The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '25 - Week 4

Is it just me, or was this an incredibly dull week on Bake Off?

Fair play to them for trying something new, but I just could not get excited about school week. Maybe it’s because I didn’t love school, so I found the rose-tinted nostalgia a little bit cringe. Maybe it’s because the showstopper challenges continue to be vague, yet also weirdly specific, and completely incomprehensible. (What is a school fete baking display? Is it things from school fetes in baked good form, or is it baked goods served at school fetes? The former explains the numerous hook-a-ducks, because really what else is there at a school fete? At least the bakers all seemed as confused as I was.) Maybe it’s because my fave went home, but overall this was a meh episode. 

Speaking of ‘meh’ things - school cake! Now, this is a familiar cake to me, but I’ve never heard it called ‘school cake’. I didn’t think this very boring plain-sponge-with-icing-and-sprinkles had a name. Is it a regional situation? Either way, what an exciting 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. 

Bread Week - School Cake 

In the spirit of suffering through the same inane challenges in the bakers, I’m committed to the ‘not using equipment’ part of this challenge. (My thoughts on that down below.) To be honest, this is not particularly terrifying to me. I also don’t think it’s particularly unfair that the bakers weren’t given quantities for the cake - basic sponge is just equal quantities. It’s not rocket surgery. 

I start by melting a bunch of butter. This was actually how we made the cakes in my last job - we had a stand mixer, but it was a nightmarish beast to clean after using. The only things we really used it for were garlic butter and meringues. (Not at the same time.) Melting the butter and whisking the mix up by hand therefore doesn’t feel like too much to ask. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes, including haphazardly lining a baking tin and getting the whole thing into the oven. 

One hour and forty-five minutes to go. It’s sprinkles time. I’m particularly resentful of this part of the challenge. Mostly because I bought sprinkles for the doughnuts last week, but now I’ve got to faff about making my own. This is purely faff for the sake of faff. It’s not a test of anyone’s technical abilities - it’s royal icing that provides some b-roll. 

Still, I duly mix egg whites into some icing sugar. Actually, first, I attempt the nonsense DIY piping bag situation. I feel ridiculous. I have perfectly good piping bags in the cupboard, but I want to stay in the spirit of the thing. 

I refuse to buy five different food colourings, and dirty five different bowls, so I opt for pink, blue and purple sprinkles, as a cheeky little bi pride moment. Might as well try and inject some queer joy into this absolute nonsense. I then realise that with just the pink and blue, on the white background, I’ll have a bit of a trans pride moment. I still add the purple, allowing the sprinkles to be two flavours of pride, because I’m bisexual and cannot choose just one. 

This absolute nonsense takes me half an hour. I give up on the third nonsense home-made piping bag, after it falls apart in my hands, and use a real one. I have betrayed everything my not-so-great-bake-along stands for, and I am sorry. 

The cake comes out, the sprinkles go in to dry out in the residual heat, and I make a batch of plain white icing by mixing icing sugar and water. Riveting stuff. This is the third time in four weeks I have had to make some variation on this icing. I feel like, maybe, Bake Off isn’t really challenging anyone’s technical skills. The show exists purely to make me suffer through stickiness. 

(It’s chocolate week next week, so it’s possible I’ll be eating my words.) 

With an hour to go, it’s time to…wait for my plain sponge to cool down! A thrill! Actually, there is still excitement looming ahead of me, in the form of custard. I feel very strongly that custard only features in challenges like this to give the bakers something to do - and to provide more b-roll. Still, I dutifully whisk my egg yolks and sugar, and whisk them into hot milk. I’ve used oat milk, because that’s what I had, which has left my custard a particularly unappealing shade of wallpaper paste. Not ideal. I decide that, as this is meant to be reminiscent of school dinners, I should bust out the Birds custard powder. Surprisingly, the oat milk fights against the lurid yellow colour I’m aiming for, but I do at least end up with a custard I can stand a spoon in, and that’s what life’s really about, isn’t it? 

 With twenty minutes to go, I get bored of waiting for the cake to cool. I trim it, get distracted at a crucial moment, and fuck it up. I am, at this point, a bit beyond caring. These will be small cakes then. I delicately spread on the white icing (do I bollocks, I dump it on and hope for the best). The sprinkles get randomly hacked up with a bench scraper, and I sprinkle them on top. I decide it looks artistic. And a bit queer. After cutting some maybe-too-small-squares and squeezing them onto a plate, I am finished, with four minutes left to go.  

The Judging 

My partner gives me a ten for flavour. It’s exactly like the cake he remembers from school. He’s not sure about the custard, but he says that while eating it from the jug with a spoon, so I don’t take the criticism seriously. He gives me a ‘nine, almost ten’ for appearance. He’s knocked off that last point because the sprinkles look weird. Sadly, that does mean that he’s a homophobe. 

I’m giving myself an eight for appearance, because they are a bit on the small side. It’s a ten for flavour though. Admittedly, the custard isn’t quite right, but I’m not knocking points off myself for busywork. 

Was this a fair challenge? I mean, yeah. There was nothing tricky with the timings, and it was all very doable. It was just dull. It was a plain sponge cake with icing and sprinkles. Instead of testing technical skills, the challenge was just padded out with silly gimmicks like ‘mix a cake by hand’ and ‘make sprinkles’. 

My biggest gripe with this challenge, and the episode in general, was the total absence of any kind of mention of the hard-working people who actually make the school food we’re all supposed to be whimsically remembering. Instead of the cringe nostalgia the show could have, at least once, acknowledged the challenge of feeding hundreds of hungry children, every day. If this very plain cake recipe was a bulk-cooking challenge; say, the bakers could have been given a recipe to make eight cakes, and told to scale it up to make 64, that might have been interesting, and acknowledged the work of real human beings! Instead, we got an episode of Bake Off desperate for a fictional past. I’m desperate for the past where Bake Off had challenging challenges. 

Next week, chocolate!