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 idiots of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off recently convened at a fancy rented kitchen in Philadelphia. Not merely to say mean things about Paul Hollywood, although plenty of mean things were said about Paul Hollywood, but for some baking. It was an intense experience, as you'd expect from a series that has produced so many burned fingers, so many dangerous sprays of molten caramel, so incredibly many sobs of purest anguish. We were there for more than the usual thrills of a timed baking challenge: We were there to satisfy the requirements of Defector's much-hyped 2025 Tip Jar drive. We and our terrible baking were, in a very real sense, the raffle prize.
This was not like other baking challenges. For one thing, baking "season" is still a few months off: The next collection of The Great British Bake Off drops sometime in autumn, and between now and then your Defector idiots would normally prefer to bake nothing more complicated than maybe the odd loaf of yeasty bread. For another, this was the first time that the Defector morons have baked together in one kitchen. We have helped each other through many baking-related panic attacks and nervous breakdowns, but always via text messages, never in person. Could we share a space? Have they invented a space that can contain so much chaos?
Most significantly, this bake stunt included a third participant, Defector reader and raffle winner Anna Wendt, who chose not only to observe our baking challenge but to don an apron and enter the crucible. You might think the regular Defector goobers are nuts, but get a load of this: Anna was doing this in a kitchen she'd never used before, without even the vaguest hint of what she'd be required to bake, with observers zooming around her, and on camera, and in a room full of strangers. Two cameras, in fact! And with judges! That's the spirit we like to see from our readers, surely the coolest bunch of sports blog subscribers anywhere on the internet.
Our challenge, carefully chosen by a panel of judges to suit a beautiful spring day, to really herald the season, was to produce a damn yule log. Regular readers of this series will recall that the last time we were asked to produce a filled and rolled cake, genuine abominations were brought into being, in our very own kitchens. Now we were in an unfamiliar rented kitchen and performing in front of a live audience, with nowhere to hide.
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! My good friend! How are you? How are you feeling about this latest twist in our baking journey?
Kelsey McKinney: Chris! My friend, my buddy, my pal! I am doing well! When we agreed to do an off-season bake as a way to raise extra money so that we can give subscriptions for free to people who need them, I felt really casual and cool about it. Now that we are done, I also feel casual and cool and happy. But during the bake, I did not feel casual or cool at ALL. How do you feel?
CT: Today I feel fine. When this stunt was first proposed, I felt very flattered to have been asked. And then I felt excited to travel to Philadelphia. But in the hours leading up to the bake I felt a lot of dread. I also realized that I am not really ever on camera, and that was a real wrinkle, for me. And I don't just mean that in the sense that I have lots of wrinkles around my eyes and forehead.
KM: I was really excited to have you and your family here in the beautiful city of Philadelphia where we live. Not to share all our business but the night before we began our work activities, we went out to dinner for sushi and it was so fun! I was so happy! It’s so thrilling to be together even if it did mean that very soon after that we would be forced to embarrass ourselves greatly.
CT: Did you worry about embarrassing yourself? I very much did. I felt certain that I was going to forget how to bake.
KM: I worried that I would both make a bad bake and somehow it would not be entertaining. I figured if I embarrassed myself and it was funny, that would be fine. But I was also really nervous because we had a wonderful reader joining us and I wanted her to have a good time! Our beautiful Anna.
CT: Yes, I was surprised by how anxious I became about whether Anna would have a good time. Anna, our contest winner, flew with her husband all the way from Portland, Oregon, to hang out in a kitchen and bake shit with us. Which you would think would be an OK time, but it occurred to me as the date of the bake approached that I don't tend to socialize while actively cooking. I can be sort of intense and scowl-y in the kitchen, I think, and this would be a timed bake with cameras and onlookers, so I was really worried that I would radiate angst and poor Anna would be on tip-toes. I've joked before about slashing at Nigel with various sharp kitchen implements, but I would feel especially rotten about beheading one of our own readers.
