In keeping with “Bake Off” tradition, this year’s semi final was patisserie week. Fiddly and French, patisserie is what separates the hobby baker from the one who has to bake to maintain their mental health. I’ll leave you to decide which category I fall into.
Our four remaining bakers (who were definitely not the bakers I saw making it this far) march into the tent. The signature challenge is two batches of eight laminated breakfast pastries. It’s hyped up as the most ambitious signature in “Bake Off” history. Except it isn’t. It was the signature challenge in 2016’s pastry week. That challenge was actually more challenging: 24 pastries total instead of 16, with two batches of dough, and only three and a half hours. This year’s bakers even get to rest their dough overnight. That’s billed as something “Bake Off” has never done before, which is once again wrong. In 2013, the bakers were given an overnight proof for their European sweet bun showstopper. Clearly, whoever is producing the show now has completely forgotten the BBC Bake Off lore. In my opinion, this is actually a surprisingly easy challenge for a semifinal.
Not even ten minutes into the episode and we get our first instance of hazelnut. Drink! Georgie is making coffee and hazelnut pinwheels, as well as pain suisse (basically a sideways chocolate chip and custard croissant. It’s actually really nice). Christiaan is keeping things complex, as usual. He explains that his love of complex flavors comes from growing up gay. I mean … sure? He’s making a saffron rhubarb danish, which sounds great, and a savory gruyère and za’atar swirl.
Meanwhile, Dylan is being obsessive as usual and tracking the temperature of his butter. However, he wasn’t obsessive enough when reviewing the challenge brief, because he thought it was a two hour challenge rather than a three hour one. As a result, he’s making two batches of simple custard-filled croissants. Paul doesn’t like the sound of these, and orders Dylan to leave a couple plain ones to try. One batch of croissants will be filled with cinnamon custard, and the other will be filled with, you guessed it, hazelnut custard. Drink again!
Gill saves us from too much hazelnut with her aggressively English flavors: sausage for one batch, bananas and custard for the other. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. She’s intimidated by patisserie, as she’s more of a hearty and rustic home baker. Her idea of a “nod to the posh” is fennel seeds in her sausage mixture. Clearly tired, she thinks wistfully of eliminated baker Mike, who’s at Glastonbury while she’s laboring over puff pastry.
Now, what makes a breakfast pastry so tricky is that it’s a yeasted puff pastry. Yeast likes to be warm, and butter likes to be cold. The key is a low and slow proof so the yeast is properly developed but the butter doesn’t flood out during baking. I made a few batches of breakfast pastries during the COVID times, and often, they took all day. You need to be patient and take your time.
Alas, time is what the bakers do not have. Georgie and Dylan choose to prove their pastries in the oven. They’re playing with fire, literally. Despite having one more hour than he thought he did, Dylan is behind. Then we get the episode’s obligatory Dylan Depression Moment when he says “I’m like the most disorganized person to ever make the semifinal,” while staring at his croissants. Now Dylan, don’t be unfair to yourself. That title clearly belongs to Alice from Season 10, whose level of disorganization even featured in the judges’ deliberations.
After making the tricky call of when to put the pastries in the oven, all the bakers can do is wait. “This is just like a transient state of whatever,” Dylan says, clearly losing his mind a bit. The only baker who seems calm is Gill, but that might just be her way of coping. The challenge ends and the bakers pile into a group hug. That is, Gill, Christiaan and Georgie do while Dylan has to be dragged away from his croissants.
Onto judging! Georgie whacked her oven temperature up too high, so her pastries are simultaneously burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. Gill’s pastry delaminated due to a rushed prove, but her flavors are good. “Sausage is a bit thick, but I must say I love the flavor of the sausage,” Prue says, waggling her eyebrows. Sausage innuendo! Drink!
Christiaan has the same underproofing problem as Gill. He might be a little closer, and his flavors are fantastic. Dylan’s croissants look slightly sad. The flavor of the cinnamon is good, but the chocolate hazelnut doesn’t work. Will this put an end to this season’s hazelnut epidemic? Paul feels the pastries don’t show enough skill. Going into the technical, it’s incredibly tight, maybe with Christiaan a little ahead and Dylan a little behind.
