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 third-to-last week of the 16th series of The Great British Bake Off was to prepare six of Prue Leith's Gluten Free Orange and Cardamom Puddings. It's a complicated, finicky dessert: The instructions ask the baker to boil an orange, and then to use its pureed flesh in a sponge batter, and to use the boiling water to thin a lemon-scented golden syrup made from caramelized sugar, a portion of which is used in the initial bake and the remainder of which is later flavored again with blood orange and cracked cardamom pods, and then re-cooked to a thicker consistency. The sponge batter is divided into six pudding molds, sealed, and then steamed in a bain-marie double boiler for approximately an hour. When it has finished steaming, it is dressed with the citrusy syrup. Also it is served with warm pourable crème anglaise, which the baker also made, somewhere in there.
What this is is a math problem. Prue's recipe, on the show's website, says that the oranges need to be simmered for 15 minutes. Add to that however long it takes water to boil. In my kitchen that is about five minutes. Then, after the oranges have been removed from the simmering water, quartered, and pureed—optimistically, another two minutes of activity—the recipe asks you, and I quote, to "leave to cool." Time it out! Think it through! Five minutes to boil, 15 minutes to simmer, two minutes to quarter and puree, we are up to 22 minutes. How long should the puree cool? Three minutes? That seems fair: Three minutes for a thing that was steaming hot to become cool enough to go into a sponge batter containing raw eggs. So after 25 minutes of activity, we are now ready to make a sponge batter.
Now let us examine the sponge batter. Prue's instructions say to beat together butter and sugar for three to five minutes, but this part, at least, can be done while the oranges are cooling. Also, the eggs—two of them, beaten—can be added. Now the orange puree, which you are instructed to add "gradually," presumably because it is still warm, because only moments ago it was simmering hot. Next you are instructed to "fold in" sifted dry ingredients and "mix into a smooth batter." The batter is then divided into the six molds—each of them greased and lined with parchment, and also dressed on the bottom with caramel syrup you somehow made (don't get me started), and also adorned with a slice each of blood orange—and each mold is covered with parchment paper and aluminum foil, and then tied up with twine.
How long for those steps? Gradually incorporating cooled puree into your creamed butter could maybe be done in a minute, so long as you don't mind gently curdling your eggs; sifting and folding dry ingredients is another minute; carefully dividing the batter into six molds is, optimistically, another minute; topping each one and tying it with twine is, at an absolute minimum, another minute. Give yourself one more minute in there for, you know, having only two arms, and you're up to five minutes, assuming that you are a Terminator and are incapable of wasted movement or indecision. Realistically, it will take you 10 minutes, if you work well, to make a sponge batter, to spoon it evenly into six molds, to neatly cover those molds with paper and foil, to tie them off with twine, and to get them into a hot bain-marie inside your oven.
We've used 35 minutes, we've used them miraculously well, and in that time we have produced a smooth caramel syrup—we haven't even talked about the syrup, and will not, except to say that Prue demands that you simmer it for 15 to 20 minutes—and a thick sponge batter, and begun a bake that will take 60 minutes. At the end of that baking time, once the sponges are fully cooked, we will remove them from the oven, leave them to cool, and then carefully turn them out of their molds. We will use a culinary torch to "caramelize" the orange slices atop each sponge, and then we will dress each sponge with the remaining syrup, which was been fortified with the juice of blood oranges. Voila.
How long did this take, in total? What is a reasonable length of time to allow for the making of this dessert, with no shortcuts, made to the highest standard? I ask you! I demand that you stand before me and count this out on your fingers! If you say "90 minutes"—if you dare to utter those noises in that order, even by mistake—so help me, I will strike you down where you stand.
Of course, the idiots of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off did not have the full set of instructions found on the show's website. We were told to make these things, but not precisely how, nor were we told how much time to devote to any particular step. We did not have handy little off-screen kitchen helpers; we did not have bain-maries; we did not have other rooty-tooty-ass bakers around, whose efforts could be measured against our own. We had good intentions. We had a certain base of baking knowledge, perhaps even greater than average. We tried, man!
