Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
It's autumn again. The extremely popular and enduring contest show The Great British Bake Off has returned for its 17th season, or series. The format is pretty straightforward: A dozen enthusiastic amateur British bakers are invited to the show's set—a large tent in a field—to participate in three baking challenges. At the end of those challenges, two judges decide who performed the best across the challenges, and name that person Star Baker. They also decide who performed the worst, and that person is eliminated from the competition. Then everyone goes home for the week, before returning for a new set of challenges, and another round of elimination. At the end of each season, one baker is named the winner, and everyone celebrates together, and the vibes are off the charts.
The middle of the three challenges each week is called the "technical bake." The contestants are given ingredients and some kind of instruction and are tasked with making a particular baked thing to a high degree of specificity, and with a very severe time limit. Because they don't know at the outset what they'll be baking and thus cannot prepare, it's thought to be a pretty pure and solid test of each baker's knowledge and technical skills, rather than the creativity, planning, and ambition that is displayed in the show's other challenges.
We, a couple of idiots who like to eat baked things and sometimes forget that there is so much we do not understand about baking, try to compete alongside the show's contestants on these technical bakes. Sometimes we do great! It has been known to happen! Sometimes our creations are wan and grey and sag to one side, but taste fine. Sometimes they look surprisingly neat and presentable but taste like elementary school cafeteria shit. Those ones are never our fault. Sometimes everything goes completely to hell and one or both of us wind up sobbing in our kitchens. Sometimes something evil crosses over from the infernal plane.
What is new about this season? Let's see: Prue Leith has retired and is no longer Paul Hollywood's co-judge. She has been replaced on the show by Nigella Lawson, who seems like a much bigger cooking celebrity than either Leith or Mary Berry, who Leith replaced in 2017, and more famous even than Hollywood, who owes much of his fame to this show. Can Paul's ego handle the presence of an even bigger fish? Is the tent big enough for the two of them?
The technical challenge for Week 1 of the 17th season of The Great British Bake Off was to make Nigella's recipe for Coffee & Walnut Layer Cake. This is a straightforward bake made with normal ingredients, so to keep it challenging the contestants were given no method at all, just a heap of ingredients, an illustration of the cake, and a description of its properties.
Due to crazy schedule things having to do with our annual Defector team meetings, only one of us was able to make a cake this week, but Kelsey and Chris are both here in the blog mines, Chris to share how he handled this challenge and Kelsey to sit in judgment from the comforts of a clean kitchen. Off we go!
Kelsey McKinney: Hello Chris! Welcome back to the terrible tent (we love it) of horrors (baking).
Chris Thompson: Hello Kelsey! It's great (awful) to be back! On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you to don the apron for another season of adventure, and do some freakin' bakin'?
KM: Well I would say for me it is a 10! I can’t wait! But it is important to note that for this first week of the bake off, I did not participate. I was on vacation and then we had company meetings, and so you entered the tent alone. Therefore my excitement may be over-inflated by anticipation.
CT: I was not expecting to bake this week, due to scheduling conflicts, but wound up with some time and was able to squeeze it in. I've been feeling very autumn-ish lately, and thus was very goofily happy to think of inaugurating the season with a delicious home-baked cake.
KM: I am so excited to hear about it and also terrified. Before we get into it, have you been baking at all in the off-season?
CT: Yes! I baked a cake for my daughter's birthday and then my wife and I took turns baking a weekly loaf of bread for the house. That was pretty fun, I recommend it as a winter ritual. We stopped when it started to get warm outside, but for a while there our house pretty consistently smelled like freshly baked bread, which beats the hell out of its usual smell (eau du overwhelmed parents). And then I did some pies over the course of the summer.
What about you? Have you been baking or what?
KM: I had a similar experience. I baked a lot of bread in the winter, and then the minute it got warm, I stopped baking at all. My kitchen gets too hot! It’s not fun when it’s too hot! But I feel I have become Pavlov’s dogs in relation to this damn challenge, because the minute I felt the first whiff of fall breeze, I craved the tent. I am ready to bake again.
