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 judges of the Great British Bake Off seem to have lost faith in the format of the technical challenge. For Cake Week, they allowed the contestants to see and to taste the Fondant Fancies, but provided no method and no list of ingredients, a sharp departure from the normal protocol. For Bread Week, the judges asked the contestants to make something that is not bread. For the fourth technical challenge, the contestants were told the amount to use of one single ingredient, and no others, presumably to show that they could math their way to a successful cake sponge.
For Chocolate Week, judge Paul Hollywood abandoned the technical format altogether. Instead of challenging the bakers to reproduce a specific bake, Hollywood asked them to imagine up their own damn flavors, from a table of random ingredients. There is already a weekly challenge of this general sort on the show, and it is called the Signature Bake. Maybe Paul Hollywood is just sick of eating nine unsatisfying bites of the same confection each week, or maybe he is just bored out of his mind. Maybe the show's producers have data or whatever to tell them that the format needs a shake-up. The technical challenge has always been a merciless, pressure-packed highlight of the competition, but maybe longtime viewers are sick of it. Or maybe the pool of contestants is now too skilled to be reliably thwarted by a standard bake. It's also possible that the judges have simply run out of standard bakes.
In any case, however much this format shift might stink for the competition, for Chocolate Week it was at least theoretically a boon to the idiots of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off. Followers of this very serious competition will have noted that we have gotten extremely grumpy about the flavors forced into our kitchens over these weeks. Three times already we have been challenged to make sticky iced sugar-flavored confections, things that we strongly do not want to eat. Twice in four weeks we have been assigned bakes that include not one single grain of salt. The donut bake came no closer to flavor than liquid science things dripped from bottles. Our otherwise well-aimed anglophobe zingers have been phased out and replaced with the sorts of angry tirade shit you might expect to hear from an inebriated uncle. We have not handled things very well.
So despite our well-earned reputations for always showing the deepest respect for rules, boundaries, and protocols, this week we were relieved, and even thrilled, to have a relatively straightforward challenge, with explicit wiggle-room for choosing our own flavors. The task was to make Paul Hollywood's White Chocolate Tart. Though we are not big enjoyers of white chocolate, we were excited about this bake. Hollywood flavors his with a curd made of passionfruit and mango, tops it with whipped cream, and decorates it with thin curled shapes of tempered dark chocolate. Sounds good! Would the Defector bakers surpass this with their own inspirations? Absolutely hell no, they 100-percent would not.
Kelsey McKinney: Hello Chris, and welcome to … uh … Chocolate Week?
Chris Thompson: Hello Kelsey! How pleased you must feel today to have had a chance to work with your all-time favorite ingredient, white chocolate. Would you care to describe for us how you feel about this substance?
KM: NO!!! I will not force the readers to read again about my hatred of white chocolate after so many of them already must be worried about how we handled being given it again. I hate it! It's garbage to me! I wish I could never see it again! Would you like to explain your feelings about white chocolate?
CT: When I was a kid I considered white chocolate to be revolting, an abomination. But as I've gotten older I've discovered that I don't mind it so much, as a thing to eat. I will munch on a few white chocolate chips if they're handy. But I generally do not like at all to use white chocolate as an ingredient, because it seems always to behave in bizarre, unpredictable ways.
Other than that, though, I will say that this was the first challenge of this season of our Bake Off adventure that I looked forward to, from the outset. Not because I like white chocolate, but because I like a tart, and—in a twist—we were given creative freedom to decide what other flavors to put into our tart. The judges really have not seemed very committed to the traditional technical bake format this season.
KM: The emotional whiplash I felt about this challenge was immense. I was so angry that it was white chocolate for chocolate week. Then your wife warned me that there were no measurements again, so I was scared. But then, I learned it was a tart, and I love tarts, so that was exciting. And then I learned we got to pick our own flavors, and this was also exciting because famously I do not like the British taste. It was confusing!
