The Not-So-Great-Bake-Along '26 - Week 6

It’s pastry week! 

Incredibly, my streak of not-feeling-too-much-rage after watching Bake Off has continued - I absolutely didn’t hate this episode. 

(Well, I hated Clara going home - she was an absolute delight.)

But what an array of absolutely normal challenges; pasties, a pie, and for the first time since I’ve started doing this nonsense, we finally got some choux pastry in the technical. 

I’m deeply attached to choux pastry - it was one of the few things my mum taught me to make (largely because her eclairs were in high demand and she wasn’t one to sniff at a bit of child labour), and it’s one of those things I know I can make well. Apart from the occasions I cock it up, that is, but this isn’t one of those occasions, and hooray for that! 

Had I ever made a Karpatka before? Absolutely not, but I have had it described to me by the amazing Polish women I used to work with as their ‘favourite dessert that I’m never making’. Did I let that stop me from diving into this challenge with gay abandon? Absolutely not! At least, not once I’d trekked to three different shops to find potato starch. 

A reminder of 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 still have a distinct lack of gingham altar and (thankfully) Paul Hollywood in my life. My partner was completely willing to step up to the plate this week. 
• 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. 

Pastry Week - Karpatka

Custard first, something I’m never particularly upset about assembling. I’ve been eagle-eyed, and paused the show to try and actually count the number of egg yolks the contestants are using. My life is so wonderfully, tremendously exciting. 

I’ve picked eight as the magic number, and scaled my standard creme pat recipe to fit - with the addition of potato starch. I’m very aware that I’m really making a lot of custard. Possibly too much custard. Possibly, just maybe, an insane amount of custard. But, to be fair, it still fits in my usual saucepan - so clearly I haven’t gone overboard just yet. 

The downside of making custard in such vast quantities is that it takes so damn long - the first 25 minutes disappear in egg-separating and tempering and whisking. Still, I successfully make the requisite bowl of gloop that tastes far better than it looks, and move on to my choux. 

Once again, I’m being vague on quantities and maybe shouldn’t be trying to do this from memory. Still, the milk and water and butter melt, the flour goes in and gets cooked out - bread flour makes for a choux less prone to collapsing - and the resulting gunk goes into the mixer. I’m once again struck by how odd this stuff feels to make - how it goes against the laws of man and god and every other pastry. 

Such is life.

Eggs happen to the gunk - five, to be precise, - and I get what looks close enough to those ‘V’ shaped drips to think about getting the pastry in the oven. Obviously I don’t own two matching rectangular tins, so freeform it is, and I manage two mountainous rectangles that vaguely match. Vaguely. 

And then the fun part happens. The pastry goes into the oven. 

I’m immediately struck by how flat it looks on the tray, and by the thought that this will never rise into those beautiful, Carpathian peaks. Clearly (with an hour and five minutes to go), I’ve cocked up - all my smugness about choux pastry has come to hoist me by my own petard.

I calm myself down and walk away for ten minutes. When I come back, I appear to have baked two giant Yorkshire puddings - puffy and delightful, just like me. I didn’t really need to stress. But then, what would life be without a little bit of unnecessary panic?

Anyway, it’s time to whip butter into custard. Well, whip custard into butter. Because this is basically a creme mousseline - but made the other way around. Until last year’s framboisier, I’d never made creme mousseline, and I’m still very much guessing on quantities. I go with a block of butter and a bit extra, and miraculously this whole things comes together without incident.

With twenty minutes to go, my choux is out of the oven - crisp, perfectly risen, and you can barely see the spots where I’ve stabbed it (to let the steam out - I’m not in the habit of stabbing desserts when it’s not warranted.) 

I wait until five minutes are left on the clock to assemble - my pastry’s just cooled enough. Precision is not the name of the game here, so I pile on the custard, whack the second choux on top, cover it in a blizzard and voila - I have achieved Karpatka. 

The Results

My partner is delighted, at least. Admittedly, this is largely because the filling reminds him of ‘You know, those Milky Way dessert pot things’ - I’m not entirely sure this is a compliment, but I’ll take it. He gives me an 11/10 for flavour, and a 10 for appearance. 

I’ll give myself a 9 for flavour - the custard needed more vanilla - and an 8 for appearance because, on cutting, the custard does seem overly determined to escape. Chilling it would fix that, but my fridge simply isn’t big enough. 

Was this a fair challenge? Remarkably, for two weeks in a row, I’m going to say yes! 

Look, yes it’s an unfamiliar-to-many dessert. But it’s two very simple and achievable components, a reasonable time frame, and from the looks of it there was a recipe that made sense for the bakers. 

It’s not lost on me that all of the fair and entertaining technical challenges so far this season have been set by Nigella. I may be biased, considering my decision to make Paul Hollywood my nemesis and the fact that Nigella’s hot and I’m a mere mortal, but I’m enjoying this season of Bake Off immensely, and the lack of rage is doing wonders for me. 

Will that hold up next week at the Free-From party? Who knows!