The Not-So-Great Bake Along Week 3

I have never been particularly superstitious. Often, for me, Friday the 13th passes as just another day. I have also never, in my life, eaten a Devonshire Split. It turns out that making something I’ve never made or tried before, on Friday the 13th, on a new moon, was not a great idea. I may not be superstitious, but Friday the 13th doesn’t care. Ill omens abounded and I, with my brazen tendency to forge ahead regardless, suffered. 

This week, it was bread week on Bake Off. I was very much looking forward to it. I know bread. I’m good at bread. I bake focaccia and bagels and buns (oh my!) most weekends. I became a sourdough wanker during lockdown and I still have a real, living starter in my fridge. (It’s name is Dickens. It’s not my lockdown starter, which didn’t survive a chaotic house move. My lockdown starter’s name was Susan, and he’d like you to respect his life choices.) Most of all, I was looking forward to a potentially savoury bake. I was not anticipating, or looking forward to, Devonshire bloody Splits. I have not, and will never, appear on Bake Off or meet Paul Hollywood. He is not reading this. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure he has a grudge against me. That’s the only explanation for forcing me into this cream and jam-filled nightmare. 

This week’s Bake Off saw signature cottage loaves (a baking scenario so ripe for innuendo that it almost feels unfair to make a dirty joke while watching) and a showstopper of braided breads. I could have recreated them in spectacular fashion, and had delicious bread in the house to fill with bacon and cheese and all sorts of marvellous delights. But no, the technical was Devonshire Splits and I must suffer the consequences of my own audacity. 

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 made the full eight, and while I disagree with the time allowed (see below), no amount of extra minutes could have saved me. 
• The judging: I still have a distinct lack of gingham altar and (thankfully) Paul Hollywood in my life. This week, my partner politely ate what I gave him. 
• 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. A jam thermometer would not have helped. 

Week 3 - Devonshire Splits

While I’ve never eaten one of these bastards before, I go into the challenge confident. I’ve made enriched doughs and I can imagine the texture is dissimilar to those jam and cream donuts from the supermarket that I enjoy eating in a fashion that no other human being should ever see. (I should be kept in a zoo and studied, quite frankly.) I know how to make jam and I’m confident in my Chantilly Cream. Mostly, I’m confident that Chantilly Cream would be an excellent drag name. Having watched the show, I know that 45-minute proves are essential, and while I don’t have a fancy proving drawer (because, outside of the Bake Off tent, literally no one does), I can make this work. 

Oh sweet summer child. 

(Speaking of summer, buying strawberries in October turned out to be a bit pricey. Especially as I don’t particularly like strawberries. Another reason Paul Hollywood is clearly out to get me.) 

I set my timer for 2 hours, 30 minutes and begin by nudging my oven to almost warm, in the hope it can become a proving drawer. I didn’t see a single person do it on the show, but I know yeast likes to be woken up, and if I’m adding butter to a dough, I usually melt it. So I start by melting 80g of salted butter with 200ml of milk. When the butter’s melted, I add 60g of sugar and 8g of cursed (as it turns out) yeast. I have 400g of flour (plain, not bread. Bread flour would have been a better choice, but I’d run out and they don’t sell it in my local corner shop. I brought my suffering on myself) waiting in my stand mixer.  Did I see anyone else on the show use a stand mixer? Not a one. But I’m lazy and want this dough proving as soon as possible, and the machine will make that happen. 

The dough hook in the mixer does its thing, beating the hell out of the dough the way the season finale of Schitt’s Creek beat the hell out of my emotions. At this point, things seem promising. I grab the dough, give it an extra knead for good luck, and throw it in a mixing bowl, into the warmish oven for its first 45 minute prove. There are 2 hours and 15 minutes left on the clock. 

I spend what seems like an eternity decapitating and quartering strawberries for jam. Strawberry jam was a regular task at my last job, but there I would throw a bag of the frozen bastards in a pot. It hadn’t occurred to me to buy said frozen bastards this time around. I throw in roughly an equal amount of sugar. I do not have special jam sugar, because I am not that kind of person. (If I become that kind of person, there is no hope for me. Please throw me immediately into the deepest well available. Thank you.) I have caster sugar, and I zest a lime in there for the pectin (the setting agent in jam sugar that allows this stuff to set. It also lives in citrus pith and many other fruits. Especially quinces, and there’s a long rant I could go on here about how we got the word “marmalade” but it’s a Saturday and I’ve got oven chips begging my attention). I don’t approve of food waste, so that zested lime becomes destined for a gin and tonic. It’s the circle of life. Stupidly, I add a splash of water to the strawberries and sugar, before remembering that I wasn’t supposed to. This will come back to bite me in the arse. 

At this point, I have 2 hours left on the clock. That’s half an hour left on my first prove. Usually, I’d use this downtime to remember everything bad anyone has ever said about me. However, the new Frasier began on Paramount+ the day I made these, and I use that downtime to try and make my review less bitchy. As with everything else I attempt on Friday the 13th, I fail. While writing, I hear a worrying noise from the kitchen. I walk in to find my worst nightmare - the jam has boiled over. If you’ve never had to smell the scent of failed, burning, molten sugar, or clean the results off of an electric hob, then I salute you. You have not known this particular flavour of true suffering. Remaining jam rescued, too runny and sworn at, and hob (vaguely) cleaned, I realise it’s time to check my dough. I pull the tea-towel covered bowl from the oven, full of hope, sure that this will all still come together. 

