The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '25 - Week 10

It’s finals time! Miraculously, I’ve made it through all ten weeks of Bake Off with my fingers and sanity intact. I wasn’t expecting it. 

That was, honestly, a delight of a finale. We had buns, we had cake, we had a length specification instead of a height specification for the showstopper bakes - which, in my opinion, is a much better way to go about things, because it involves more cake and less engineering. And Jasmine won! I mean, that was an inevitability, but a very well-deserved one. What a win for confident and aggressively competent women everywhere. (I am, personally, none of those things.) 

It’s been an absolute not-whirlwind of a season, predictable and mildly infuriating at every turn, and now, after a tower of madeleines, it’s all over for another year. The gingham can rest, the birds can quiet down, the tent has been flattened and the faux-twee passive aggression can bugger off into the ether until we do it all again next year. Anyway, on with the technical!

The Rules 

• I have to recreate, to the best of my ability, the Technical Challenge. 
• I will not be looking at any kind of recipe. Each week, I have to do this purely with some context from the show and my own store of baking knowledge. 
• The time limit: The maximum amount of time I’ll be allowing myself is the time given to the bakers. However, as I don’t want to be wasting food and I don’t have a vast team of producers and camera operators to eat my bakes, I will sometimes be scaling my bakes down. When that happens, I’ll be reducing my total time accordingly. 
• The judging: I do not have handy professionals available to judge me. I have, however, considered purchasing some fabric to make my own gingham altar. I will be judging myself, and I’m a raging bitch so I won’t be particularly lenient. My partner will be scoring as well, and probably his office mates if there’s too much cake for us to consume in one sitting. 
• The equipment: I like to think I’ve got the sort of decently-stocked kitchen any skilled home baker would have. If a technical challenge requires specialist equipment I don’t have, I won’t be buying anything for the occasion. I will be MacGyvering it, and adjusting my handicaps accordingly. Unfortunately, this week, there just wasn’t any other option - I had to buy some madeleine molds. (Which is why this write-up is coming out late; next-day shipping my arse.) Sadly, now I’m going to have to play with some madeleine recipes. 

Finale Week - Madeleine Tower 

First of all, let’s get this out of the way - an ombre madeleine tower is no more ‘a thing’ than a ‘free-standing trifle’ or ‘biscuit time capsule’ are things. Nonetheless, we persevere. 

Now, I have never made madeleines before. I’ve eaten plenty, in an effort to understand what Proust was banging on about, but never made them. Luckily, I’m the sort of person who falls down internet rabbit holes. After whipping up my genoise sponge last week, I did some reading on how important that initial bain-marie step really is, and in the process learned that the technique for making madeleine batter is pretty much the same. Armed with that knowledge, and knowing what kind of texture these should have, I’m able to knock up a pretty decent little cake. 

So, I brown the butter for buerre-noisette. I whip up eggs and sugar. I fold in flour, zest in lemons, and the whole batter making process passes without incident, mostly. Unfortunately this takes some time - by the time the batter is made there’s one hour and fifty-two minutes left. 

I portion some straight into molds, leave the rest in a jug, and get the whole lot chilling. ‘Why not portion it all into molds?’ I hear you cry. In my infinite wisdom of panic-buying these trays while still watching the technical take place, I didn’t think to order enough. I can only make eighteen at a time. I shall be engaging in a batch-cooking delight.

Anyway, with the batter chilling, I knock up a quick lemon curd. I’m mildly annoyed about this - I just made a glorious batch of orange and lemon curd a couple of days beforehand, for a new recipe I’m tweaking. I am now thoroughly overstocked on curd. This is a delicious problem.

There’s an hour and twenty minutes on the clock when I get the first batch of madeleines in the oven. The batter definitely has not chilled for long enough. See my ‘is this fair?’ thoughts below for more on the matter. Still, I get some pretty little cakes out of the oven a little over ten minutes later. I could definitely do with more of a hump, but we can’t have everything, can we? 

A second batch goes in. Some chilling happens, some filling happens. My curd is not thick enough, my piping nozzle isn’t quite right, and lemon curd ends up everywhere except inside the cakes. Nevertheless, I persevere like a brave little soldier. 

With half an hour to go, I’ve done some maths and started coating the cakes in pink chocolate. Again, only having eighteen molds is not ideal, but I sort-of make it work. There is pink white chocolate everywhere. Everything is sticky. This is a sensory nightmare and I don’t like it. Why do I do this? 

Finally, with fifteen minutes to go, it’s time for assembly. I’ve made a foil-coated polystyrene monstrosity out of some leftover computer packaging that my partner brought home from work. It looks atrocious. The madeleines themselves are pretty, I suppose, but they can only do so much to improve things. The chocolate isn’t quite set, and it’s melting even more every time I touch a madeleine. Prue Leith has somehow become aware of this, and I swear I can hear her mocking laughter every time I inadvertently stab myself with a cocktail stick. 

With two minutes to go, I add some ribbon. It does not help matters, but this does not matter - I’m done. 

The Judging

My partner gives me a nine for flavour, and an eight for appearance. I’m going down to an eight for flavour, and a six for appearance. They’re tasty little cakes, but the lemon curd has not made it through. As for the look of the thing - my chocolate’s a mess. Apparently, the cake is ‘bang on’. As my partner has never eaten a madeleine before, I’m taking that with a pinch of salt (not citric acid - poor Tom). 

Was this a fair challenge? Honestly, no, but I also sort-of don’t care. Madeleines don’t work for a time challenge, because that batter needs to chill for a good few hours, preferably overnight. These madeleines were never going to come out right. On the other hand, the judges didn’t seem overly bothered by the lack of humps - the defining characteristic of a madeleine - and the technical didn’t really seem to have any bearing on the final result - so does an unfair challenge matter? 

Overall, this finale is what the show should be going forward. It wasn’t dramatic for the sake of it. It wasn’t mean. The contestants had vague enough outlines for both the signature and showstopper that they could make something genuinely interesting, something that demonstrated what they were best at. If the whole show could be like this, I wouldn’t have anywhere near as much to complain about. 

Every year I judge myself a little bit more for doing these challenges, and for over-thinking what is supposed to be a nice, simple television show. I always realise, around the finale time, that it’s ok to care about this stuff. It’s ok to want a silly show like Bake Off to be fair, to be different from cooking shows that try to screw over their contestants at every turn. It’s ok to care about cake, and I’m going to keep doing that for a long time to come.

I should probably have mentioned this at literally any point during the last ten weeks of Bake Off blogs, but my new book - American Teen Dramas from Sunnydale to Riverdale - is very nearly out! And signed copies are available for pre-order here.