes. Back then it was because we didn't know how badly we were fucking up, but this time it was because there were lots of little triumphs along the way, and it was fun to just be in constant, constant motion.
Like, once my genoise came out of the oven, I knew that I could make a cake. Once my syrup was made, I knew I could soak the sponge. Once my mousseline was mixed, I knew that I could fill the cake. Nothing could stop me from producing, at the bare minimum, a soaked and filled cake, topped with whipped cream. Measured against some of the really terrible failures of this series, that's a lot to feel good about.
Unfortunately, I left the cover on the cake stand overnight and the humidity inside there caused the flower to wilt and melt and the fondant to become even more disgusting.
My wife and child each got one thin sliver of cake last night but now it is trash. Farewell, framboisier!
KM: NOOO! I have not eaten my framboisier. I don't intend to eat it! Goodbye!
CT: Robert assures us that our fondant flowers are otherwise basically deathless (absent humidity), so you can keep your framboisier as decoration, if nothing else.
KM: Good idea! Flowers are forever, now.
CT: Well, Kelsey, it appears we have made another Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off final. That's got to be some kind of all-time record.
KM: OMG! The final is next week already? Really???
CT: May the best baker experience the blessed release of death.
KM: Wow! It'll be crazy if we win the Bake Off and die again for the fourth year in a row! See you then!
