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.
When I was a child, there was nothing I loved more than preservatives. I loved soda. I loved fast food. I loved the kind of packaged treats that you get in a box at the grocery store, where each of them is individually wrapped in plastic, and the sugar content is so high that they make your teeth hurt. In particular, I loved Little Debbie's Nutty Buddies. The stacked wafers layered with chocolate and peanut butter called to me when my household had them. It was always a special treat. I can feel the crunch of the thin wafers between my teeth even now, probably 25 years since my last Nutty Buddy. I would eat one tomorrow. Such is the draw of childhood nostalgia and sweet treats.
This week, on The Great British Bake-Off the contestants were given a special challenge. The technical challenge for Week 2 of the 17th season of The Great British Bake Off was Paul Hollywood's Iced Gems recipe. They were presented with the little cookie called an "iced gem," which I guess is the British version of a special after-school treat. Contestants were given the little gems to eat and try and relish, and then asked to recreate them from taste. This must have been disappointing for them. There are very few things worse than eating a knock-off version of a mass-produced product you have very fond memories of. But Chris and I do not know anything about "iced gems" and we are American, and so we entered this beautiful biscuit week blind and excited for cookies.
This bake was pretty straightforward, with extremely normal ingredients, but tested us in our ability to strategize and create beautiful icing. Into the Chaos Tent of Hopes and Despair we go!
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! You're back! Welcome to the tent. How are you feeling about doing some goddamned baking for the next nine weeks or whatever?
Kelsey McKinney: I’m back! My first bake of the season! The weather is cooling off here, and I was so jealous last week that you were back in the tent and I wasn’t, so I’m thrilled to be here. We love the tent!
CT: It's Biscuit Week, and we are once again confronted with a thing that apparently everyone eats in England but nowhere else. Have you ever had an Iced Gem before? Or even heard of one?
KM: No! I had hope in my heart that this would be a good bake, though because one of my friends texted me on Saturday asking when I would be baking and if she could come over to eat my creation, which never happens!
CT: Pressure! My wife sometimes heaps pressure onto me by telling our child that Daddy will be baking something delicious for dessert, despite knowing that I do not know what the thing is or how to make it, at all.
KM: To be honest, I was happy because I feel like usually we are making something called like “sad mushy mew mew for grannies,” and “iced gems” sounded cute and exciting. Though I did kind of assume there would be a jello component for no reason at all.
CT: I like the name, "Iced Gems." And I have to admit, these are very cute little cookies. When I saw the photo of them, I became excited. Little sweeties!
KM: Apparently on the show they were not given instructions or ingredients and just shown the iced gems. We were given vague instructions by your beautiful wife and ingredients, which I think is fair because we could not taste or touch the iced gems in real life. We only had an adorable picture of them. I loved how they looked. Little cookies with icing ball on top? Sign me up!
CT: Apparently everyone over across the pond has happy memories of eating Iced Gems from their childhood? I guess the American equivalent is, like, Oreos.
KM: I assumed the American equivalent was like Little Debbies, and frankly, I would love to make those oatmeal creme pies.
CT: Oh man. If I knew how to make those I would be incredibly powerful in my family and social circle.
KM: Maybe we can learn for Christmas. Chris, in other news, I have an incredible update about this week’s bake.
CT: Yeah? Let's hear it!
KM: I ended up having every single correct ingredient!
CT: Whoa! I don't think this has ever happened before!
KM: BUT, to do this I did embarrass myself. Right before the bake began, I was accumulating my ingredients and I realized my butter was not at room temperature so I shoved it in the top waistband of my pants as I learned during our live bake-off. Then, I realized I was out of icing sugar, so I went to the bodega to get it with butter in my pants! No one noticed, but it feels important to confess.
CT: Imagine a stick of butter falling out of your pants onto the sidewalk by the bodega. You'd have to move to a different city.
KM: Trust me, brother, I was imagining it. There was nothing I could do about the butter. I couldn’t just like … hold it. But whatever! It all worked out in the end. I returned from the bodega with icing sugar and room-temperature butter.
CT: Which is fine! I also had all the ingredients for this bake. The only change I made was I resolved to use three oranges, because in my experience there is no such thing as too much orange flavor or scent. But for the second week in a row the judges have given us technical bakes made entirely from normal things. I like this.