KM: So the day before the bake, we met Anna and her lovely husband at the rental where we would be baking. This felt very funny to me because it meant that I arrived at a random North Philly rowhouse with two (2) KitchenAids and a bunch of baking supplies, and then we had to shoot testimonials! Standing before the camera, I realized that I wasn’t actually sure if anything I had ever done in the kitchen was normal. No one ever watches me do it! I could be doing something insane and not even know it!
CT: Right! And that's without even accounting for stuff like being normal through an interview. What if my eye starts twitching? What if I jam a finger into my nose?
Our rental was close enough to the location of the shoot that we decided to walk it, but I also needed to lug along all my kitchen supplies. So we were marching through Fishtown on a hot day and I was towing a huge heavy suitcase behind me. Along the way I needed to find an apron, which turns out is not as easy as you'd think. I did eventually find one, in a thrift store (I will pause here to note that thrifting in Philly is exactly as fun as advertised). At the end of this schlep I was pretty well soaked in sweat, and feeling flustered, and my child was hangry, and I did not feel in the best shape to suddenly be interviewed on camera. I think the interview lasted like 10 minutes, but you will note that only like 18 seconds made it into the final video. I'm not cut out for movies!
Anna and her husband Kevin were very nice and normal-seeming, so that eased some of the tension.
KM: Anna was also nervous, which made me feel a little calmer. If we are all nervous, then none of us are nervous!
CT: I would not have known, from her demeanor, that she was nervous. Anna is a supremely cool and easygoing person, so far as I can tell. When I am nervous I turn into a jittery little goblin. Anna was over there speaking in complete sentences.
KM: In our preparation interviews, we were asked what we thought we were going to bake, because one interesting difference in this bake is that we were going in blind. Jasper had bought all of our groceries for us! I couldn’t even fuck that up!
CT: Yeah! On the one hand, it felt to me like a nice luxury to have someone else do all the shopping and prep work. But I have to admit that shopping for a bake does afford a really valuable opportunity to think ahead to the bake itself. I had much more of a sense of chaos in this bake, going into it completely blind. Didn't this freak you out?
KM: Yes! I had not realized how much time we had to think about the ingredients while we purchased them. This did freak me out! I was nervous! I assumed we were making a cake because there were KitchenAid mixers and a lot of eggs in the fridge. But I had terrible nightmares the night before that my cakes kept disappearing!
CT: It's been a few weeks so I can't remember all of how I felt in advance of the bake, but I think I had guessed that it would involve icing, I think because of some of the stuff that Jasper asked us to bring to the kitchen. I was hoping for some sort of cake.
Nightmares? Oh no! Do you remember the substance of these nightmares?
KM: No! I just remember that when I got in the car at the atrocious hour of like 8:00 a.m. I was all rattled! I was so tired from my terrible dreams and being made to be awake before my usual hours, and needing to look decent enough to be on camera. Poor Jasper had to ride with me in my ghost-like state.
Stage One: Sponge
CT: So the order was, we went to the spot for setup and interviews, and then after those were finished and the kitchen was decently prepped we all walked to a nearby place for a casual dinner, which was a lot of fun. And then we had to be back in the kitchen really early the following morning, ready to jump right into the bake itself. And it was on this second morning, on camera, that we learned what we would be baking.
KM: There we were, standing behind our individual mixers, as we listened to the words “yule log” drop like bombs.
CT: They did a good job of setting this up. They were talking about seasonally appropriate bakes and I was thinking about spring and flowers and trying to get into a Spring Headspace, and then they said "yule log."
KM: YULE LOG!!! This was, in a way, cruel because one of the worst bakes we have ever done (the caterpillar) was a rolled and decorated cake!
CT: Right, I mean you and I have terrible experience with rolled cakes. The smiling face of your caterpillar haunts my dreams. Clearly the yule log was chosen to torment us, which is pretty mean.
KM: Yeah!! Jasper, explain yourself!
CT: In a meeting with HR!
KM: Yeah!! Adrenaline flooded my body the minute the clock began, and then I began doing stuff. What stuff? THE WRONG STUFF! I dropped an egg on the ground. I mixed the batter wrong? I made one whole batter without sugar? I can’t even remember how many cake batters I made! They were all wrong! Meanwhile you and Anna had delicious perfect looking batters! I wanted to DIE.