Kelsey McKinney: Welcome back, Chris! I missed you so much!
Chris Thompson: It's great to be back, Kelsey!
KM: I would like to issue a public apology to your wife: Last week, I said that because you were on vacation, I had to find other means of obtaining the recipe, when in FACT she did make the recipe for me even though she was on vacation and it was YOU who kept it from me!
CT: Yeah, I blew it. I had vacation brain.
KM: Canceled! God forbid you log off! You missed the soufflés! And because you weren't here I didn’t make that weird pork pie.
CT: I did feel a little bit sad about missing the soufflés, because soufflé is such a classic, almost mythic, baking challenge.
The pork pie sounds like something I would sure love to eat. Grody and outrageous, but tasty as hell, I'm sure.
KM: This week, the challenge was closer to pork pie than soufflé in my opinion.
CT: I don't suppose there's any way we can complete this blog without discussing or even mentioning this week's bake, is there? Couldn't we just talk about Halloween costumes or something?
KM: We could! I would rather!
CT: This was not a fun bake. We just wrapped it up a little while ago and in my present state of mind I would welcome the violent arrival of an asteroid. If Jason Voorhees marched into my home right now, I would welcome him with a mug of tea and draw a little bullseye on my neck for his machete.
KM: We baked in the morning this week, which is not what we normally do, and let me tell you, I did not feel like I was awake because even from the beginning of this bake trying to read the instructions made me feel insane. I really, really, wanted to go back to bed
CT: I felt the same way. I took my first look at the instructions just a few minutes before the start of the bake and felt totally flummoxed. None of it made any sense at all, I could not even begin to imagine what the hell we were supposed to be making. We're boiling oranges? We're making a syrup, and then making it again? There are somehow five steps before we make the sponge? In a 90-minute bake? What?
KM: I also want to admit here, that I don't really know what pudding is or is supposed to be in Britain. My assumption going in was that it was kind of like a cake?
CT: I think a British "pudding" is basically a steamed cake? A cake that has been steamed?
KM: Who is asking for this? Who wants this? Why would you want a steamed cake when you could have a delicious BAKED cake?
CT: I feel more skeptical than ever of the British steamed pudding. But mostly I feel that I would like to never bake anything ever again for as long as I live. The oven is my enemy. Flour can go to hell. I hate baking.
KM: Welcome back from vacation!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: A pretty long list of ingredients for this one! What stood out to you, in there?
KM: Well, kind of long, except that many of the ingredients were "water." There was quite a lot of water in the ingredients! This never happens! Also, one fun thing about this bake is that it required blood oranges. I like blood oranges, so this was exciting. And to get them, I had to go a fancier grocery store and while I was there I got a rotisserie chicken again!
CT: What's bizarre is, I think I also brought home a rotisserie chicken. I wanted a rosemary-garlic rotisserie chicken but they only had plain. Still went for it.
KM: Woah, rosemary-garlic chicken sounds so good. Thank god I bought the chicken, to be honest, because the blood orange got wrecked by the bake (not god).
CT: [In the voice of one who is definitely not just trying to avoid talking about this bake:] So, how was your chicken, Kelsey? Pretty good? Hit the spot? Tell me an hour's worth of details about this chicken.
KM: Pretty good! I have put its carcass on the stove now to make stock! The chicken serves my family, and I am proud to have it here, unlike these FUCKING PUDDINGS THAT I HATE.
CT: Ugh, the puddings. The only other ingredients on the list that caused me to raise an eyebrow were gluten-free self-rising flour and gluten-free baking powder. I couldn't find either of these things at my local grocery store, though I tried.
KM: Oh yeah! So I had gluten-free flour at my house already because many people I know are gluten-free (sad!). And to be honest, I assumed baking powder was gluten free. I don't really know what baking powder is, to be honest. I assumed it was made of science somehow.