CT: Soon enough! Unfortunately, due to your travel you were unable to try your hand at Nigella Lawson's first ever Cake Week challenge, her Coffee & Walnut Layer Cake. Not to brag, but cakes have become a walk in the park for us—a cake walk, even—so you missed a real opportunity to develop some momentum, a little mojo at the start of the season.
KM: I know! And I love making cakes! Now that I am no longer substituting ingredients with crazy shit on account of everyone getting mad at me all the time, I feel my cakes have really improved! Tell me how you felt about doing this cake, and what kind of special ingredients you had to buy.
CT: I was excited to bake the cake, even though I think in some ways it's not really my kind of cake. But I am now competent enough at baking that I was reasonably sure I would make an edible cake, and an edible cake is a nice thing to have in your kitchen for a couple days. What I am saying is, I was excited to eat cake.
KM: I agree! I also like coffee cake, so I don’t mind the idea of this cake. It’s kind of a breakfast cake in vibe.
CT: I like coffee cake, but I do not think there is coffee, usually, in coffee cake? And in this case it was coffee in the cake. Think of it as a walnut cake with coffee in it.
KM: Hmmm. I’m not feeling so optimistic about that, Chris. I don’t think I want that.
CT: This is where I was willing to trust Nigella Lawson. She has a reputation, I gather, of being a chef whose food tastes really fuckin' good, who has an almost hedonistic devotion to flavor and texture. I think I've cooked some of her recipes before and they hit pretty well, but those were, like, stews and pastas. This was my first time attempting one of her bakes. Have you ever attempted a Nigella recipe? Do you have a go-to recipe person?
KM: Not that I know of! I know who she is obviously, but she is not one of my queens. My queen is Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen. Do you have a go-to recipe person?
CT: Any time I look for a recipe, I check her site and I check for a Kenji joint. If Kenji Lopez-Alt has a recipe for the thing I want to cook, or for the ingredients in my kitchen, I will consult it very closely.
KM: Kenji is really goated to be honest. So you would say you felt optimistic headed into this bake?
CT: Yeah! I was helped by the fact that I really didn't have to do any shopping for this recipe. All of the ingredients are extremely normal, with the exception of instant espresso powder. That's not exactly perverted, but I would not otherwise buy coffee powder, and declined to do so in this case. Everything else was pantry shit: Flour, baking powder and bicarbonate, sugar, icing sugar, etc.
KM: Wow! Feels like it should have been a blessed experience. Can’t wait to find out what happened in reality.
The Bake
CT: I decided to do the bake in the morning, but first I had to clear out a parade of furnace contractors.
KM: Wow! That’s exciting. Were they cool? Did they fix the furnace?
CT: Yeah, I'd say they were cool. They did not fix the furnace, in the sense that it has problems that go beyond fixing, that defy our concepts of repair and function. But the technicians did what they could to help it to live, to continue blighting the Earth with its evil unnatural presence, for at least one more season.
Once the cool furnace men left I had a couple of hours of quiet and so I grabbed my apron and turned on my most disturbing playlist and prepared to make hell.
KM: How much time did you have for this bake?
CT: Exactly two hours. Which, having done no timed baking for a good long while, felt like an eternity. I looked at the ingredients, then the allotted time, and then I scoffed. Ha ha! Two hours! 'Tis but a trifle!
KM: Yeah, that seems like plenty of time in THEORY.
CT: They've got a theory for everything. It's real easy to ride the theory when you haven't done any very serious baking for the better part of a year.
KM: OK, so the timer went off. Then what?
CT: The cake has three things: Sponge, frosting, and nuts, some portion of which must be chopped. The sponge had to be mixed and then baked and then cooled, so that had to come first.
KM: Are the nuts … in the sponge?
CT: They are! One component of the sponge is toasted nuts, which are then ground to make a kind of flour additive. So the first step was to toast some nuts and then get them into a food processor or food mill. I didn't have enough walnuts for the whole recipe so I supplemented with pecans.