CT: To me, the more I thought about the finished product of this bake, the more I was able to be excited about the challenge. I know how to make a shortbread crust, and I am reasonably proficient at making goops, and all this bake is is putting goops into a tart crust, and then decorating. So I pictured a contained and basically edible finished product, flavored with stuff I'd chosen myself, and I thought that would be a nice thing to have in the kitchen. How foolish. How arrogant and ridiculous.
Holding aside that we were assigned a white chocolate tart: Kelsey, do you have a favorite tart? Is there a tart you would've made if you'd been given complete creative freedom?
KM: A few years ago during my Thanksgiving testing, I made a raspberry curd tart that was so good that I think about it all the time. It did not ultimately make my menu because it took too damn long and was a little finicky, but that's the tart I would make given infinite time and money. Do you have a mythical and magical tart in your heart?
CT: I like a mixed berry tart. Some of that vanilla goop down on the bottom, and then some berries, and then a lemony glaze over the top. Unfortunately we are past peak ripeness for berries around these parts, and also this berry tart of my imagination is, to me, a summer concoction, and we are solidly now into autumn. I have transitioned into sweater mode.
KM: Wow now that we are talking about it, I kind of wish I had considered pumpkin! Pumpkin and white chocolate might have been a nice spooky autumnal flavor.
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: The ingredients on our list were very basic, but then we were assigned the job of choosing some off-list stuff to customize our white chocolate tarts. How did you approach this assignment?
KM: I felt it a little unfair that we got to know about the process presented by the judges. On the show, the contestants were told to make a shortbread tart and then shown a table of ingredients they could choose from to make their tart with. I decided that for ethical reasons, I would not look up any recipes or even look sideways at my pie cookbooks. I would just go with my first instinct like I would have to on the show. And my first instinct, as it almost always is, was LEMON.
CT: I tried to stick to the same basic approach. Looking at a recipe would've felt wrong. But I ran into an issue here, which is that I can picture in my head lots of different things, but if I have to make them entirely from memory or vibes, it turns out I don't have very many moves at all. I imagined making a raspberry curd—raspberries are the last summer berries to go out of season here—but I have never done that before and have no idea how to sort out ratios of citrus and pectin and so forth.
KM: Yes! I also had this problem. My memory is quite bad, so even imagining what I might need and how I might go about it to make it a tart, left me feeling a little unmoored. This, however, I kind of enjoyed. It was a challenge!
CT: It felt like a real and fair test of my baking knowledge, which was exciting! But it also forced me to confront, for the one millionth time, that I know jack squat and in fact am a big huge loser. Like you, my mind went to lemon curd, because I've made it a couple of times and have never fucked it up too badly, at least not to the point of disaster.
KM: I don't know why I did this. Maybe I've lost my mind. But in my heart, I did not want the whole pie to be lemon curd. I wanted it to be fluffier than that. I wanted like soft lemon tart with lemon curd on top. So I ended up trying to make both. MISTAKE!
CT: Wait, what is meant by "soft lemon tart?"
KM: I was imagining almost like a cheesecake! Like creamy and soft and fluffy! Have I ever made this? No! I'm stupid!
CT: Wait, so you were going three layer mode? Kelsey!
KM: Yes. Somehow I kind of thought that was what we were supposed to do. But actually, it's just what I wanted to eat. I wanted white chocolate, then soft creamy lemon, then lemon curd on top. This was my dream and my nightmare.
CT: I did not dare to attempt three layers on my tart. My wedding cake, one thousand years ago, had lemon and raspberry, and was topped with this huge endless field of raspberries, and so in loving memory of this delicious cake—my wedding anniversary is this month—I decided I would top my tart with a field of raspberries.
KM: Don't talk to me about your wedding cake, WHY WASN'T I THERE? Sure, we didn't know each other yet, but I still should have been there!!! I would have loved to eat that!!!
CT: Kelsey, my friend, I think you were like six or eight years old on the day of my wedding.
KM: SO!? I would have had a great time!!!!!!! How dare you!! Get married again!!! Anyway, happy anniversary. So you were making a tart with delicious pile of raspberries on top. What flavor was the tart itself?
CT: The bottom layer was, of course, white chocolate. Then on top of the white chocolate would be a layer of lemon curd. And then on top of the lemon curd would be raspberries. I also intended to make whipped cream, to go around the outside.
