The Not-So-Great Bake Along Week 8

It’s party week! I completely forgot to don a festive hat while baking, and have dug one out instead for the purposes of this write-up. I feel ever-so celebratory. This was the first ever party week on Bake Off, and it’s not the most horrific of concepts - especially as it has the benefit of not being culturally insensitive. According to Josh, and his excellent jumper, it was Christmas week, and honestly his festive bakes were almost charming. If it wasn’t still November I’d have loved them. (I’m firmly in the “no tinsel before the first of December” camp.) Christy went home on the back of undercooked sausage rolls and too much beige in her buffet, and as she was the contestant I irrationally disliked the most (I’m so sure she’s lovely I’m just a horrible person) I’m…not celebrating. That would be too mean. But I’m not rioting either. 

The technical then. An Unnamed (for legal reasons) Caterpillar Cake. I have a tragic history with caterpillar cakes. As a child, I was intolerant to chocolate - migraines, hives, all sorts of horrible stuff. The fact that I grew out of the intolerance is the only thing that makes me think there might be a god after all. That meant endless birthday parties at which I was given fruit, or a drumstick lolly, while I watched all of my friends merrily dismember a chocolate caterpillar. These cakes were the height of fashion, but I couldn’t have even a single bite. I’d still be resentful about it to this day if my wonderful friend Francine hadn’t provided me with my very own, personalised, Colin the Caterpillar for my 30th birthday. My entire childhood was healed by that chocolate cake. (Well, most of it. I’ve got some lingering issues to do with Catholicism but I’ve heard there’s a cream for that.) 

It would never have occurred to me in a million years to make my own caterpillar, and yet, today, I tried. Spoilers - It was not an entirely successful attempt, and the dungeon dimensions might have come into play. I knew, going into the challenge, that it wouldn’t be. I’ve got absolutely no opinions on the fairness of this week’s technical challenge, so I’ll spare you the usual ranting. (Although I’m genuinely offended at the implication that there’s anything wrong with a beige buffet.) I went into this challenge knowing full well that prettiness and precision are not my strong suits. Nonetheless, I forged blindly ahead as is tradition, and now I look upon what I hath wrought in horror. 

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. This week, I didn’t scale down but I thought an extra handicap would be amusing, so I gave myself 2 hours. 
• The judging: I still have a distinct lack of gingham altar and (thankfully) Paul Hollywood in my life. My partner did the honours next week, and the resulting caterpillar will be haunting his dreams for some time to come. 
• 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. This week, I realised I do not own enough mixing bowls. 

Unnamed (for legal reasons) Chocolate Caterpillar Cake

While I go into this certain that my final results are going to be…lacking, I’m fairly confident in the sponge. I’ve made a few Swiss Rolls in my time, as they say. It’s just a sponge cake with no butter, and the rest of the ratios are halved accordingly. So 4 eggs and 4oz of sugar go into my stand mixer and I tell the whisk attachment, sternly, that it’s not going to give me any trouble. I weigh out the 4oz of flour and guess that 40g of cocoa powder is going to do the trick.  It does! The cake comes together with surprisingly little drama, and goes into the oven. At this point I realise I have no way of setting a separate timer on top of my main one, and have to rely on myself remembering to take the cake out of the oven in ten minutes. 

The meringues, again, I’m confident in. Giant meringues were part of my regular baking tasks in the last restaurant I worked in. I need to make it very clear that this restaurant was part of a cinema. Please take the time to imagine eating a giant meringue at the cinema. It’s a unique experience. Anyway, 1 part egg whites to two parts sugar is the ratio, and I guess I need about six egg whites. (This proved to be a bit much.) Genius that I am, I realised yesterday, before baking, that I had a box of leftover egg whites from last week in the freezer. I thought about taking them out of the freezer. When I come to make the meringue, I realise that those egg whites are…still in the freezer. I separate more eggs, and now have a plethora of spare yolks. Tragically, this means more weekend hollandaise. 

I don’t have beaters and therefore have to chase out my own game birds…sorry, wrong blog. I don’t have beaters and thus have to temper my meringue first, then whisk it into stiff (I’m not even going to bother) peaks. When I made this meringue at the restaurant, there was definitely a specific temperature it had to get to. Checking the temperature is highly overrated. When the vibe seems right, the meringue transfers to my stand mixer and starts to do its thing. Luckily, at this point, I remember that I’m making a cake, and I’ve somehow timed things perfectly. With an hour and 40 minutes to go, my sponge is out of the oven and rolled for the first time. (I know to pre-roll it while warm thanks entirely to Bake Off.)