CT: I also had not ever considered that baking powder might have gluten. Does this mean that you could make a whole cake out of baking powder? Tune in next week…
KM: Actually. I have googled this now for us, and learned that most baking powders ARE gluten-free and only some use wheat as a filler product, I guess. So really they were being drama queens with these instructions and all we needed were gluten free flour and regular baking powder. I had both of these things by accident.
CT: Was your gluten-free flour self-rising? Or just all-purpose? Because I could've used gluten-free all-purpose flour, but the recipe demanded self-rising, and who am I to argue?
KM: I don't believe in self-rising flour. I just make my own every damn time. It's just flour with baking powder and salt. I always have those things! I don't even know the ratios. I just go on vibes, to be honest.
CT: I would consider this advanced science, except that science is never vibes-based. So instead I will consider it alchemy. Witchcraft! Hee-hee mode!
KM: That's right, I'm a witch! Speaking of witches, Halloween is coming up Chris! Should we talk about that?
CT: Next year for Halloween I would like to dress up as the Were-Rabbit. This will take some doing, some ideating in the costume space.
KM: Good idea! Next year, I want to dress up as a big cake that is actually good to eat.
Stage One: Boiling Oranges, Making Syrup, Making Batter
KM: What was the first thing you did when you began, Chris?
CT: God, I really do not want to talk about this.
KM: SORRY!
CT: The first thing I did after starting my timer was put a saucepan of water over high heat, and I then measured 70 grams of almonds and put those into the spice mill.
I am questioning every single choice that I made in this bake, for reasons that will later become obvious, but I swear this all seemed perfectly rational to me.
KM: Well you did have two weeks off! You forgot the aura of the tent!
CT: I think that's correct! I was out there LIVING MY LIFE, and returning for this bake was like being tossed bodily into an orange-scented burr grinder.
Both of these steps were required for the making of the sponge batter. More to the point, the instructions told us right at the top to simmer the oranges and then blitz them. So I boiled water, and then put the oranges in there, and then lowered the heat and covered the pot. How naive I was, how stupid and innocent, back then.
KM: The first thing I did was panic. I assumed that the sponges would need an hour in the oven. So I set a timer for twenty minutes. We only had 90 minutes and I wanted to be almost done with my batter by then. Then I put a WHOLE GIANT POT OF WATER ON THE STOVE. I'm not really sure why I did this. I also stupidly put it on one of my "simmer burners" instead of one of the "power burners." Dumb! I tossed the oranges in there from the beginning because I was so worried about time.
CT: I want to emphasize what you just mentioned about the timer. I had no idea how long these things would need to bake, but I want to note that before they could go into the oven, we had to boil and puree oranges and then incorporate the puree into the batter, and we also had to make a somewhat complicated multi-step syrup, and we had to grease and line some baking tins, and we had to slice blood oranges, and we had to prepare a bain-marie, and we had to prepare some way of covering our sponges during steaming. All of that, it turns out, was supposed to have been completed—COMPLETED—inside the first 20 minutes of the bake.
I am so angry at Prue Leith right now that my hands are vibrating.
KM: Well. Technically I did it all in the first 40 minutes. Because it was quite literally impossible to do in 20 minutes. I assume that the contestants had some kind of access to boiling water? I don't know, man!
CT: Truly, I am not able to believe that the contestants on the show took this on from scratch. If anyone completed this challenge, to any television-grade standard of excellence, inside of 90 minutes, I will consider that absolute proof that the show is rigged.
KM: The next thing I did was make the syrup. Or I tried to. But I put the sugar and some water in the beautiful copper pot and was really stressed because I didn't think I should be standing still. So I very rapidly made two very ugly pudding cups out of tin foil. While I was doing this, the caramel burned. I smelled this and said "OH NO" loud enough that my partner came down to check on me.
Then, I poured the burnt caramel into the sink so that I could try again and I BURNED MY HAND on the inside of the pot like a big dummy!
CT: Oh no! The hands of a blogger are vital instruments!