CT: I remember having to start over with my batter at one point, because I had forgotten something obvious. I'm looking at the instructions again now and I can taste the metallic buzz of adrenaline. Our so-called friends who constructed this stunt did us no favors: The first instruction: "Make the cake. Bake the Cake." Thanks for NOTHING.
- Make the cake. Bake the cake.
- When the cake comes out of the oven, invert the cake onto a large clean kitchen towel that’s been dusted with cocoa powder.
- Roll the cake up in the towel and let it cool in the fridge.
KM: Yeah!! Honestly, eat shit!! I also realized pretty quickly that I walk around a lot in my own kitchen. I pace back and forth, or take two steps in one direction and then remember something else and pivot around really fast. You cannot do this when you are sharing a kitchen! The quarters were tight! So I had all of this adrenaline and panic and nowhere to even displace it except into shit-ass batters that were non-starters!
CT: The quarters really were tight. They did a good job of setting up little stations for each of us, and it was a nice spacious modern kitchen, but three adult bakers working a complicated bake against a timer took up a lot of room. And we had to get back and forth from the oven and the fridge and the island without whamming into one another. I remember your egg incident, and then seconds later the splash guard on one of the mixers crashed to the floor, and I could feel myself starting to panic a little.
KM: We had enough time in theory for the bake. There were 2 hours and 15 minutes in which we needed to complete these yule logs and decorate them. However, that amount of time did NOT expect me to make the cake three times, which I in fact had to do.
CT: Not all of the instructions were quite as cruel as that first one. By the time of your third batter, did you start to feel like you had settled in a little bit? How were your nerves at that point? Because it did seem to me like you hit your stride after a bit and then entered The Zone.
KM: Well Chris, I did take a beta blocker before this bake began, so even though my mind was racing 100 mph, I felt physically fine by the time I ruined the second batter. Also, I kind of resolved myself to losing at that point, which made me feel less pressure. My third batter looked correct and tasted good, so I felt that even if everything else didn’t work, at least I would have some chocolate cake.
CT: That's the nice thing about cake challenges: However bad your cake is, it's still cake.
I didn't have a beta blocker but Jasper did hook me up with an edible about 20 minutes before the start of the bake, so by the midpoint of the challenge I was feeling extremely calm.
KM: I was so jealous of you. When my cake finally came out of the oven, I had to flip it onto a dishtowel coated with cocoa powder and roll it up and by then, your cake was all rolled up and basically entirely cooled! You seemed so relaxed!
CT: I felt pretty good! I can't remember how long my sponge was in the oven, but at some point someone in the room said that they smelled a finished cake and I impulsively yanked it out of there.
KM: I do remember you at some point saying, “There’s a back!?” in response to the second half of our instructions which were printed on the back of the paper.
CT: Oh yeah, it had not occurred to me to look at the back side of the instructions. I'm glad I looked when I did, because that was how I was reminded to pre-roll my sponge. I quickly sliced some grooves in there and rolled it up inside a hand towel.
I didn't even realize we were supposed to also make buttercream, until I was alerted to the existence of the hidden instructions. But by this time I was decently medicated. Had this happened to my normal brain chemistry, I would've kicked something, for sure.
Stage Two: Ganache And Filling
CT: Anna, I thought, was doing pretty well during the first few stages of the bake. Emotionally, I mean. Good-humored, sanguine.
KM: Anna, at some point in this second section, showed me that she had put butter into the pockets of her pants to warm the butter sticks up, and I was so envious of her it was painful. She’s so smart!!! Her batter worked immediately! It looked so beautiful!
CT: Yeah, my sense of Anna is that she has moves. I would like to see her bake or cook something in a non-timed, non-chaotic setting, where she is not sharing a kitchen with two wolverines. I softened my butter the dummy's way: By slicing it into tablespoon-sized pats and lining them on a plate and putting the plate in a warm spot in the kitchen, which in this case was atop the stove.
KM: I also did that! It worked fine!
