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 technical challenge for the ninth and penultimate week of the 15th season of The Great British Bake Off asked the bakers to produce a gateau opera, or opera cake. Looking at it—that's a well-made one in the image at the top of this post—the only part that stands out as particularly fancy is the twist of tempered chocolate on top, which the show's contestants were assigned to imprint with a gold sheet-music pattern. The rest is just layers: some sort of cake sponge, then some chocolate, then what might possibly be icing, and then another layer of cake sponge, and so forth, eventually topped with a final layer of shiny chocolate. No big deal! Finicky, sure, but straightforward.
No! For starters, that is no ordinary cake sponge. It's a jaconde, which is a light and springy sponge made with no rising agents, and studded with ground almonds. And those internal brown layers are ganache, a spreadable and perfectly smooth mixture of cream, melted chocolate, and butter. And those pale-colored layers are coffee creme au beurre, a complicated buttercream made with tempered egg yolks and melted sugar. And that top layer of chocolate is a deceptively simple glaze which can be neither warm nor cold when it is poured and spread over the top of the stack. Also in there are brushings of coffee syrup. Also along the bottom is a painted layer of melted chocolate. No part of this gateau is not complicated and annoying! Possibly the very least complicated part of it is the thing your eyes went to at the beginning, the little twirl of chocolate decoration.
To make this challenge particularly brutal, judge Paul Hollywood did not provide instructions for making any of the component parts, only the order and method for stacking them. Make jaconde. Sure, man. Make French buttercream. Yes, definitely, I will get right on that. Make chocolate glaze. Go to hell, dammit!
It is sink-or-swim time for the Defector Baking Idiots. To paraphrase the words of Otis P. Driftwood: Now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and chocolate absolutely fucking EVERWHERE.
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! Welcome to Patisserie Week! What do you think about this "opera cake" business? Is this something that is eaten regularly in the McKinney household?
Kelsey McKinney: Chris! Thank you so much. I am happy to be here in Patisserie Week. I know nothing of this Opera Cake business. I have never ever had it before. Had you eaten this before?
CT: No, but I think I had a pretty accurate idea of it in my mind. Like, I picture it having lots of layers, and having chocolate. And lo and behold, it indeed has both layers and chocolate.
KM: I also pictured that there would be layers and chocolate, and boy were there so many layers and so many chocolates.
CT: Having made this thing, I now hope never to lay eyes on chocolate again for as long as I live. Not to spoil the ending or anything, but every square inch of my kitchen received a splash of chocolate during this bake. I had a smear of chocolate on the interior of my refrigerator, and an even bigger smear of chocolate on the interior of my basement freezer.
KM: When I was cleaning up after this bake, I found chocolate underneath the microwave on the bottom part. I also found some on the handle of the dishwasher. It was such a mess! I was also wearing a glove on one hand, so I kept touching chocolate and not realizing it and then touching something else. It was so out of control! It took me like 30 whole minutes to remove chocolate from my kitchen.
CT: Awful, a nightmare! Kelsey, I want to ask you, what was your reaction to learning that we would be making something called "opera cake" for Patisserie Week?
KM: I was scared! How did you feel?
CT: I was very slightly disappointed. I don't know what exactly I was expecting but the word "cake" was not in it.
KM: Oooh. Because you wanted to laminate something? We really have not done a lot of laminating this season. I miss it.
CT: Laminating would've been fun, yes. I have this picture in my mind of the display case of a French pâtisserie, and it's full of small intricate colorful things that look like they are not meant to be eaten. And as sure as I am that I would not be able to make any of these things, I sincerely would've loved to have had the chance. It's not necessarily about the challenge; this opera cake was certainly a challenging bake! It's just that it's also identifiably a cake: It looks like a cake, from every angle, like a cake that you slice and eat. I guess I was hoping for something weirder.
KM: Yes! I genuinely expected the cake to be small, to be honest. I thought it would be a lot of little cakes, like maybe six? But then when I translated the centimeters to inches, it was so big! This should have been for cake week! And this was NOT cake week!
CT: I was almost … relieved when I saw the instructions and there were approximately one zillion steps and 900 components and 10,000 ingredients. Even though it's just a cake, it is at least history's most complicated cake.
KM: Wow. That is not at all how I felt. I felt very tired. I read all of the instructions and then instantly forgot them. They disappeared out of my mind instantly.
CT: Your mind rejected the steps.