KM: I'm OK. It's not that bad, but I will have to take months off for the emotional damage of this challenge.
CT: So you had to take a second crack at the syrup?
KM: This time I put it on very low heat, and finished making my tin foil cups.
Then I became panicked that I had not begun my sponge batter yet, so I put the butter and sugars into the stand mixer on low, blitzed the almonds, and mixed my self-rising gluten free flour. I wanted to put the orange into the wet stuff and then the dry stuff. So I just left that bowl by the KitchenAid.
CT: While you were doing 19 things at once, and apparently at the speed of sound, I was methodically stirring caster sugar together with a splash of water in a small pan.
I had this pan on the burner in front of my simmering oranges, and when the syrup would get too dry I would spoon in another splash of hot water from the oranges. I figured we were looking for a golden brown. This seemed to take a very long time. I don't know how many splashes of water went in there or how long I stood there, but I now understand that what was really happening in this moment is I was dying.
KM: My right leg kind of hurts, to be honest, which I think is from pivoting too much very fast. I'm basically a true hooper. The oranges I was not looking at, at all. They were just in a pot of water. Once my cake was mixing, I added some of the water from my pot of oranges to the caramel syrup and threw in the lemon and… oh, I forgot to mention I had no cardamom.
This recipe called for cardamom pods AND ground cardamom. Cardamom is one of those ingredients that I buy every time I need it and then have so much of it. Or so I thought! It turned out I had zero cardamom, so we agreed at the last minute that I could just use cinnamon. I threw some cinnamon sticks into my syrup and then the orange still hadn't boiled. At this point, the timer went off for 20 minutes, so I began cutting little strips of parchment paper to line my cups, while I waited for it to boil. I also somewhere in here cut my blood orange and put it on paper towel to dry a little. I have no memory of doing that at all.
CT: I am going to guess that my oranges were done simmering after about 18 to 20 minutes.
KM: Well yeah, because you didn't put them in a VAT of hot water over your "simmer" burner!
CT: I mean, I wasn't at all sure what I was looking for, but I figure it probably took me about that long to do the syrup, and it was only when I was done with the syrup that I decided they'd been in the water long enough. I used tongs to get them out of there, and threw them directly into my wife's Ninja blender.
The recipe called for one seedless orange but I have little teeny clementine fellas in my fruit bowl, so I used four of them.
KM: I had little mandarins and I put two into the vat of water! I also ate like three mandarins during the course of this bake because they are so good. I'm actually mad that two of them got boiled and put in this pudding and now I can't eat them.
CT: With my syrup finished—or at least at a stopping point—and my oranges pureed, I next put butter and sugar into the stand mixer and started creaming that stuff.
KM: Oh! You waited until the oranges were done to make your batter!
CT: I did! Because it was way down the list on the instructions! Also I figured I'd be adding very hot orange puree to the batter unless I gave the puree some time to cool in there, so I figured it wouldn't make sense to rush into the creaming of butter. What a fool I've been.
KM: At 34 minutes after the timer started, I took my oranges out, cut them into quarters, dropped them into the blender and blended the shit out of them. I did not take the peels off. I really debated whether I was supposed to do that or not. But I didn't have time, so I decided to leave them. This made essentially very pulpy orange juice.
CT: I also left the peels, because we eat candied orange peel and orange zest and so forth, so this seemed fine.
KM: OK, great! Oh yeah! We have made those before. You're so right. I did not reason it out. I just didn't have time. So then I poured my pulpy orange juice VERY slowly into the Kitchenaid so the eggs wouldn't curdle, and then put the dry in there.
At this point, I realized we were supposed to put some of the syrup at the bottom of the little cups. I tried to do this, but I'm not really sure what it was for.
CT: It was around this time that I realized, with the force of a nuclear explosion, that I was totally fucked. I was way behind you. It had already been more than half an hour and I hadn't even made my batter. I was standing there beating a couple eggs and considering the steam still coming off my orange puree and I just knew, all at once, that my situation was all but hopeless.