KM: I love that we both went to lemon. Of course we did. Oh. I did make whipped cream!! I ended up doing that spontaneously because there was a lot of waiting in this bake for things to cool and I'm not good at just standing there. I get nervous!
CT: I also do not handle waiting very well, especially in the later stages of a bake. And this bake had some of the most nervous late stages we've ever experienced. I was a mess.
KM: I actually really wish I could do this bake again. One of the reasons I really liked this bake, is I feel like I learned some things! It has been many bakes since I have felt that I have learned something.
CT: I can definitely see attempting it again, although left to my druthers I might skip the white chocolate altogether.
KM: The white chocolate added nothing!!! If anything, it made the tart worse.
Stage One: Making Dough
CT: For this bake we were given a time limit of 2.5 hours, which initially felt like a long time. I knew that none of the individual cooking steps would take very long at all. This filled me with dread, because it meant that chilling would be a very important part of the challenge, and I am never very successful with chilling. The judges are sometimes weirdly generous with baking time, but they are never, ever, ever generous with cooling time.
KM: I had the same instinct, and what scared me the most was that everything kind of needed to be chilled. If I were making this tart in my leisure time, for example, I would probably make the shortbread dough, let it sit in the fridge for two hours, roll it out, mold it to the tin, and let that freeze overnight! All of this was impossible in this challenge. And that’s just for the crust!
CT: I had not considered how I might do this bake if left to my own devices. I think I might actually choose to make the goops first? And only after I'd decided that those were a success would I then do the shortbread dough, because that part is no longer any concern at all. I am simply too accomplished a baker (three-time co-winner of the Great British Bake Off) to be troubled by shortbread crust.
How did you start this bake?
KM: I started by rapidly making the dough. I really thought that the dough would need to chill for as long as possible before I parbaked it, so I wanted to make it quickly. Before we began this ordeal three years ago, the thing I made the most was pie, so I felt pretty good about making the pie dough. I made it pretty quickly, even threw in some lemon zest for pizzazz and put it in the fridge. That took me maybe ten minutes. Is that how you started?
CT: I started with the dough, although I did not go very rapidly. I'd decided to allow my child to don her little apron and do some assisting, so I lost a little bit of time in the early stages explaining "the rub-in method." I also had to kind of sit down and think through the amounts of things, because here again we were given ingredients but no quantities. I decided that to simplify things I would use a whole stick of butter in the pie crust.
And then I decided that however much that weighed in grams, I would double it in flour. It was about 112 grams of butter, and so I did about 220 grams of flour.
KM: This is also what I did! One stick of butter. More than a cup of flour (I think I used 1 ½ cups approximately) and some salt. I did love that because this was mostly intuitive for me, I did not have to use my terrible malfunctioning scale.
CT: I would love to get to the point where I just know these ratios, by weight or by volume.
KM: Same! But ultimately baking isn't cooking and it doesn't reward this. It's math time when you bake, unfortunately.
CT: I ran into a math puzzle when the pastry ingredients called for icing sugar. I really had no idea how much ought to go in there.
KM: What I did? I just put like three tablespoons of icing sugar in there. I cannot be bothered with THIS.
CT: I assumed the sugar was entirely for sweetness, because I know I've made pie crusts without it. Like, it has no science properties, just the taste of sugar. So I handed my child a quarter-cup scoop and allowed her to add that much to the bowl, and then to whisk it in.
Then we started adding ice water one little tablespoonful at a time.
KM: I added apple cider vinegar to my ice water because I like to do that. I'm not really sure what it does chemically, I've just always done it for pie. The dough came together nicely and looked good on my counter!
I wrapped it in plastic wrap and decided it could be in the fridge for 15 minutes while I made my lemon curd.
CT: I felt great about my dough, once it was formed into a ball.
I wrapped it in plastic film and set a timer for 30 minutes of chilling, which I think reflects how unconcerned I was about total time but how deeply concerned I was about making sure everything was cold.