But we also had to make ganache. I want to admit that I have no memory at all of making the ganache. I remember making the ice bath to put the ganache in and being really happy that it was hardening, but actually making it? No idea!
CT: I was slightly ahead of you guys in the middle stage of the bake, so my ganache was in the fridge when I looked over and you were doing the ice bath. I knew instantly that this was the right call and that I had biffed it due to being in a frenzy. So eventually I did yoink my ganache from the fridge and treat it to a nice cooling ice bath.
KM: I felt really happy to have done something right. At least my ganache was good! I was not a failure, after all!
CT: Ganache, I think, is one of those things that I will just know how to make from now on. We've made it so many times over the few years of these baking blogs, I feel very confident that I can whip up a solid ganache.
In addition to ganache, we also had to make a filling, which in this case was a fluffy, light-colored, cream-based thing, with cocoa.
KM: Wow. Guess what Chris? I also don’t remember making that!
CT: You blacked out! Fugue mode!
KM: I was gone girl! The chaos became me and I became the chaos! I was doing so many things at once, and also I was standing almost this whole bake on my tip-toes for a reason I do not understand. I was tall enough to stand normally!
CT: Let the record show that Kelsey did in fact produce a filling. The video evidence is incontrovertible.
KM: What do you remember about your filling?
CT: I remember not being happy with the color. I am not one to turn down chocolate in really any form, but in general I am not a fan of things that are "chocolate" but are the color of a latte. This filling had the texture of whipped cream, more or less, and the cocoa powder seemed to be more of a pigment than a flavoring.
KM: At this point, everything was brown! We had brown cake, brown filling, brown ganache, and none of them were even a particularly satisfying brown. It was all kind of dull and drab.
CT: We all seemed to be doing well through this part of the bake. At one point in there I even became a little bit concerned that maybe we were proceeding a little too competently, and the people in the room to film it and judge it were being deprived of the circus they'd probably expected. But I was not about to sabotage my own bake for content. I was IN IT TO WIN IT.
KM: I do think that we have improved to a point where now almost all of our bakes are competent in a way that they just were not when we began baking. This felt very noticeable during the second phase, when you, me, and Anna were all just competently making our various fillings efficiently and happily.
CT: When we made the caterpillars my ganache never firmed up and so I wound up having to pour it out over my disaster of a sponge. So I was grateful this time to have stolen your ice bath idea. And as far as I can recall the filling came together without incident.
It was really the buttercream where things started to go sideways.
Stage Three: Buttercream
KM: It’s so funny because we have (all three of us) made plenty of buttercream in our lives! It’s not like … a hard thing to make. But the instructions did not include any measurements at all and just said “make buttercream,” and we all spiraled out basically immediately.
CT: This was very devious. The other parts of the instructions were pretty helpful with amounts, except for the ganache, which is literally just cream and chocolate. My first batch of buttercream was absolutely disgusting, with the curdled texture of cottage cheese. Nasty, awful shit. I had to kind of retreat to my mind palace and think about what gives buttercream its structure.
KM: I made two “buttercreams” that both looked like the word “buttercream” but nothing like what the icing was supposed to look like. They had almost a grainy texture? I threw these directly into the trash.
CT: The thing that threw me off in there was the heavy cream. It's been long enough since I last made buttercream that I couldn't think of what role the cream has in there. All I came up with on my first try was to whip air into the cream, and maybe that would be helpful to its structure? And this caused me to overlook the role of sugar in the icing. It was only after this first disgusting effort that I remembered that most of what icing is is sugar. Everything else in there is just suspending the sugar. The answer was: More sugar.
KM: On my third attempt, I just started dumping a whole bag of icing sugar into the bowl with the butter, and this looked correct. Good enough! More sugar!!!!
CT: Poor Anna came last to this realization. I was sincerely worried that she was about to bomb out of the bake. She was trying to remain cheerful but I think even her third attempt at buttercream went sideways. We did a little team conference and the solution, of course, was more sugar. Don't be shy with the sugar!
KM: I thought it felt pretty nice to be able to discuss this together. You see them do that on the show sometimes, and because I’m competitive, I’ve always thought it was a little silly. But in the moment, it makes sense to share.