KM: My mind said "no thank you!" It is also kind of hysterical to do a bake with a dozen steps the same week as Thanksgiving, which also requires so many steps.
CT: God, yes. Genuinely a fucked-up and insane undertaking.
KM: Did you know that your beautiful wife texted me?
CT: Ha! She mentioned it, yes. She was walking around carrying all of this guilt about the instructions she was preparing for us. Paul Hollywood has forced her into the role of a villain in our story.
KM: I felt so bad because she felt so guilty! But she did make me feel good because she told me that even if I did a terrible job and it looked like absolute shit, it would still taste good if it was all mashed together. I constantly reminded myself of this throughout.
CT: Right, I mean, most of what we were doing in this bake was variations on combinations of sugar, coffee, chocolate, egg, and cream. It could only go so wrong.
But the instructions were pretty harrowing. "Make ganache." "Make jaconde." "Make French buttercream." "Make glaze." Terrifying.
KM: Yeah most of the instructions were about how to do the layers, which is not that helpful when what I wanted was more instruction in what to do. This damn Paul Hollywood is always doing this!
CT: It's true! In Paul's mind, a good home baker should have an entire cookbook stored in their brain, including how to make jaconde batter from scratch. You know, that thing that we all do all the time, where we make jaconde batter. It's not enough to know the principles of whipping eggs or developing glutens, you have to have memorized a complete catalogue of doughs and batters and custards and fillings, or die.
KM: Yeah, what Paul actually values is memorization! And guess what? I suck at memorizing!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: A very long list of ingredients for this bake. Not many weird items. But there were two things on here that I instantly rejected, and I'm going to bet that you had the exact same reaction.
KM: Yes! I did look for these two things at the bodega, which was the only place I was willing to go to find ingredients for this bake. I always end up going to the grocery store 500 times during Thanksgiving week, so I just could not bear to do it right now. I rejected: "coffee essence" and "liquid glucose." Did you also reject these?
CT: I certainly rejected coffee essence. I’m not a very religious person but I can say that "coffee essence" is against my philosophy of living. I also rejected "coffee extract." Reading these ingredients made me want to be rude to Paul Hollywood. Hey Paul: When I put roasted coffee beans into a burr grinder and grind them, and then put the grinds into a filter, and then run hot water through them, do you know what I have at the end? Extract of coffee. Do you know what I sniff in the air as I am pouring myself a cup of extract of coffee? Essence of coffee. To buy small bottles of these things is, to me, unconscionable.
KM: Oh! To be honest, I did not even realize those were different. I guess I rejected three ingredients. I have so much coffee at my house. I just assumed that the coffee could be made in some other way!
CT: I did not reject "liquid glucose," but only because a mid-bake Google search told me that another way of saying "liquid glucose" is "corn syrup." So I did not buy liquid glucose, but I did have a bottle of old corn syrup, and I used some.
KM: Oh wow! I’m learning so much. Luckily, I did in fact use light corn syrup as a substitute because for whatever reason, I assumed it needed to be sticky. "Liquid glucose" just sounded sticky. And there was already so much damn sugar in this bake that I didn't want to use honey or agave. So we did pretty well, in my opinion.
CT: Yeah! When I saw the list of ingredients—just, like, the size of it—I felt overwhelmed. But then as I scrolled down the list I realized that it's mostly the same few things, just divided into different components of the bake. Which can make shopping annoying as hell but is helpful at bake time.
KM: I would say this bake is 40 percent butter, 40 percent chocolate, and 20 percent other normal ingredients like almonds and flour and sugar.
CT: Truly an incredible amount of butter and chocolate. Lots of cream, too.
KM: I think I used almost five sticks of butter! That"s how you know you"re having fun! And a whole tiny carton of heavy cream! Decadent!
CT: Imagine how much butter you will have cooked with by the end of this week. Staggering!
KM: Genuinely, I cannot think about that. I imagine I'm gonna use dozens of boxes of butter. I deserve it!
Stage One: Making Ganache, Making Jaconde Batter, Baking
CT: A whopping two hours and 45 minutes for this opera cake bake. And very little down time! What was your first task after starting your timer?
KM: Well I want to admit that I did something before the timer began, which is that I translated the centimeters to inches, and drew a square onto a piece of butcher paper. And then I also made another butcher paper with a tape outline to construct on.
I don't own things like "cake frame" and "acetate sheets."