KM: Honestly, I love when the ingredients are normal, but it is also terrifying. We had a mere 90 minutes to complete this bake, and nothing seemed that complicated which is very unsettling.
CT: Yeah it was a little bit too normal. We were both really nervous, anticipating a trap of some sort.
Stage One: Making Shortbread Dough
CT: Kelsey, how did you feel at the start of the timer. Was it confusing and new, or was it like riding a bike?
KM: I really locked in the minute the timer went off. I had not even really thought about how to complete this bake before I preheated the oven to 350 and started creaming the butter and sugar in the KitchenAid. It was as if my body functioned without me. I felt incredible. What happened to you?
CT: I started by preheating my oven and then I began zesting oranges. My butter was very soft and I knew I could cream it together with the sugar in a matter of seconds, so I put that off until I had a nice little bowl of orange zest. Then I dumped butter, sugar, and zest into the stand mixer and fired it up.
KM: I put my orange zest into the flour. I’m not sure why I did this. In retrospect, it makes no sense because the zest is wet and should be with the wet ingredients. But in the moment of action, I wanted it with the flour and I mixed it in there with my hands and it smelled really good.
CT: After a few years of this, I think I have decided that it really doesn't matter when you add things like zest into a bowl that within a matter of minutes will have all the batter/dough ingredients mixed together. Zest isn't doing anything mechanical, it's just flavoring the dough. Just get it in there, I say.
KM: While my KitchenAid was mixing the dough together I put approximately five sheet pans into the freezer. This, it seems, has become a routine for me in these bakes where I think that cooling will play a large role. Plus I like doing it. And looking at the dough in the bowl, it looked like it would basically melt on contact with the oven if it were not really, really cold.
CT: Dammit, that's right, I forgot that you do this. It's genius. I had the same worry about my dough, that it's basically smushed butter with some flour and sugar in there. It wants to melt. I was very careful not to overmix it. Once it was crumbly in the mixer I smashed it down onto some parchment and quickly rolled it out basically flat.
KM: I actually put my ball of dough into a Ziploc bag and into the freezer, but then 10 minutes later, I realized it was going to get way too hard to roll it out, so I removed it from the freezer, rolled it out into a weird oblong shape between two sheets of parchment paper and put it back in the freezer. I think in total it was in there for 25 minutes.
CT: I'm not sure how long mine was in the freezer. It was a pretty scary jog down to the basement to get it in there—in a 90-minute bake you really do not have time to dump your first batch of dough onto the basement floor and then start over—but I never started a timer, I just was waiting for the next opening to haul it out and proceed with cutting and baking.
Stage Two: Cutting Shortbread Rounds, Making Royal Icing
KM: I did begin making my royal icing while the dough was in the freezer. All I could remember was that you were supposed to add the icing sugar really slowly. So I just whipped the egg whites until they were foamy and not that big and then began adding the infinite amount of icing sugar one spoonful at a time. This took forever! I literally had to leave the mixer running while I did other things and came back and forth adding icing sugar over and over again.
CT: It was so much sugar!
When I started on my royal icing, I noticed two things: First, that the eggs in my fridge are freakin' huge, and second, that one of them had a double yolk.
Troubled by these omens, I started by whipping the egg whites in the mixer, thinking that in the end I wanted a pretty stiff icing.
KM: I thought the double yolk was supposed to be good luck. This is something that really bothers me about recipes, though. Oftentimes the recipe is really specific about 11 grams of salt, 117 grams of flour, and then it willy-nilly is like “two medium egg whites.” WHAT!
CT: Yeah! This one says "medium egg whites." First of all, who buys medium eggs? And second of all, who decides what is medium? Paul damn Hollywood??
KM: WHAT IS MEDIUM!? Is this British medium or American medium?
CT: In this case, by basically any standard of measurement, what I had was two ginormous eggs.
KM: Lmao. Your eggs were “medium” in that they could tell the future.
CT: I was whipping them into shape and adding spoonfuls of sugar and I realized that there was no way my icing was going to come together even with 400 grams of icing sugar. The eggs were truly enormous. I needed more damn sugar! I'm not sure how much wound up in there but it might've been 500 or even 600 grams.
KM: 400 grams of icing sugar was already a whole box of icing sugar for me. But my royal icing looked really shiny at the end and was pretty stiff. It was honestly probably the best icing I’ve ever made. I left it there in the bowl while I began cutting out my cookies.