KM: My dough also ended up chilling for 30 minutes because it didn't feel chilled to me after 15!! This was the double whammy about this bake though. Pastry dough really does need to chill! If it doesn't chill, it freaks out. But also we needed everything to be really, really cold. So every second the pastry wasn't parbaked was one less second it had to cool. I was more concerned with it being a good crust (boy, did this come back to bite me), so I too was lackadaisical in my hustle.
CT: This is an area where things would've gone so differently without a time limit. Like, you would not set a timer on this stage if you were baking at your own pace. Or, I would not. I would just sock that ball of dough into the fridge and leave it there for as long as I damn want.
KM: Yeah! I would go do a chore or watch TV or look at my phone or read a book! I would not be scurrying around making a damn lemon curd.
Stage Two: Chilling Dough, Making Goops
CT: So next you stared in on your lemon curd? How'd this go?
KM: Easy breezy! It was so fast! I put some sugar, cornstarch and water into a little saucepan, brought it to a boil, and then let it thicken. After this I added my lemon zest and my lemon juice. Then my lemon curd was not YELLOW enough for me so I added one (1) drop of yellow food coloring and it looked perfect and I put it on the counter to cool. I made about 1.5 cups of lemon curd because I only wanted it to be a top layer.
CT: Wow, I am throwing a penalty flag at your lemon curd. 15-yard penalty!
KM: Oh no. For the food coloring? It was very unlike me to do this.
CT: I think to be curd it has to be thickened with eggs, my friend. The "curds" in curd, as I understand it, are from egg yolk.
KM: Whoa. Then what did I make? OK this is so funny because I had a whole carton of eggs on my counter, which I clearly meant to use for the curd. But then I forgot this entirely until just now. And the whole time I was looking at the eggs like "What are you for?" and then I used one for the egg wash and was like "Well, I guess they were for that!"
CT: Ha ha! Mystery eggs!
KM: This is what happens when you don't have a recipe. Please, tell me how you made curd.
CT: Honestly, I wish I had forgotten to use eggs for my curd. In my mind, curd is basically hollandaise, but thicker, and sweet. So you mix together egg yolks and sugar, and then you whisk in lemon juice, and then you double-boil it to slowly cook the egg, which thickens the mixture and makes it stable. And then once it's at the desired texture, you melt butter in there and voila: Lemon curd.
KM: Yum. I love hollandaise.
CT: One extremely important difference between curd and hollandaise, though, is you really do need to know ratios. And I extremely did not remember any ratios.
KM: Wow I didn't even put butter in mine. I guess I just made like lemon jelly? I don't really know what this is. I'm poking it right now and it's quite jelly.
CT: It sounds like you made basically the filling for lemon meringue pie, which is delicious and fine! And I badly wish I had also done this!
KM: OK so what happened with your ratios?
CT: I wasn't sure how much lemon juice to use for my curd, but I knew that I wanted it to be Hella Lemony, so I used A LOT. But as I was whisking it in the double-boiler, I knew that I had reached the temperature where the egg was cooking, but also the mixture really was not thickening, like not only would it not coat a spoon, it would not be all that distinguishable from lemonade.
KM: I also wanted my tart to be super lemony which is how I stupidly ended up making two fillings. Why wasn't it thickening!!!???
CT: I just had way too much liquid in there. So in desperation I made a slurry of cornstarch and more lemon juice, and tried to furiously whisk that down into the curd.
But by this point I was so worried that the egg was going to overcook and get that sulfur-type smell that I was super frantic about getting it away from the heat. Things were not going well.
KM: Oh god. I'm stressed just reading this.
CT: So I only gave the cornstarch slurry a minute or two of whisking before I hauled it off of there. I poured the mixture into a room-temperature bowl and socked the bowl in the fridge.
KM: This is where I made another mistake. I left my curd on the counter because it was firming up. This felt good enough to me. I forgot that a key part of this bake would be getting everything as fucking cold as possible. If I could go back in time, what I would do is trace the tart pan onto butcher paper, and then put my layers onto the butcher paper and freeze them so that I had a bunch of frozen disks that I could just stack inside the pie. However, that is not what I did.