CT: The one that cracked me up is "chocolate comb." I can't even imagine the life of a home-baker who has a comb for their chocolate.
KM: Literally, what the hell is that?
CT: I don't want to know. I never want to know why a person needs a comb for their chocolate.
KM: Stop combing chocolate! I also wish to admit that I had to wear a latex glove to do this bake because I forgot that I needed to do this bake and so I got a hand tattoo on Saturday. Luckily by the time I baked, my hand was no longer swollen, but I had to protect my beautiful hand! So that was an extra bonus for me.
CT: I assume the hand tattoo is of your caterpillar cake.
KM: What else would it be? His face will haunt me forever from my hand.
CT: I also do not have a cake frame, but I did endeavor to make one. I used foil and then I cut up a sheet of counter plastic, and I taped these things together into a rectangle measuring nine inches by six inches. I also used foil to make a little divider in one of my baking pans, a trick that I used back when we did that terrible Battenberg bake.
KM: Wow! OK star baker! That sounds really fancy! My plan from the get-go was to make my cake all stacked up nicely and then to trim it so that it would look beautiful. I knew that it would be pretty messy, but I figured if I cut the cakes a tiny bit large and spread everything right to the end, it would work itself out.
CT: That was very bold of you. I absolutely do not trust my stacking and spreading and icing skills enough to try this maneuver. But then, perhaps I should know better than to trust my making-kitchen-implements-out-of-foil skills.
KM: I did not have the innovative idea to create my own cake tin out of tin foil!!
CT: So after you'd done your math and your mapping, I assume your first step was to get going on the ganache? How did you attack this task?
KM: Yes. That was my first task because it was the first instruction!
I went with what I consider to be The Chris Method of Ganache: I heated the milk and poured it onto the chocolate, which was in a bowl on the counter, and then let it sit for two minutes and then stirred and added butter.
This felt straightforward to me because the Bake-Off loves to make us make ganache. Is that what you did?
CT: Heh, it’s funny, we've done ganache enough now that I think we've each tried it a couple of ways. I did basically the same thing here, simmering the cream and then pouring it into a bowl and then stirring in the chocolate, and then stirring in butter.
I then stuck the whole thing into the fridge. I also used some of the simmering and melting time to throw a bunch of almonds into a spice mill and grind them down, for the jaconde. I think I was about three minutes into the bake and already feeling very frantic.
Kelsey, does the word "jaconde" mean anything to you?
KM: Listen .… No. It means nothing to me! I was truly flying blind on this. I felt so frantic too. I think because I knew that the assembly would take so long, that I felt like I needed to go so, so fast. I blitzed my almonds and then I stared at the ingredients for a while because I felt like the sugar needed to go in both the mix with the almond and eggs and in the egg whites. So I just divided it in half. Who knows if that was right! Did you do this?
CT: Because we are a Meringue Household, I have a basic idea of what jaconde is supposed to be, in the sense that I know it is a meringue sponge that has nuts in it. So my first move was to put egg whites into the stand mixer and to start whisking them at high speed.
KM: Wow. I didn't even know that and to be honest, still did not know that until you typed it. The only reason I knew to whip the eggs was that there was no other rising agent in the recipe.
CT: I also know, from having made meringue several times, that the proportions here were insane. You cannot get 225 grams of sugar to stabilize in six whipped egg whites. So I used approximately half of the caster sugar in the meringue, and then I put the other half of the sugar in with the ground almonds. And then I stirred into this mixture the whole eggs.
KM: Wow, so perhaps I was right to divide it!
CT: You were right! At this point I had a nice stiff meringue in a huge bowl and a slimy mixture of eggs, almond meal, and sugar in another bowl.
KM: Wow. Okay this is why your cake ultimately ended up so much puffier than mine. I got mine to stiff peaks, but definitely not meringue! I also whipped the slimy mixture, just in case.
And then I mixed them GENTLY together so that the air wouldn't fall out of it!
Then I added the flour and melted butter, and in the end, it did look like cake batter and taste like cake batter, so I figured that was good enough.
CT: Yeah, folding the almond mixture into the egg whites was nerve-wracking. I dreaded over-mixing it and I knew that I could not allow myself to take a second pass at any single step of this bake. I used a fine mesh sieve to add the flour, and did more extremely tedious- and slow-seeming folding, and then added the melted butter. I felt very tired at the end of this but I was happy that my batter was extremely foamy and light, the eggs whites hadn't taken too much of a beating in all the folding. I immediately divided the mixture into the cake tins and threw them into the oven, at my cop-out temperature.