CT: Oh yeah, this royal icing was gorgeous. Glossy and smooth and beautiful. It tastes like straight sugar, and you can't add any flavor to it without messing up the texture, but it looks amazing.
KM: Neither of us had a tiny little cookie cutter like they asked us to have. I stole your idea and used the small side of a cocktail jigger to cut my cookies, but then I kept running into a problem where the cookie dough was so cold and hard that if the cookie ended up inside the opening of the jigger, I couldn’t really get it out without breaking it, so I ended up basically stamping the cookie sizes and then using a knife to cut them out.
CT: I also had this problem, I had to squeeze the jigger and shake it like crazy, and a couple of times I flung little discs of cold shortbread dough onto the counter.
KM: It was really dramatic when the discs got stuck in there. It made me feel like a Tim Robinson character the faces I was making when one of my precious cookies was in there.
CT: How many discs would you say you cut, in the end? I think I cut something like 36.
KM: I refused to waste the cookie dough because it tasted really good and it smelled like oranges. I think I cut out at least 40, and then I had a few little scraps of cookie dough also. I decided that I didn’t think they would spread and put them on two of my frozen trays and put them back in the freezer for 10 minutes before moving them to the oven. I did this mainly because they gave us 90 minutes and I could not imagine needing that amount of time unless they had to be really, really cold.
CT: I gave mine another quick turn in the freezer, as well. This gave me time to start on the dyeing of my icing. I went with six colors: Blue, pink, yellow, green, orange, and purple. The purple was too dark but it was fine.
KM: I went with pink, orange, yellow, blue, purple. I do not care for green on the gems. I wanted them to be very soft and cute. But I did use too much food coloring and then my colors were too dark, but the texture of my icing seemed good so I decided to just leave it be.
Then I began my experiments to try and figure out how to make the colors come out of the tube in a rainbow without looking like absolute shit.
CT: This was a real puzzle! How to get the colors evenly distributed onto the cookies in a little poofy rosette shape. What did you come up with?
KM: Well, I thought I was a real genius. I cut open an icing bag and spooned a little bit of each color onto there, and then tried to see if that would work. It did NOT. Emphatically it didn’t work because the spooning was not precise enough and everything mixed together. But luckily I had tried this with only a small amount of the icing.
CT: Oh no!
KM: I thought, though, that this was the right idea, because I could imagine the colors all rolled up in there so I ended up just putting each of my icing colors into their OWN ICING BAG and then piping them out in straight lines onto a different cut open icing bag.
Then I rolled THAT bag up and put it inside a fresh bag with a piping tip on it. This worked great to be honest and I felt like a god.
CT: OK, actually, I think you are a genius. My own plan was much simpler and dumber. I wrapped a piping bag over a narrow plastic pitcher.
Then I sort of scooped and scraped different colors of icing along the sides, and then the final color was blobbed down in the middle. Since I committed 100 percent of my icing in this way, there was no turning back.
KM: I genuinely think this was so smart. I really did not like wasting so many plastic bags, and so much icing INSIDE the piping bags. I wish I had done it your way instead of my way which was very wasteful but also very functional.
CT: I don't want to spoil the ending but such methods, in the past, have proven unsound.
Stage Three: Baking, Cooling
CT: Do you know how much time was left when your little cookies went into the oven? And how were you feeling at this moment?
KM: I do because I was stressed. There were 30 minutes left when I put my cookies into the oven. At the eight minute mark I checked them and turned them around, but they did not seem to be done. I was worried that they wouldn’t have time to cool! How much time did you have?
CT: I went in about seven minutes before you did, from the Slack record. My oven was hotter than yours, and not only because it tends to make up its own temperatures and to prefer ones that are approximately volcanic. I had preheated my oven to 375 degrees. I set a timer for five minutes and planned to rotate the pan at that time. When I checked on them I could see already that something was not great: They were browning along the bottom but still pale on top, and they were baking unevenly, and it was clear that they had dramatic differences in thickness.
KM: No!!!!!!
CT: I was glad that I'd cut and baked 50 percent more cookies than the challenge called for!
KM: I also noticed putting my cookies in the oven that they were not the same thickness. Luckily, I had so many extra cookies that I could just choose the ones that were almost the same.
CT: Do you have a sense of how long your cookies were in there, in total? And how did you feel when they came out? Did they look pretty good?