Paul tells the bakers that for the technical, they will “have to be really careful of the layers and be extremely accurate,” an apt description of all patisserie bakes ever created. The technical challenge is an opera cake, last seen as the showstopper in 2013’s French Week. This whole episode is such a throwback to the 2013 season.
Now, I love an opera cake. I’ve made them several times, and in high school I would bake one for my French class every year for extra credit. They’re not as hard as they initially seem – an opera cake is composed of a joconde sponge (basically a génoise with almond flour), chocolate ganache, coffee syrup and coffee buttercream. If the bakers could handle the tiramisu challenge from earlier this season, they should be able to handle this.
And yet, something about the challenge sends the bakers spiraling. None of them have made a joconde, which surprises me. It’s one of my go-tos when I want to introduce pistachio or almond to a layered bake. Plus, the technique is very similar to a génoise, which they should have all made before. Georgie misreads the recipe and forgets to add whipped egg whites. This error pushes her over the edge, and she contemplates giving up completely. She needs Allison to talk her back from the brink. I know I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I LOVE ALLISON.
The next challenge is how much coffee extract to use in the coffee syrup and buttercream. Now, I can’t stand coffee extract. What happened to a good old-fashioned teaspoon of espresso powder dissolved in a tablespoon of hot tap water? The whole “coffee to taste” thing also throws Gill off, as she hates the taste of coffee.
While Gill is stressing about flavors and Georgie is having a breakdown, Dylan is sailing through the challenge. After a bobble in the signature, he’s back in his comfort zone and very happy about it. He’s the only one who seems confident going into judging.
During judging, Gill’s cake is deemed to not have enough coffee in it. Georgie has the same problem. Christiaan’s layers are uneven, and Dylan’s cake is great. In fourth is Georgie, who is unsurprised. Christiaan is in third, Gill in second and Dylan takes an equally unsurprising first place. As a result, Christiaan is a tiny bit ahead going into the showstopper, and the other three bakers are essentially tied.
The showstopper challenge is 12 individual fruit-shaped entremets. Now that’s the kind of ridiculousness I expect from a patisserie week showstopper. Prue is especially excited about this challenge, and she insists on pronouncing “entremet” with a French R sound (or at least an attempt at it). Gill is keeping it simple and making strawberry entremets, shaped like strawberries. Georgie is combining her Italian and Welsh heritage with a batch of blackberry entremets and a batch of lemon entremets (with a healthy dose of limoncello). Dylan, of course, is doing something absurdly complicated. His entremet are shaped like avocados, with a pit made out of chocolate choux pastry. He’s also making orange and white chocolate entremets. So we’re free from the hazelnut, only to be subjected to white chocolate again. Ah well.
Christiaan is sticking to his brand with basil and bergamot entremets shaped like “citrus.” It’s a broad category of fruit but I get the idea. He’s also making a lemon biscuit tree, giving us more biscuit construction foolishness that we should have been done with after Week Two. Later on, Christiaan shows us his time keeping spreadsheet. A spreadsheet on “Bake Off”? Drink!
Despite the challenge posed by entremets, there’s no major drama during the showstopper. Dylan pours his sponge into the tin too violently and it comes out weird, but since he’s cutting small pieces out of it, it doesn’t matter that much. Everyone’s entremets look nice and taste nice, with Dylan getting particular praise for the concept and Christiaan getting particular praise for the flavors.
It’s really unclear who’s going home. It seems like everyone is still pretty much tied, and nobody has had a meltdown like we often see in semifinals (remember when Briony used salt instead of sugar in 2018?). Nobody ran away with the Star Baker title either. But, ultimately, Star Baker goes to Christiaan. He was the only baker this episode to have not yet won Star Baker, and it gives him a big boost going into the final. Going home is Gill. I’m guessing it’s because she only made one type of entremet while everyone else made two, but it must have been a close call. However, Gill seems completely fine with the decision. To be honest, she seems relieved. It’s nice to see the person going home in the semifinal leaving with their head held high, rather than in tears.
Next time, it’s the final! And the big question is, of course, who will become the Bake Off Champion of 2024? But I have two smaller questions: will it take winning the show for Dylan to be truly happy for an extended period of time? And how many hazelnuts will we be subjected to? Keep reading to find out.