KM: I have to admit that when I mixed the cake batter together, I did have a thought that if it didn't work, I was going to give up. I had already done so much and it had only been like 16 minutes.
CT: Yes. By this early stage I was already sweating and swearing and covered in various slimes. And my kitchen was somehow already a total wreck.
KM: I also really envied the people in the tent because I only have one bowl for my stand mixer. I think if I had two bowls, my life would really be different. Two bowls and a scale that worked? That would be bliss.
CT: Ha! I have one bowl for my stand mixer but I also have a huge metal mixing bowl, which was very clutch in this bake. I used like nine different mixing bowls and used several of them two or three times over the course of the challenge.
KM: I used so many things. By the end of the bake, my formerly empty dishwasher was completely full.
CT: What temperature did you use for your jaconde bake? And how long were your very delicate foamy sponges in there?
KM: I used 400 degrees. I'm not sure why. I think I meant to preheat to 400 and reduce to 375, but then I forgot. I used one quarter-sheet baking pan and did that one first so that I could understand how long it would take, and I lined all the trays with baking paper. I checked the first one at 8 minutes and it did not look gold. I ended up pulling it at 11 minutes. Did your convection betray you?
CT: No, it came through again! I also went with 400, which is my go-to temperature. Curiously, my sponges took a little bit longer than yours, possibly because the dimensions of my pans were slightly smaller than they should've been. This also might account for why my sponges looked so poofy: They were just taller!
The larger of my two sponges was in there for just over 12 minutes, and even then I was worried that it might not be fully baked when I removed it. But the smaller one had already started to brown around the edges and I just feel like in my oven if you look away or lose track of things for even one minute the thing you are baking will turn to charcoal.
KM: I was doing other stuff while both my sponges were in the oven because I was stressed! The first one came out and I put it in the freezer the minute it was not scalding hot. I just felt like the sponges needed to be cold before assembly.
CT: Oh wow, mine never made it into the freezer at this stage. I just set the baking sheets on top of my range, where there's some air circulation, and moved on, in a state of crazed urgency, to the next thing.
Stage Two: Making Buttercream and Coffee Syrup
CT: Did you take some time here to clean or did you launch straight into the buttercream?
KM: I launched right into the buttercream, because I wasn't exactly sure how to do it. I assumed that the French would want me to boil stuff, because they like it when you boil stuff. So I whipped the egg yolks until they felt whipped enough in my heart, and then I boiled the sugar and water on the stove. Then I dropped it in there so slowly with drips into the bowl with the yolks in the mixer and it looked like meringue so I felt, very proud of myself. But then I fucked it up.
CT: Oh no! How?
KM: Well, I added my butter in tiny knobs but it was TOO COLD and so it quickly became weird. The beautiful meringue became yucky. At first I thought the eggs had become scrambled because that’s what it looked like, but when I tasted it, it was fine actually.
CT: It's funny that your egg whites—which are one of two essential ingredients of meringue—did not become meringue-like, but your egg yolks—which are never a part of meringue under any circumstances—did become meringue-like. You've got some funky science going on in your kitchen.
KM: I know. I know. I'm dumb! I don't know how this happened. But this was maybe the moment I was the most proud of myself in the whole bake. I really did not want to do the buttercream again. I was not in the mood for that! So I dropped the metal bowl on top of the copper pot of simmering water that I was just keeping hot because I assumed I would need it for double boiling, and it melted a little.
And then I put it back in the stand mixer. It worked!
It was perfect buttercream! Did you have this problem? What did you do?
CT: Oh wow, you had a real adventure with the buttercream!
The word "French" fucked me up, here. I had meringue on the brain, and I know that French meringue is the only one of the three meringues that does not involve any heat. But then I remembered a time when we had to do something like this before—that time it was called "creme au beurre" but is the exact same thing as French buttercream—and it involved pouring molten sugar syrup into my actively whisking stand mixer and watching it congeal into superglue while the whisk splattered little droplets all over, which froze to the sides of the bowl like, well, superglue. Genuinely one of the worst methods we've ever encountered in the tent, as far as I can recall. I feel sick to my stomach even thinking about this.