I had not really considered how long it would take to bake these things, but I knew that I needed to finish the batter, get it into the molds, cover and tie the molds, and then bake in a bain-marie, and I had less than an hour left.
KM: At some point during my chaotic pivoting, I had also found the roasting pan and the cookie cooling rack, and put them together like I do when I make Thanksgiving turkey and pour a whole gallon of apple cider under it. Once my batter was done I VERY FRANTICALLY put the oranges in the cups and the batter on top, and then I poured the whole pot of still not boiling water into roasting pan.
I threw the little cups on top. But the tin foil ones kept falling over!! AH! So I put them in a bread pan on top of the wire rack, threw some foil on top of them and put the whole thing in the oven which was VERY precarious because it was heavy and full of hot water.
According to the records, I had everything in the oven after 41 minutes.
CT: I, on the other hand, was nowhere close.
Stage Two: Baking
CT: I was in such a frazzled state after putting my batter into my molds—I used a set of ramekins purchased for this exact purpose—that I could not make my fingers work to cover them. I was trying to cut parchment and foil and then to tie it off with twine and I couldn't manage it.
KM: Wait, sorry. What do you mean "cover and tie the molds"? I did not do this and have no idea what it means. Was I supposed to do this?
CT: Well, I was trying to tie loops of twine around the openings of my molds to secure some parchment-and-foil lids on there. I remember doing this when I made Spotted Dick last year, and it was no problem then. But this time it was a huge problem. I just could not get my fingers to be normal.
KM: I remember seeing "blow torch" and "string" on the equipment list but then I just immediately forgot about those things because I didn't have them.
CT: At one point, after a loop of twine slipped off a mold for like the sixth time inside of one minute, I screamed "What the fuck is happening right now!" at such a volume that I actually became sincerely worried about my state of mind.
KM: God! That's terrible! I basically just put tin foil over my whole roasting pan and puddings and so it kind of became a steam lid. I guess? I don't know!
CT: That might've been the right thing! I just kept picturing the neatly bound-up Spotted Dick from last year—the only other time in my life that I've made or even seen a steamed pudding—and so I figured I needed to do that again to each pudding.
I don't know for sure how much time I lost to this desperate, foolish undertaking, but I can say that my puddings did not go into the oven until there were just 28 minutes left on the clock.
KM: You really killed that Spotted Dick challenge and I remain stunned that you did. I don't know how you did that.
CT: I still have not even mentioned the worst mistake that I made in this bake.
KM: Oh no. What was it?
CT: Not only did I neglect to prepare anything bain-marie–ish, or even to consider what I might use to hold simmering water under my puddings, I also finally FORGOT TO PREHEAT MY OVEN.
KM: NO! NO!! FUCK!
CT: So when I put my puddings into the oven—I decided to abandon the bain-marie and just dry-bake them—the interior of the oven was at room temperature.
KM: Oh shit! Wow. What a pivot!
CT: I thought very seriously about abandoning the bake at this point. I knew that it would not work, and that it could not work. And I knew that by continuing I was just making a bad mess even worse, and wasting more food. I felt very awful at this point.
KM: You did message me "I'm giving up," at one point.
CT: My oven was set to 400 degrees but because it had not preheated I knew that it would barely be up to temperature when the timer ran out, to say nothing of leaving myself a little room to plate my puddings.
KM: I accepted while my puddings were in the oven that they would not be coming out of their little homes before the timer went off. I was only trying to get one of them out before the timer went off because otherwise, I knew they would be underbaked. I went way too slow to have the luxury of a good plating.
Stage Three: Making Custard
CT: Here we are again, making custard. How'd your crème anglaise turn out?
KM: I'm so sick of making custard, dude. I never even eat it! So I'm just making a custard so I can throw it away. I don't ever want thick milk on my dessert, I'm sorry!! Anyway, it went fine? I don't know.