CT: Yes. And I think it's easy to underappreciate just how stressful a bake, or really any complicated task, can be when you have a timer going. It's very easy for a person's brain to short out and for easy, obvious solutions to escape their attention. It felt very wholesome and nice to put our heads together.
How did you feel about your buttercream? Mine was a little bit loose but it was pipeable and I was not about to take another crack at it. I was anxious to start building my yule log.
KM: I felt pretty good about it to be honest, but it was a tiny bit grainy. I could not figure out how to fix this, and it felt too late to do that, so I just put it in tiny bowls and began adding coloring to the bowls. We were supposed to decorate our Yule Logs with the icing and because it was just before Easter, I decided to make all my colors kind of pale and Easter-y.
CT: I had the same idea. You won't ever catch me doing Christmas colors in spring. No way.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: Do you have any memory of filling and rolling and cutting your yule log? Because I do not. I'm sure it happened!
KM: I do remember doing this, because I was so happy about the fact that my log actually rolled and did not split into halves like it did when I made the caterpillar. Once my log was rolled, I trimmed it according to the directions to give it a little side arm, and then I praised myself because my ganache was perfect and this was very exciting. Fuck the buttercream! Fuck the filling!
CT: Did you have an idea at this point how you would apply your decorations?
KM: Yes, I decided to make Easter eggs and flowers because it felt very spring-y to me, and I wanted my yule log to be seasonal. I cannot remember why that felt like a good idea at the time. I also remember at this point, looking over at Anna, who was carving the ganache on her log with a fork and thinking, “well it doesn’t matter how I decorate this because Anna is going to win easily.”
CT: I was again slightly ahead at this point and I was just piping stupid little flowers onto my log and I looked over and saw Anna's genuinely lovely bark and was incredibly jealous. And I had the same thought, that I could not possibly hope to win if she was gonna do that shit.
But! Anna was still pretty down on her buttercream, even though to me it seemed fine. So I felt hopeful that I might get an honorable mention in the buttercream category.
KM: In the competition against myself, I had done so well after my disastrous beginning. I did not have a terrifying caterpillar cake that made my sister scream. I did not panic when everything was going wrong. And by the end I had something that did in fact look like a yule log! This felt like enough of a success for me.
CT: Yeah! After two-plus hours of stress and chaos and multiple messes and restarts, at the end of it all we had each produced very log-like yule logs, and nothing had caught fire. I was proud of us!
The Finished Product
CT: By the time we got around to judging, I was coasting on endorphins and feeling very happy. But soon I became nervous that my cake would taste like shit or have the texture of cardboard. How were you feeling about the judging?
KM: I was feeling indifferent. I had no hope in my heart that I might win, and I wanted to eat the cakes, so mostly I wanted the judges to simply decide so that I could try the cakes myself and find out how they tasted! Sadly, they took 100 years to decide.
CT: They made us wait outside in a little courtyard area for what felt like decades. At a certain point I started to suspect that we were either being pranked or they had simply forgotten about us, and were in there chatting and eating cake.
KM: They were eating all the cake without us!!!!!
CT: Did you like your cake? Did it taste good, to you?
KM: It tasted like cake for sure! One thing that was stunning, though, was that all the cakes tasted really different! I assumed that Paul Hollywood had some specialized palette that allowed him to taste the difference.
CT: That really was a surprise. It wasn't just texture, either. Your cake was noticeably more chocolate-y than mine, which made me jealous. Anna's cake was gorgeous and tasted great, but in the spirit of constructive criticism, that buttercream needed more sugar. More sugar!!
KM: In the end, the judges (in my opinion) chose cowardice and did not pick a winner! We all won. No one won.
CT: I think the judges were hampered somewhat by the fact that my wife is loyal to me and my child is loyal, somehow, to you. Really Anna was at a severe disadvantage, given these dynamics.
KM: I feel comfortable saying that Anna won. In my heart, Anna was star baker.
CT: I agree. Her log was beautiful. Way to go, Anna! And thanks to everyone who entered the raffle, sincerely.