KM: Pouring the molten sugar is also so hard because the pots are so heavy. To hold them up there and pour it slowly is a wrist exercise! And one of my wrists is not bending so good on account of the tattoo and the glove so it really was something. Did you just not do that? I genuinely think we could have not done that. But then what was the water for?
CT: Well, I was determined to get "coffee essence" into the buttercream, as instructed, so I heated up the water in a saucepan and added a few scoops of coffee grounds and simmered that for a while. And then I added the caster sugar to the egg yolks in the stand mixer and creamed those fuckers until they were pale and foamy.
And then I simply slowly poured the hot coffee into the egg mixture a few drops at a time, reasoning that it would temper the egg yolks and melt the sugar as it went.
KM: Did that work? It sounds brilliant.
CT: I mean, I really cannot say. But it didn't not work, as far as I can tell. Like, I am no judge of creme au beurre, but I can say that at the end of this process—I added the softened butter after all the liquid was incorporated—I had something that looked like cake icing, and was sweet, and smelled like coffee.
I think an expert might possibly be able to tell whether all the sugar was dissolved, but I really feel that between the creaming of the yolks and the slow addition of the hot liquid, most if not all of it melted down. At any rate, it's good enough for Amateur Hour.
KM: Oh right, I forgot that I put instant coffee into the hot water and sugar! I felt really proud of myself for this innovation! I had instant coffee for some home improvement project I got excited about and then immediately forgot existed, so I never used it. I really liked the way the coffee buttercream tasted. I wanted to eat it all.
CT: Oh yes, I was very excited about the coffee flavor and scent in this bake. And at this point in the bake I felt pretty chuffed, even though my kitchen was truly as fucked-up as it has ever been, simply because I had successfully completed three components without any major hitches.
KM: Yet again, I became very cocky at this point. Having all three of these things done correctly, in a pretty short amount of time, made me realize that we've really learned a lot! I could never have done this before this series!
CT: I hate to even imagine how this would've gone in the first season. I truly believe I would not have had anything to plate at the end of the timer.
Did you go syrup mode next? This, I thought, was a pleasingly simple step.
KM: I liked making the syrup, but we have done SO MUCH stove top work this season. This, to me, is not baking! I'm tired of making syrup and caramel. But I did it. I used the instant coffee again, and this worked perfectly. Once it cooled, I tried some. It tasted good!
CT: Yeah, I just used the same saucepan and this time added sugar, brought it to a simmer, stirred it around for a couple minutes, and then poured it through a coffee filter that I’d rested inside a mesh sieve.
At this stage of the bake we had jaconde sponges, chocolate ganache, coffee-flavored French buttercream, and coffee syrup.
KM: We really had so much stuff! And I had plenty of time left, so I felt like the many layers were going to ruin my life.
CT: It freaked me out a lot that we still had THREE chocolate-melting tasks ahead of us, including the tempering of dark chocolate for the making of decorations. And I truly, truly hate tempering chocolate. The literal only thing worse than tempering dark chocolate, in the entire universe, is tempering white chocolate, which is True Hell.
KM: Genuinely, after all this time, whether the chocolate tempers or not is just an act of god to me. So I was not looking forward to that, and also I did not know what the "tall glass" was for, so at this point, I felt crazy. But I wanted to begin assembling, so I took my butcher paper with the square drawn on it, and I cut it out like a stencil, and then I put that on the small pan, and I cut out the first layer.
CT: I admire you for launching into assembly. I was too freaked out by the tempering, I couldn't bear to wait until deeper into the bake.
KM: Genuinely, I was ignoring it. I could not face it at this point after making so many things. And my kitchen was a disaster. I just needed something to seem correct.
Stage Three: Melting and Tempering Chocolate, Beginning Assembly
CT: There's a confusing thing at the start of the assembly instructions, where it says to melt chocolate, and then to paint one side of the bottom sponge with melted chocolate, and then to place the sponge chocolate-side down. What is the point of this?
KM: This did not confuse me because I'm not interested in Paul Hollywood and his little tricks. I knew that the sponge was incredibly sticky because I had touched it. And I knew that flipping it around would certainly break it. So I ignored this entirely. I just melted the chocolate in the double boiler, and spread it into the square I had made to be the correct size, and then I just put the cake on top of that.
CT: Is the chocolate base intended to keep the sponge from sliding around? I still don't really understand this.
KM: I have no idea! But it was kind of nice that there was chocolate on the top and the bottom of the cake. That felt very beautiful and symmetrical to me.
