The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '26 - Week 4

Well, that was definitely an episode of the Great British Bake Off. 

Apologies for the lack of technical challenge last week, but A) I was ill, and B) there wasn’t really a technical challenge for me to recreate. A pantry is not a technical challenge - it’s filler. As I wasn’t here, brief thoughts now on Audience Choice Week: Baked cheesecakes in that time-frame is a criminal suggestion, cheesecakes don’t need to be decorated, everyone making something different defeats the object of the technical challenge, wearable bakes are nonsense, and this is yet another display of how the general public can’t be trusted with anything. Anyway, Bread Week! Everything was underproofed, Paul Hollywood remains my nemesis, and we had the worst technical challenge in the history of Bake Off. A delight.

Honestly this was an underwhelming week all around - and I don’t think it’s the fault of the bakers. There was so much underproofed dough that I think the fault lay in all three challenges - bread is dull in a competition format because it needs time, and it behaves weirdly based on nothing but vibes sometimes, and it just can’t be that decorated, no matter how much nonsense you throw at it. 

Nonsense like blue cheese and roasted grapes, which brings us to this week’s challenge. 

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 not, as of yet, however, purchased the 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 - Roasted Grape and Blue Cheese Flatbreads.

I’m going to be comparing this to the official recipe on the Bake Off website as I go along - I clearly tackled things slightly differently. 

So, we’ve got an hour on the timer. 

I start with the grapes, because they need a decent amount of time roasting if they’re going to go jammy enough to be mushed into the flatbread. Five minutes down, and they’re halved, tossed with olive oil, and in the oven. 

Paul Hollywood suggests roasting them whole for 20 minutes and then, at some point before putting them in the flatbreads, slicing them - five grapes per flatbread. Where there’s time in this hour to count out 40 very hot grapes and slice them, I’m not entirely sure.

Next up, the dough. My arch-enemy provided the bakers with the ingredients for a yeasted dough - and I think that’s where things started going tits up on-screen. Because you’ve got an hour, you see yeast in the dough, and obviously you focus on getting that kneaded and rested - and unless you start on that before the grapes, it’s just not going to be ready to roll in time.

I’m obviously not following the bane of my existence’s recipe, so instead I mix bread flour, greek yoghurt, olive oil, salt and bicarb, and add enough water to make it into a dough. I make this flatbread dough a lot - it doesn’t need much in the way of kneading or resting, so it actually does work under a time crunch. The architect of many failures has suggested mixing his dough for five minutes and resting for fifteen - but a dough like his will need at half an hour to be comfortably rollable. Unlike the contestants, I am being slightly less set up to fail. 

With 42 minutes to go, the dough is made and the cheese is done, and my grapes are still roasting. 

I portion out the bread into 8 roughly equal balls. My grapes are still roasting. 

With a bit of time to kill, I remember Nigella’s suggestion that these flatbreads would go down a treat with a few olives. I prepare a few olives by putting them on a cocktail stick and resting them in a martini glass. I tip a bit of olive brine into a cocktail shaker as well, for luck. 

With 30 minutes to go, knowing I need to get these flatbreads filled, I give up and get my grapes out of the oven. They are nowhere near roasted enough, but alas, we persist. Again - this is a recipe that doesn’t work with these timings. 

I’m making these the same way I would Paratha or Scallion pancakes in the hopes my fillings will be evenly distributed - 18 minutes left, and they’re all filled and ready to roll out and fry. 

Now - assuming 2 minutes per flatbread, I’ll have 2 minutes to spare, provided nothing goes tits up. 

It goes tits up. 

My first flatbread falls apart in the pan; the grapes have predictably not squished down enough, they start spilling out, the cheese joins them, everything collapses and sticks, and I swear a lot. 

I throw that one out as a sacrifice to the flatbread gods, and start again with a new pan. I’ll be honest here - I do fuck up at this point. My replacement pan can carry a lot more heat, and things start burning. I can’t switch back, I can’t stop to clean it with this damned time limit, and I can’t cool the pan down enough. 

So I persevere, knowing I’ll have cooked but every so slightly charred flatbreads. With two to go - my timer rings out. I have, to an extent, failed. I cook the last two anyway, and decide I never want to look at a grape again. 

After one hour, four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, I have managed seven flatbreads. I swear, loudly, at Paul Hollywood, and proceed to add some ice, gin and vermouth to the aforementioned cocktail shaker, give it a good stir, and pour the resulting mixture into the glass with the waiting olives. 

The Results

I mean, I’m not proud of these. They’d be fine though, without the pan fuck-up, and they are all vaguely flat and cooked all the way through. 

My partner is overly generous - scoring me a six for appearance because ‘they’re in the right shape.’ I’m giving myself a three - and that’s largely for the martini. We both settle on a seven for flavour - not the worst, but definitely still edible. 

Was this a fair challenge? Was it fuck.

As I’ve said, many times, when everyone gets it wrong the fault is with the challenge, not the bakers. This challenge doesn’t work in that time frame. 

I’ve seen a lot of people pointing out that flatbreads should be flat, and the contestants should have known that. But I’ve seen plenty of thick stuffed flatbreads in the past. As a handy example, here’s Paul Hollywood’s Grape and Stilton Flatbreads (Prep time 2 hours) from his book How to Bake*:

*A book I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone who enjoys baking.

I can easily see how a baker would get to that point. The grapes are still chunky, you can see they won’t get any flatter, you try and cook what you’ve got, and by the time you realise the flatbreads will never cook in time there’s nothing you can do - there’s not enough left on the clock. 

It’s clear that the technical challenge had a tight time-limit because the Bakers had an evening start on their showstoppers. Flatbreads are the obvious choice. Flatbreads that already feature in one of Paul Hollywood’s cookbooks are an even more obvious choice - most bakers would have flicked through his books before going on the show. But this was a challenge that set the bakers up to fail - a mean-spirited effort that, I suppose, at least made for good telly. If you like that sort of thing. It was, at least, a lovely martini.