My meringue mix has become shiny gloop. Honestly, it’s a bit undermixed but I’m bored. I take a third or so of the shiny gloop out, to be coloured and turned into pretty (HA) decorations. The rest gets 170g of butter and 80g of melted chocolate and becomes a, quite frankly, fantastic buttercream. I should make meringue buttercream more often. I go to colour the meringue. I should make it clear at this point that I am using food colouring rescued from the back of my baking cupboard. I was not willing to walk to a shop today. I also really need to clean out my baking cupboard. I have a choice of purple, blue, and red. It’s not very effective food colouring. My meringues are resolutely pastel. We’ve all been there. It’s also not really a…pipeable mix. I manage something akin to antennae and some wonky legs, and the rest becomes some decidedly freeform kisses. At an hour and 15 minutes left, my meringues go into the oven. I realise that I have generated an insane amount of horribly sticky washing up, and consider burning my flat down, changing my name and leaving the country. That would have been kinder to the world than completing this poor caterpillar. 

While I’ve been performing my meringue faff, I do manage to melt some white chocolate buttons and pour the chocolate into one of the too-small-for-cheesecake silicone moulds I bought a couple of weeks ago. I tell it, sternly to set. My ganache, with 170g of dark chocolate (there certainly wasn’t dark chocolate ganache on those caterpillars when I was growing up) and 200 ml of cream, comes together without a hitch. I have 50 minutes to go. I take a brief break, and decide to tackle the cake. 

Thanks to watching Bake Off, I know how to do the ridges, in theory. Obviously, I don’t measure them. Life is short. I also don’t count them, which proves to be a mistake when I end up with an even number and have to fix things by making a skinny ridge on the end. Basically, this is where things started going south. I put far too much buttercream in, roll the bastard anyway, and my flimsy ridges start cracking. Also the thing’s not tight enough, and it’s starting to look a bit…squat. Forging blithely on it is. I cover the whole thing in more buttercream. It doesn’t help matters. 

I remember that this bastard needs a face. I’ll admit to ignoring Bake Off a bit here. The bakers were definitely making up their own black icing to use along the pre-made fondant provided. As I’m short on non-pastel food colouring, and I don’t think mixing icing sugar and water is a particularly impressive test of skill, I opt for dark chocolate instead. (Bugger the fondant, I’d definitely have to walk to a shop for that.) I manage to pipe on something akin to a face. It’s not quite right. It’s also definitely looking at me funny. 

I start covering my “caterpillar” in ganache. I realise at this point that this is definitely going to be delicious, and is absolutely going to look atrocious. The ganache and the buttercream have covered up the ridges. This doesn’t look like a Caterpillar. The meringues are not going to help. 

Said meringues are done by the way, for a given value of done. They’re not exactly pretty, but they’re fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I glue the face to the Caterpillar. It is judging me. It knows I’ve brought the horrors upon us. I start adding meringues. One of the antenna breaks. It’s really the least of my worries. No amount of pink legs and meringue humps can improve what I have done. At eight minutes to go, I admit defeat. I have made something. 

It is The Very Curséd Caterpillar. My partner cannot stop laughing. Neither can I. I tell him that “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight, I need you to eat his face.” 

I name it Clarence, after Eustace Clarence Scrubb. It almost deserves it. 

The Judging

I deserve to be not just judged, by judged for this. I have brought something horrific upon humanity. It’s quite tasty though. 

My partner’s thoughts: 

Appearance - 666/10

Flavour - 8/10 (I’m marked down for a slightly dry sponge. I’ll accept it.)

“It’s Chocolatey.” (He’s not wrong.) 

My thoughts:

It’s fine. I mean, it looks dreadful, and I think it would make children cry, but it’s delicious, and I did technically manage the techniques the bakers were being tested on. Would the extra half an hour have helped? Probably not to be honest, I had plenty of time left at the end that I could have used to make things prettier, but realistically, this was doomed from the start. It was a fun challenge, even with the inevitable horrors, and for Bake Off it felt pretty fair! (It makes my skin crawl to say that about a Paul Hollywood challenge.) 

Next week - patisserie week! Featuring Bel-Shamharoth!   

Thanks for reading Two-Hats Television! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.