KM: I already know how this would go for me, which is: I would burn them in the oven.
CT: Yeah I am the worst at remembering about these things, I have wasted so many poor nuts in my life. This time I set my little mechanical timer and then I simply planted myself in front of the oven. I knew that I didn't have a backup quantity of nuts so I could not afford to char these.
KM: Wow! That’s personal growth! I’m proud of you.
CT: Because I was feeling so confident about the time, I spent about eight minutes making sure my nuts didn't burn in the oven—you're just going to have to get used to me talking about "my nuts" and "the nuts" and violent things happening to the nuts if you want to read the rest of this blog—and didn't otherwise do anything to start on the sponge. When the nuts were finished I felt behind the eight ball.
KM: I think this was smart because otherwise you would have had to do the nuts again.
CT: Yeah and that would've been a real disaster. The rest of this phase was straightforward sponge stuff: Cream the butter with the sugar, add the eggs, the flour, etc.
KM: OK! You know how to do that!
CT: Yeah! I can do those things, for sure, and what's more important is, I know that those things must be done, and in what order. The only slightly weird thing in the recipe is determining when is best to add the nuts, and then there's supposed to be some instant espresso powder in there, but I don't have that and don't want to have it, so I used finely ground espresso beans.
KM: Did the instructions your beautiful wife made for you tell you when to add the nuts? Or was it part of the question? To be honest, ground espresso does not seem the same to me.
CT: It's definitely not the same, but I didn't want to buy instant espresso powder, and I already had the beans. I'm aware that this probably led to a much less coffee-ish cake than Nigella intended, but I reasoned that this was fine because it would better suit the cake for the tastes of the five-year-old who would soon be eating it.
I just want to be very clear about this, for the purposes of total exoneration: There were no instructions for this bake. The only thing I was given was a screenshot of a drawing of the cake, and then a list of ingredients
KM: So it just said “bake the cake”? Also, is this a layer cake? Or one single layer? Please show me the drawing.
CT: That image is of what I was given. You can see that this cake has three layers, and icing, and poofs, and nuts.
KM: OK three layers, with a nice cream, covered in walnuts. Got it!
CT: I only have two matched sponge tins so my cake would have only two layers. It's a very simple concept, not chosen to trick the competitors, but to simply demonstrate their skills. I'm sure Paul was fuming.
I creamed up the butter with the sugar, added the eggs, added the flour and the nuts, got it all gloopy in there, realized I'd forgotten the espresso, added that, took a sniff, decided it smelled tremendous, and got the batter into the two pans.
The batter seemed encouragingly poofy and light, for something containing ground nuts, and it really did smell heavenly.
KM: Wait so one question here: you used the AMOUNT of batter for three layers in two cake tins?
CT: Well, yes. I figured it would be fine to have two extra-deep layers. And my two matched sponge tins are pretty deep. Also this saved me from having to do math, which is best for everyone.
I got my tins into the oven at 350 degrees. They seemed fine.
KM: How did you feel about the challenge once the tins were in the oven?
CT: I felt pretty confident that I'd made a decent cake batter. I felt broadly in control of things, but I was aware that I had not really pressed myself to move quickly through that first phase of the bake. I was still The Swaggering Artisan.
KM: OK! But this feels optimistic!
CT: Somehow we seem to always start each season freshly cocky about our skills. I cleaned out the bowl of my stand mixer and got the ingredients together for the buttercream. The only slightly weird thing here, again, is the presence of instant coffee. Since the purpose of this portion is to add coffee flavor to an otherwise smooth and textureless buttercream icing I knew that I could not add coffee grounds, that would be disgusting.
KM: I would just use …. Coffee. Is that insane? What did you do?
CT: That's what I did. I made a little steeping setup out of a whisky glass, a coffee filter, and a rubber band.