CT: Ah, that would've been smart. So you just left it on the counter, instead?
KM: Mhm. I sure did. It looked nice and firm and jiggly! I felt good about it.
CT: And around this time I assume you grabbed the dough ball and started rolling it out? That's where I was in my bake: deeply worried that I'd fucked up the curd but not ready to take a second pass at it, and anxious to get my dough rolled and parbaked.
Stage Three: Rolling Dough, Baking, More Goops
KM: Yes! I rolled the dough here. And then I put it in the tart pan and then I put that into the freezer. I wanted it to be really cold so that it would maintain its shape. However, all of this was for naught because it didn't retain its shape. So really I just froze my crust and lost 15 more minutes. Did your dough go straight into the oven?
CT: The rolling went very well. I do not have a fluted tart tin, what I have is one of those tall-sided springform deals, and I have gotten pretty good at fitting dough to it. This went smoothly enough, with the usual cleanup work to fill-in the edges.
KM: Oh! You made this in a springform pan! I have a little tart pan but I'm about ready to retire it since my tarts never turn out well in that damn pan!
CT: You do have one other thing I do not have: Baking beads! Dammit! I was so annoyed when I got here because the whole time I'd known that I would need to parbake the crust but it had never occurred to me that I would need baking beads!
KM: I have baking beads, but what good did they do!! I wish I had just used regular dried beans and poured them into my form so that they would go all the way up the sides. I'm not really sure what happened.
CT: It's so disappointing to have the right tool for the job but to be let down by the tool. I, on the other hand, had two bags of red lentils. I did not do a second chill, after forming my dough to the tin. I just put parchment down in there, filled the parchment with lentils, and sent it.
I set my timer for 12 minutes. My oven was at 375 degrees, on Convection Bake.
KM: My oven was also at 375. I put my tart in there for 15 minutes, and then I began to panic. Because it wasn't browned around the edges. So I had to leave it in the oven for five more minutes. At this point I also had an upsetting revelation, which was that if my ganache had to go on the bottom (which it said in the instructions) then I couldn't bake my filling in the pie as I had intended.
CT: This stressed me out as well. I didn't intend to bake the ganache inside there, but I couldn't figure out the temperatures. Like, presumably my crust would need to be chilled, but what temperature would the ganache need to be? Should it be pourable, and thus warm? Or would it need to be cold before going into the crust? This confusion caused me to delay the making of my ganache.
KM: Yes! I was so confused. I put my white chocolate chips over the double boiler at this point and for some reason they took SO long to melt. This has never been a problem before. I was so mad. Finally, I went to take my baking beans out and my STUPID CRUST HAD SHRUNK ON THE SIDE!!!! If anyone knows why this happened, I would genuinely love advice.
CT: I was really surprised when you told me that, because my crust did not shrink at all. Maybe it was that I had such a weight of lentils in there?
I'm also surprised that we did the ganache in a different way! My memory of ganache-making is that you heat up cream and then you add room-temperature chocolate, and then you stir. So that's what I did: I put white chocolate chips into a bowl, and then I heated up cream in a saucepan, and then I poured the hot cream over the chips, and then I stirred.
But again I did not know the amounts or ratios. I figured that I needed enough cream to cover the chips, but I didn't measure any of this. Also, by this point in the bake, I was freaking out very bad about my curd, and had in fact moved it to an ice bath, because it was absolutely not thickening at all. And so all of this was being done in a condition of rising terror.
KM: OK so that is what I ended up doing because the chips were not melting. I just switched the bowls so the cream was over the double boiler. I also did not measure, and I think I used too much cream, but also I could not care about this too much because I was already so upset over my crust. I just threw more chips in there.
CT: I lost some time here, because while I was stirring my chocolate ganache I decided that I had to take emergency actions to salvage my lemon curd. It was cool to the touch and still very much a liquid. So I stepped away from the ganache, poured some of the "curd" liquid into a bowl, and added another couple of spoonfuls of cornstarch, to make another slurry. I had to use an immersion blender in order to emulsify this mixture. Also, getting this to thicken the curd meant putting the curd back over heat. But I did not think I had time for double-boiling, so instead I put the curd directly into a saucepan. Things were flying out of control now.