CT: While you were starting on assembly, I was tempering dark chocolate. I put some chocolate into a metal bowl and held it over simmering water until it started to melt, and then I stirred it around for a while until it was smooth and hot. Then I took it off the heat, dumped in the rest of the chocolate, and stirred that around until it was melted. I think I was supposed to then return it to the heat, but I do not understand why and anyway I would not know what to look for, so instead I just poured this out onto a sheet of plastic and spread it around, and then put this directly into the fridge.
I was glad to have it out of the way, but my left wrist was sore as hell and I was now completely covered in chocolate.
KM: I was not doing that. I was brushing on the syrup, and then I was getting my ganache from the table where I put it in the drafty part of my kitchen, and mixing it up and plopping it onto the bottom cake and putting it in the freezer as detailed by the instructions. Only then did I try to temper the dark chocolate, which for me meant: I melted it. I did not have a sheet of plastic, and since I didn't understand what the "tall glass" was for, I wrapped the glass in parchment paper, covered a quarter-sheet pan in parchment paper, and dumped the chocolate on top.
CT: Heh, I tried to use the glass to shape little shards of cooling chocolate but this went INSANELY POORLY, so I abandoned it.
I then came up with what I think is a genius solution: I cut triangles into the thin layer of chocolate on the plastic, and then I rolled the plastic into a tube, with the chocolate on the inside, clipped the ends with binder clips, and threw the tube into the freezer, reasoning that the triangles would have some curve to them once they were frozen.
I finally began to work on the assembly. It was here that I discovered that my baked jaconde sponges could not be cut to fit the stupid little cake frame that I’d constructed.
KM: Wait, why? Explain, please!
CT: I'd made the frame nine inches by six inches. But when I turned the sponges out of their pan and began to measure them for cutting, I discovered that the pan I'd put them in was actually not nine inches in width, but was actually closer to eight inches.
When I cut the rectangles, they came out at about eight by six. So I had to quickly disassemble my frame and eyeball-cut it to eight by six. This was, ah, discouraging.
KM: Nooooo! My pans were way too large. I ended up cutting off so much jaconde that was not the right size. It felt like such a waste! All that jaconde in the trash!
CT: I think this is the main reason why our sponges had different levels of thickness: Your pans were too large and mine were too small! Like a Grimms' fairy tale!
I lost a couple slivers of jaconde due to trimming but it wasn't too bad, and at any rate I was going so fast at this stage that I couldn’t worry about it.
KM: I felt sad, but also my kitchen was such a mess, I just tossed it! Goodbye!
Stage Four: Assembly, Making Glaze, Plating
CT: How did you feel about the spreading of ganache and buttercream onto your jaconde sponges?
KM: This went better than expected! I followed the instructions and froze after each layer of ganache before adding the buttercream and this works!
CT: I was too frantic to comprehend the instructions, and so I did not freeze after the first application of ganache. I went chocolate-sponge-syrup-ganache-buttercream-sponge-ganache, and then noticed that I was supposed to be freezing between layers and sprinted my opera cake down to the basement freezer.
I probably gained a little bit of extra time from this oversight, in the end. I used this first chilling phase to heat up cream, sugar, and corn syrup, and then add chocolate, stir it around, and then sock it into the fridge to become glaze.
Is this about when you made glaze, as well?
KM: I am so jealous that you had a little extra time. But I did feel proud of my stack, and also it looked delicious. I made the glaze while the second ganache was setting in the freezer. And this worked unbelievably well. I felt really proud of myself because it was shiny. But then I forgot to put it in the fridge, so it was too warm!
CT: Yeah, I was really worried about temperature at this point, so before I used my glaze I actually put it into an ice-bath.
But then it became too cold and even started to clump up a little bit, so I had to stir the shit out of it to make it smooth again. Meanwhile, I did the second buttercream application.
I then added the final sponge and brushed on the rest of the syrup, and ran it back to the freezer. I was aware of the astonishing mess around me, but I had convinced myself that I was making an utterly perfect opera cake. I really believed that.
KM: I wish I had put mine into an ice bath. I'm so jealous. Instead I ended up having to pour my kind of warm glaze onto the top of my cake, so it ran down one of the sides a little. Theoretically, this would have been fine, except that time was running out. I put the whole cake back in the freezer with 10 minutes left and spent the next seven minutes trying to shovel dishes into the dishwasher, and cut the strips on the glass, which did not really work.