Then I mixed together the rest of my finely ground espresso with some boiling water. I am aware that this is less efficient than making a pot of coffee but I didn't want to grind up a bunch of beans and to grind espresso as fine as you'd want it takes forever with my grinder, and there just wasnt' time for it. So I had about three tablespoons of grounds and I added about a tablespoon and a half of boiling water.
I poured that into my little filter thing and let that steep and cool while I once again creamed butter, this time with confectioner's sugar.
KM: This all sounds brilliant to me, and I think you’re a genius so far.
CT: I was feeling good! Strutting around the kitchen, making gadgets, whipping butter. I nodded approvingly at Nigella's recipe, the work of my peer, for you see I too am really a famous chef, when you think about it.
I spooned some of the icing into a decorating bag and then just covered the rest with film and socked it away in the fridge.
KM: To be honest, all of this sounds great! How much time did you have left at this point?
CT: I really wish I could tell you. The problem is, I was not closely monitoring the time at all. I had my cake in the oven, and I checked on it after 15 minutes, and spun the tins. And then I checked again about 10 minutes later, and then set a timer for five minutes. If I had to guess, I would say that I'd already used more than a full hour by this point. The cake would need to come out of the oven, cool all the way down to room temperature, and then be iced and decorated, in something less than an hour.
KM: OK. That still seems kind of fine. I’m a little nervous, but not bad.
CT: That describes my vibes at this point of the bake. The next immediate tasks were very easy, if tedious. I had to finely chop up like 200 grams of toasted nuts, while reserving a handful of complete specimens, for decoration. And then I had to clean my kitchen, which was a flour-coated mess. That's the other thing: You get away from the tent for a while and some of the efficiency of movement you'd honed in the competition starts to soften, and by the time you get back in the tent you cannot transport a cup of flour from here to there without causing an emergency situation.
KM: Oh no! The flour! It becomes a terrible sludge.
CT: But since all that was happening at this point was two fat warm sponges cooling on a wire rack, I had plenty of time, I felt, to get things back in hand. Then I checked my timer and was very spooked to discover that I only had a half-hour left. I went over and put a hand on my sponges and they were still very warm, almost hot.
KM: No! No!!! And the sponges were on the counter? No!
CT: I was pretty sure that I was screwed. So sure, in fact, that I lifted the wire rack and marched it over to my wife's home office and stood in her doorway and said, aloud, "I'm screwed." Feeling pretty desperate, I then raced downstairs and put the sponges into the basement freezer. It was my only chance.
KM: Thank god the furnace men were gone! They would have seen your harried racing!
CT: No, I'm sorry, I cannot answer your ducting questions right now! Can't you see that I'm fighting for my life!
I knew that if I could just get my sponges cooled that I would be able to make a very nice cake. My buttercream was fine, I'd prepped my nuts—grow up—I had my piping setup ready and my nice cake stand. But if I had to put icing onto a still-warm cake, the butter in the buttercream would melt and it would become a disgusting slimy mess.
KM: Now I too am stressed and concerned. Because that is not enough time for the cake to cool!
CT: Right, certainly not for it to cool well. In a freezer the outer parts of the cake will get near frozen by the time the inner part of the cake is room temperature. I did not have enough time for that to become a possible outcome, because my sponges had gone in very warm. But this meant that they would almost certainly not be fully cooled by the time I started icing. And they were not. I pulled them for the final stage with 10 minutes to go, and they were still obviously not fully cooled. But 10 minutes is not a long time for me, when it comes to icing and decorating a cake. I don't have the necessary set of fine finishing skills, at all.
KM: Ten minutes is not enough time for your toasty cake! It always takes so much longer than I think!
CT: I think I could've done very well with like 15 minutes and a fully cooled cake. As it is I was rushing along but still managing to keep things relatively neat.
KM: But you did not have 15 minutes or a fully cooled cake!
CT: I did not. I could tell pretty quickly that the still warm part, right in the middle of each circle, was starting to soften the buttercream.
There was really nothing to do about it. I iced the first layer, laid on the second one, and iced the top.