KM: Oh god not the BLENDER!!!!! I’m scared! What happened to me at this point was that I had another filling to make LOL. I remembered, thank god, a no-bake filling that I used to make with peanut butter for peanut butter pie, so I decided to make that in the kitchenaid. What this filling requires is, one block of cream cheese, one can of delicious sweetened condensed milk, some heavy cream, and your lemons. This tasted great! I put it in the fridge.
CT: I would love to eat that. Just that, with a spoon.
I whisked my curd over heat until it was steaming and nearly simmering, and then I whisked in the second slurry, and then things really fucking fell apart. Because I was trying now to stir two things—the curd over the stove with one hand, and the ganache in a bowl with the other—too much of the slurry made it to the bottom of the saucepan, where it overheated and became glue. The curd did thicken somewhat, which was heartening, but now my whisk had cornstarch slurry glue stuck to it and my curd had clumps. Also, time was now running down, my crust had to come out of the oven, and everything was hot. I felt like crying.
KM: Oh my god I can't believe you went back to the stove. You're so brave. The whisk with the slurry is stressing me the hell out. I would have also cried!
Something insane happened to me at this point. My crust came out and I threw it directly into the freezer. Then I went back to the fridge, to check on my filling, which was pretty thick, thank god! And I saw something: The jar of jam that we had made for one of the other bakes. I was already kind of upset that all of my layers were so pale (hence the yellow food coloring), so at this point, I decided I was making a four layer tart and adding the raspberry jam. It's called reduce, reuse, recycle.
CT: Going rogue! I admire this pivot.
I was encouraged by the state of my crust. It had taken longer than 12 minutes for the first parbake, but it looked nice, and getting the lentils out had not destroyed anything. I was able to swipe it down with beaten egg whites and to get it back into the oven for another few minutes.
When it came out the second time it looks absolutely glorious. I snapped off the spring liner and ran it down to the freezer. At this point I had lumpy hot curd in a saucepan, soupy half-stirred ganache in a bowl, a lovely crust in the freezer, a huge bowl of raspberries, and a kitchen that looked like it'd offended a Tasmanian devil.
KM: God I'm so jealous. My crust looked like shit!!! Somewhere in here, I made whipped cream in the Kitchenaid so I could decorate my tart. What's incredible is that I had a full 45 minutes left. All my elements (crust, white chocolate ganache, cream-cheese lemon filling, lemon-not-curd, and whipped cream) were ready and done. And yet I was absolutely positive that this was not enough time to get everything cold.
CT: Cooling was everything. I attacked my curd with the immersion blender one final time, reasoning that I could get pulverized globules of thickened starch to stabilize in there via brute violence, and then I ran it through a mesh strainer, and then I put it back into the ice bath. The ganache seemed closer to an OK texture, so I put that bowl into the fridge. Opting for the fridge here wound up being a terrible mistake, but I felt in this moment like I was getting things back in hand.
KM: The moment I knew this was not going to work at all was when, after 15 minutes in the freezer, I poured my ganache into the crust, left it for ten minutes, and it was not firm enough. I had no choice. I had to keep adding layers, none of which were cool enough. So I put my raspberry jelly onto the still wet ganache and let it have ten minutes in the freezer, after which it was still not frozen.
CT: That's about when I knew I was ruined, as well. My ganache was cool but still very loose, and I had about 25 minutes left in the bake. I poured it into the crust in the freezer and just knew instantly that it would not be possible to hard-freeze it in time. Disaster.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: So at this point you had ganache in the tart, plus raspberry jelly, and you were still needing to add lemon curd and lemon filling?
KM: Exactly. I added the lemon filling next, and this was a mess. The lemon filling was not cold enough, and because nothing in the freezer was cold enough, it was threatening to run off the side of the tart. I just shoved it into the freezer. I did this with the curd too. If I had had to present this to Paul Hollywood, I would have cried.