CT: Kelsey, I'm so impressed that you were pouring liquid glaze onto your cake with no frame to hold it. I could never have taken this step. The fear of disaster would've overcome my senses.
KM: I was using my best friend, the offset spatula!
CT: I had something like 11 minutes left on the clock when I raced my cake back to the kitchen and poured the glaze onto it. The glaze was now cool enough that it had the texture of pudding, which made it easy to spread around without worrying about it dripping down the sides, which the frame only loosely protected.
I got the cake back into the freezer with nine minutes on the clock, and planned to pull it out and plate it with about two minutes.
KM: The great thing about never doing these bakes inside the tent is that I can always delude myself into believing that with the right tools and the assistant to clean our dishes, we would be so good at this. I pulled my cake with two minutes left also and just plopped some of the semicircles on top. They were not shiny at all, which was upsetting because the top of my cake was very shiny.
CT: Yeah, during this final chilling phase I pulled the plastic tube from the freezer and found that most of the curved triangles were broken, but that several of them were whole and nicely shaped.
But as soon as I handled them for even one second they began to melt, so I had to rush them back to the freezer. Safe to say my tempering did not work at all.
KM: I also did not have enough time to slice the sides off of my cake before the time ran out, which was devastating because I knew it would look better if I did, and that had been my plan all along.
CT: I had the same problem. Two minutes was not enough time, in the end, to recover the cake from the freezer, pull off the frame, add the chocolate topping, plate it, and cut the sides so that they were clean and straight. And the sides of my opera cake, straight out of the frame, were horrible. The cake that I would be presenting to the judges looked like crap! Total crap!
KM: I was so mad when the timer went off. With ten more minutes, I could have really done something.
The Finished Product
KM: Show opera cake?
CT: First, to be totally honest and transparent with our readers, I will show the opera cake as it was at the moment the timer sounded:
It would be hard for anyone reading this to appreciate just how profound my disappointment was at this moment. Also a normal person would've screamed at the condition of my kitchen.
KM: I appreciate your honesty and transparency and so I too will be honest and transparent. Here is my opera cake the moment the timer sounded:
I hate it.
CT: Laboring at max speed, for almost three hours, in an increasingly destroyed kitchen that you will then have to clean yourself, and producing something that is very close to what you envisioned but different in ways that make it horrendous and embarrassing, is genuinely a horrible, emotionally crushing experience.
KM: God. I could not have explained it any better. After having this terrible feeling, I decided that I deserved to have a nice cake. So I put the cake back in the freezer for ten minutes, and then I ran a big knife under very hot water and sliced the sides of it off! It looked so much better and I felt so relieved! I moved it to a plate, and this I do feel kind of proud of. Look at it:
Did you also do this?
CT: I did, eventually. I was just sitting in my kitchen feeling awful about this stupid piece-of-crap cake and then you reminded me that I could just run a knife through it to clean up the sides. I didn't get my opera cake quite as clean as you did but I certainly felt a lot better about it after following your advice.
What makes me crazy is I would've had time for this if I'd pulled my opera cake from the freezer a minute earlier, and I totally could've done that, because of the ice bath. I truly thought two minutes would be enough time, and was wrong.
Kelsey, I feel that we actually did pretty damn well with this challenge! It took some extracurricular cutting and trimming, but look at our cakes! They're not bad!
KM: Compared to the semifinals of the past, I think we did a great job! Our skills have really improved! These are good cakes! Did you taste yours? Mine tasted delicious except that there is not a single sprinkle of salt in this whole cake. I added Maldon salt on top of mine!
CT: That sounds great! I haven't tried my opera cake yet, but I will soon. It looks and smells very appealing, and my child is very eager to dig into it. I'm trying to be a good role model by insisting that we eat fish and broccoli first.
KM: I bet she is going to like it. It does slice very, very well. The slice feels very satisfying, unlike last week’s pie, which felt like cutting nothing.
CT: Kelsey, my friend, we have made it all the way to yet another final round of The Great British Bake Off. An incredible, unprecedented achievement.
KM: Wow! Yet again, we are the best at this!
CT: Remember that time Paul had the final contestants make tortillas over a campfire for their technical bake? I will vomit if he tries something like that next week. Please let us bake, Paul!
KM: If he does that shit, I'll destroy him!