Then, with an offset spatula, I iced the sides. I was impressed that Nigella's buttercream, even with liquid coffee in there, had a very lovely texture, and I was extremely distressed to see it warming and separating atop my sponges.
KM: Did you try the icing at this point? Did it taste good?
CT: It tasted good, but not strongly of coffee, which was a bummer. Like, it's butter and sugar, it definitionally cannot taste bad, but it didn't have much other flavor. I would've preferred a more coffee-ish icing. Judging by the photo on the website, Nigella wants the icing to be dark with coffee and presumably to taste pretty strongly of coffee. Whereas my buttercream was quite pale and had only a mild coffee flavor. Maybe that flavor would stand up to a yellow cake or angel food, but this dark nutty sponge was destined to kick its ass.
Once I finished icing the cake, getting the nuts onto the side meant just grabbing little handfuls and just clumsily mashing them on there. It was messy and ridiculous but at the end my cake had a reasonably uniform nut siding. I didn't have time to be very fine with it, but I'm not sure how much more I could've managed anyway, with my clumsy blogger hands.
KM: I have tried to cover a cake in sprinkles before and it was so, so, so much harder than I expected. It’s really difficult to get them to not look like absolute shit on the side of the cake!
CT: Someone should invent a kitchen gadget that is basically a little leaf blower but it shoots sprinkles onto the sides of cakes.
The Finished Product
CT: The cake in the "instructions" has eight large rosettes on top, each topped with a walnut, and then some chopped nuts arranged in the center. After all these years I still suck so bad at things like piping rosettes. One of them came out OK, the rest look like total ass.
KM: Oh god! How did you feel? Show cake?
CT: I was bummed about the warm sponges and bummed that my buttercream didn't taste like much more than sugar, but my sponges were well-baked and I was happy to now possess a cake, for eating. It looked OK!
A problem, Kelsey, is that this cake doesn't taste great.
KM: No! No!! What kind of doesn’t-taste-great are we talking about?
CT: So, I don't know what I got wrong in the sponge, but it's very dark and dense and kind of overpoweringly nutty. It's not a light spongy cake, it's heavy, each bite is more of a commitment. And the icing—my fault! It's my own damn fault—isn't doing enough. The coffee flavor is too far in the background. You bite into the cake and it's very nutty, very heavy, a little bit salty, mildly, almost blandly sweet, and sort of greasy.
KM: Hmmmm. That’s concerning to me that it’s so dense. I like the idea of a nutty and salty cake, but blandly sweet does not sound good to me, and I love coffee! I am sorry that your cake did not taste good. Was it even so bad that your adorable child rejected it?
CT: She didn't reject it outright, but she quit on her slice after a couple of bites. She said it tasted good and she loved how it smelled, but then she just wasn't very enthusiastic about eating it.
KM: Wow! That is not a good sign.
CT: I think a different kind of person would be very happy to eat this cake. I also think that if I'd used espresso powder and had a more richly coffee-flavored concoction that it would be more interesting to eat.
KM: Would you try to make this cake again?
CT: Sure! But I would be even more interested in taking the walnut-coffee flavor profile and somehow incorporating it into a cake that did not have ground nuts in the sponge. I just didn't love what it did to the texture! It's as Patrick Henry obliquely implied: Give me a light fluffy cake or give me, I don't know, a bowl of ice cream.
KM: Lol! Well, not bad for the first bake of the season, in my opinion! You did in fact make an edible cake!
CT: I did! And I was encouraged by Nigella's first recipe as a Bake Off judge. It was straightforward and made of normal things, and if it came out bland it was mostly my fault. Damn me to hell.
KM: Do we know what horror awaits us next week?
CT: We do not! Although I suspect it will be Biscuit Week? Can't wait to go biscuit mode. And I'm excited that we will both be baking next week. No avoiding it! No escape! Prepare for CHAOS.
KM: Hell yeah! It’s a pleasure to be back. If not a pleasure to eat this specific cake.