CT: I was very angry at this stage of the bake. I think had my innocent child not been puttering around in the kitchen I might've thrown something. I was furiously stirring my curd in the ice bath and confronting the fact that it would absolutely not set to a consistency appropriate for anything but a parfait. After a few minutes of this, when it was finally cooled below room temperature, I went ahead and spooned it into a piping bag, hoping that by fitting it into the freezer I might pull off some kind of miracle.
KM: Wow. Piping bag! I want to be clear that everything I was putting in the tart I was just plopping in there with a spoon. Again, in retrospect, I would have piped everything onto a little parchment paper and then stacked them all frozen. But I did not have this option. Instead, with three minutes on the clock, I was piping whipped cream onto the outer edge of my melting tart, which was still inside the freezer.
CT: I ran to the freezer with about 12 minutes left, yanked out the tart, snipped off the end of the piping bag, and immediately soft lemon curd basically gushed out of the hole and onto the ganache, which was itself just a pool of liquid. Tragically, I'd prepared an offset spatula for this step, hoping that this substance might require spreading. Needless to say, that spatula went back into the drawer, unused.
KM: LOL hot (literally).
CT: So after another two or three minutes of freezing—all I could spare—I grabbed up the tart, found a cleared spot of countertop, and started arranging raspberries on top. The berries were just sinking down into the slime. It was awful.
KM: I will admit that I did not take my tart out of the freezer. When the timer went off, I left it in there. I did not want to have a big tart puddle on my counter which I would then have to clean. Unfortunately for me, when I tried to eat a slice of it 45 minutes later, it was still too warm to slice cleanly, which is proof that I never had a chance.
The Finished Product
CT: I made a real piece of shit of a tart, Kelsey. How did you feel about your tart, when the buzzer went off?
KM: I felt like GARBAGE!!!!!! I felt that I was actually quite close to a beautiful dessert that I would love and enjoy but instead had a big pile of slop. Show your tart?
CT: Here is my tart, in the moments when surface tension still held up the raspberries:
KM: OK, honestly, this looks really good to me!! I know you're unhappy with it, but I think it looks really nice and I would eat it!
CT: Sure, in that tiny fraction of a second, it looked OK! But look at this next photo, taken moments later:
KM: NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I'm sorry but I just laughed so loud. What a BRUTAL transition.
CT: It's a bucket of slime.
Show your tart?
KM: Sure, here it is sitting in the freezer not even out of it’s pie pan:
CT: Aww! I like the lemon slice! And the color is very festive!
KM: I was pretty proud of the look of this pie! But look at this slice:
CT: "Slice." Although to be honest it looks like a delicious pudding that I would love to eat.
KM: The thing is, the next day (after a whole night in the freezer LOL) it was quite good.
Like, that's not so bad.
CT: That looks great! That says, to me, that without the time limit you would've been right on the money.
KM: With simply 12 extra hours, I could have made something pretty good! How did you feel about this technical at the end, even though your pie became slop?
CT: Real bad! The only part of it that worked was the pie crust. The ganache is mayonnaise, and the curd is pourable custard. It's an absolute failure. The crumbled mess is currently smashed into a tupperware in my fridge.
The thing that is most bothersome to me is that I have made all of these things before, and reasonably successfully. What happened? Why did this happen? Why am I being punished?
KM: In this way, I do think this was kind of a good challenge. I have made crust that doesn't shrink in the past! Why did this one shrink? It's unclear to me. Why was everything so warm? Have we learned nothing? Even though it was a complete disaster, I did have fun and I feel like I learned a couple of things.
CT: I agree. It was a good challenge. And I had more fun with this challenge than I did with the others so far this season, and I feel somewhat invigorated. I just wish I'd produced an edible dessert.
KM: I would say right now we exist in the rare circumstance of both It's So Over and We're So Back.
CT: Schrödinger's idiots? I will work on this joke. Shall we look ahead to next week?
KM: Sure! What fresh hell awaits us there?
CT: Pastry Week! I am giving this three steamnoses! Love to laminate!
KM: LET ME MAKE A DAMN CROISSANT!!!!!