CT: It's funny, despite being generally uninterested in eating custard, I have become pretty good at making it. In this case, I could not bring myself to use my last vanilla bean in a bake that was already beyond salvaging, so instead I used a squeeze of vanilla paste.
But otherwise this was a breeze. I feel like I could basically eyeball my way to a solid crème anglaise, at this point.
This custard is over!
Stage Four: Assembly and Plating
CT: How were you feeling in the final minutes of this bake?
KM: I felt bad! I had my stupid custard in my little cup. This felt easy enough, but I was mad about my wasted vanilla bean pod. I did not think as quickly as you on that. And then I did have some time to deal with my kitchen which literally looked like it had been hit by a tornado.
CT: My kitchen, even as I sit here and type this, is like an angry bear got into my pantry during an earthquake.
KM: I also had genuinely no idea whether my puddings would be baked or not. I removed them from the oven with two minutes left and was STUNNED that they looked baked.
I flipped only one of them out onto a plate and dropped some syrup on top of it and then the timer went off. So I guess technically I would have had to present one flipped pudding and five still in their janky cups.
CT: I took my stupid molds out of the oven with about 30 seconds left in the bake. I considered just leaving them in there to finish but when a person has fucked up as badly as I fucked up in this bake, it's right that they should be forced to face the carnage. I did not want to have photos of puddings that finished baking a full 40 minutes after the timer went off.
There wasn't a lot of assembly required. Just a little hit of syrup, and then the awful experience of facing what I'd made.
The Finished Product
KM: One of mine was "assembled." Then afterward, furious and with a still messy kitchen, I "assembled" the others. Here is my bake:
WHATEVER.
CT: Looks like something the British would absolutely eat. I'd say you nailed it.
KM: Unfortunately, as you can see from my photo, I did try to eat this and it tasted to me like someone had chewed up a granola bar, spit it back out, and smushed it together again.
May I see your bake? I am sorry to ask this.
CT: What bake?
KM: ...
CT: Fine. FINE. Here is my bake:
KM: NOOOOOOOO! Chris!
CT: As you can see, what I have created here is a huge pile of shit.
KM: Did you put any of them back in to bake? Or did you simply accept death?
CT: I considered putting them back in. But the thing is, another 40 minutes in the oven is not going to make these things any more pleasant to eat. They will just become terrible and dry instead of terrible and wet.
I gather we were supposed to have done something with a culinary torch, and I'd even borrowed one from a family member for this purpose. I don't want to get too earnest and scold-y, here, but I simply could not bear the thought of using combustible fuel to brulee the top of a ruined, inedible blob of food that under other circumstances might've fed some hungry people. Pulling this thing out of the oven was close to unconscionable, without also pointlessly farting onto it a hot cloud of greenhouse gasses.
I am going to leave these unsightly "puddings" on the counter until my wife and child are home, so that they can see how I spent my morning. And then I am going to huck them out into nature, so that they can be enjoyed by bugs.
KM: I'm planning to do what I do every week and put them into the fridge on a plate for four days and then throw them away when only one of them is eaten. Only the school cakes were enjoyed by my loved ones. Everything else has been garbage. I think everyone will especially hate this one.
CT: There is another dimension, one where Prue did not cruelly jam this bake into a 90-minute window, and where I remembered to preheat my oven and to prepare a bain-marie, and in that dimension, this orange-and-cardamom-scented steamed pudding is probably fine to eat. I do not think my family would ever eat several of these things, but I can imagine one of them being fine, if made well. Certainly my kitchen smells nice.
KM: My kitchen smells really good which is crazy because the puddings don't even taste that good. Oh well! Luckily, next week is a new week and maybe we will not be in hell then.
CT: I expect to be in hell! Baking is hell and I hate it forever.
KM: Do you know what the theme is next week, Chris?
CT: Hmm, I am almost afraid to look.
Wait! It's Patisserie Week! OK actually I am going to bake the hell right out of this. Baking rules.
KM: OOH! OK! Certainly we will be really good at that! I’m not worried about it! Baking is the best!