KM: Yes! They were in there for 16 minutes total, because I meant to take them out at 14 minutes but then my timer didn’t go off, or I didn’t hear it, and when a new song started I was like OH NO MY COOKIES! They were fine.
CT: Oh God, that's terrifying. But they were fine! Whew!
KM: Yes! They smelled so good. I would honestly make these little shortbread cookies again. Basically immediately upon removing them from the oven I tossed one of the scraps of dough into my mouth and immediately wanted to eat like 500 more. This has never happened before in these challenges.
CT: They smell and taste tremendous, even when they are not perfectly baked. My cookies were in the oven for around 12 minutes, I think. I was able to pull together 24 decent ones, which left me 12 overbaked ones to munch on the rest of the way.
KM: Yum. 12 snacks. Did you put your cookies BACK into the freezer? I did.
CT: Yes! I was so worried, from last week, that I would once again melt my icing. So I put the 24 chosen cookies onto a glass dish and ran the dish back to the basement.
KM: They were so TINY. They really are the cutest cookies. I put my hot pans on top of the frozen sheet pans still in my freezer and left them in there for five minutes. At this point, had you tested your icing method?
CT: No, but while I was waiting for the cookies to chill I finally piped some icing onto one of the rejects. And it confirmed my fears: My icing was just maybe a smidgen too wet! I felt like there was no way I could pipe it onto 24 cookies and have the cookies stay presentable for more than, like, three minutes.
KM: What’s funny is I don’t really like royal icing. I don’t like how hard it is! I would much prefer a wet icing, but that is not what was called for! I piped a test on my parchment paper and it looked perfect and I was proud.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: I think I started icing my cookies with like 15 minutes to go?
KM: I also started with 15 minutes to go, because decorating always takes longer than I think it will take, and I was nervous that I would run out of time. But then, actually, it went quite fast. I just piped a little swirl on top of cookies until I ran out of icing, which was about 30 cookies. Then I picked the best ones and put them on a plate.
CT: I was happy with how quickly the icing went, and how relatively neat it was. I did have one bastard cookie that continued to try to stick to other cookies, but I quarantined his ass.
KM: No! Get outta here, buddy! Did you quarantine him to your stomach?
CT: Just to a different part of the plate. In photos you can tell that he has been roughly handled, but he has no one to blame but himself.
I noticed that, as I feared, the icing was starting to soften and the points were starting to droop over a little bit.
KM: Yes at this point you messaged me something about getting a HAIR DRYER and I said “oh no” out loud.
CT: I had time and I was just standing there watching my bake come apart and I typed something in Slack about the icing not drying out in time and it hit me: HAIR DRYER. I ran upstairs and rooted around under the sink and found the hair dryer.
KM: Imagining your wife asking what you’re doing with her hair dryer as you sprint down the stairs yelling, “MY ICING!!!!!”
CT: She's seen some weird things over the years. Imagine the furnace contractors! I'm getting out of here, this man is blowdrying cookies.
KM: Hahah! I wish they had been there for that. It’s true care for the cookies to blow dry them perfect.
The Finished Product
KM: Show cookies?
CT: Here they are!
You can see that the purple is a little bit too dark, but the hair dryer really did stiffen the icing and all told they look pretty good! And they're good to eat!
KM: They’re beautiful!!! I would eat 100 of them.
CT: Show cookies?
KM: Here are my little gems
I’m so proud of them. Maybe this is the proudest I’ve ever been of a bake.
CT: I'm extremely envious of your shortbread. Mine is all mottled and uneven. Look at your perfect little cookies under there! They're so damn cute!
KM: They’re so so cute. I love them!
CT: Paul and Nigella referred to this challenge as "tricky" and "brutal" because they worried that the bakers would not have a stable royal icing at the end. We showed their asses!
KM: This morning, an HVAC guy came to my house and he said “woah” at my cookies in their little dome, and this, to me, was the equivalent of getting a Paul Hollywood handshake to me. I let him eat one of the cookies.
CT: This is the season of contractors, it seems. Next week: HVAC contractors do the baking and we do the eating.
KM: God, I wish! What are we actually doing next week?
CT: Hmm, it's something called "Audience Choice Week."
KM: Gotta admit, I do not like the sound of that.
CT: As we are the only bakers who cross the Contestant/Audience barrier, I feel that we should be allowed to tell the judges to go screw.