I am confronted with a disaster. My yeast has not chosen life. My dough is…unrisen. It’s sad, flaccid, with the look of a jellyfish abandoned by the tide (but breadier). At this point, I consider writing all of this off as a bad job and starting again tomorrow. “No!” I tell myself. It goes against the spirit of the thing, and everything I stand for. Admittedly, I don’t stand for a lot. I really like sitting down. 

The point is, I intend to blindly forge on. I hastily shape my sad, unrisen dough into eight buns. I put them on baking trays and pray to gods I don’t believe in that carbon dioxide is going to make its way into the buns and puff them up. At this point, I have an hour and fifteen minutes left. 

At this point, after the shaping of the buns and the traditional collapse of my mental health, I decide to make the chantilly cream. 400ml of double cream, because that’s what I have left in the fridge, goes into a bowl with 40g of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste. I could have just used vanilla extract, which is far cheaper, but the paste has those little black flecks of vanilla that makes things look fancy, and at that moment I needed that kind of win. I could have thrown this in the mixer, but I’m an ex-catholic so I decide to whisk the bastard by hand in an obscure form of self-flagellation. Miraculously, I create perfect soft peaks, don’t overwhip it, it doesn’t randomly split, and I foolishly believe for a split second that the fates are on my side. I even, buoyed by my cream-based success, take the time to delicately slice a few leftover strawberries for decoration. I realise that I still haven’t bought piping bags, and shove the cream into the cheap sandwich bag alternative. The jam is still simmering. Everything is going to be fine.*

*Everything was not fine

With just forty-five minutes left, and having thankfully remembered to remove those proving buns before properly pre-heating the oven, it’s time to bake. I know that they need fifteen minutes, they’ll need at least that to cool, which will leave me with just enough time for splitting and filling (I know, I know). I whip the tea towels off those proving buns, and convince myself that they look bigger. (The difference is miniscule.) They bake, and the jam finally goes into a cold bowl. I tell it to cool quickly, but forget that putting it in the fridge is the option.

Fifteen minutes later, I have a cooling rack full of atrocious buns. They have the distinctive cracks of the under-proved. They are, at least, relatable. I consider, again, binning this process off, telling absolutely no one about it, and doing the whole thing again on another day. Then I realise that I would be left with an awful amount of excess cream and jam, and there’s only so many ways I could use them up. (Not that, it’s unhygienic.) 

I accept my fate. This will be a bad day. If I was in the tent, I’d be counting on a showstopper redemption. I am not in the tent. No amount of braided breads can save me now. 

I leave the buns to cool for as long as possible. With just ten minutes left, it’s time to cut and fill them. Every cut goes slightly too deep, splitting the buns fully in half. This is not a metaphor. The buns are still warm, my jam is still warm, my brain feels like it’s full of wasps and my chantilly cream is in a sandwich bag.*

*I am aware, at this point, that this column sounds like a cry for help. I’d like to reassure you that I’m fine, and a day away from the disaster it’s all quite funny. Also, as previously mentioned, I have oven chips in my future. They’re the curly ones, which really makes everything alright.

I haphazardly throw jam at the buns. They aren’t so much “splits” as “strangely vertical sandwiches”. I will, to be safe, never visit devonshire. The cream, at least, pipes in beautifully, although I’m fully aware that it’s melting out just out of my eyeline. I delicately place my strawberry slices, as if they could salvage this catastrophe. I realise, at almost the last minute, that I have no icing sugar to dust over the top. Quite frankly, the buns aren’t worth it. 

I step away, accepting I’ve done all I can. There are two minutes left. Unlike last week, those minutes don’t haunt me. There is nothing I could have done to salvage this wreck. 

The Judging

The moment my partner arrives, that evening, I demand he eat my terrible vertical sandwich. He has never tried a Devonshire split before either, and has no basis for comparison, so I reliably inform him that they’re terrible.  

His verdict: 6/10. “They’re wrong but they still taste good.”

My verdict: 2/10. The jam and cream are delicious. The buns are dry, under-risen, and even as a vehicle for jam and cream they’re average at best. These Devonshire Splits are my version of Tia Kofi in a sewing challenge on Drag Race. They are the equivalent of an adequate dress, made of material, that is on my body. I have accepted this into my heart, and I’ve decided I’m ok with it. It’s not really my fault, it’s Friday the 13th and Paul Hollywood’s vendetta. 

Do I think this is a fair challenge? Nope. Absolutely not. Not because it went horribly wrong for me, I’m not even slightly bitter. But Bake Off has been criticised for unfair timings in recent years - and this is a solid example. Every single baker was criticised, on the show, for an under-proved bake. When it’s that consistent, the fault is with the challenge and not the contestants. When, after my dismal failure, I looked at Paul Hollywood’s Recipe, I saw that the time provided was “1 hour hands-on time, plus proving” and the baking time was “15 minutes”. So, 1 hour and fifteen minutes for making the dough, kneading the dough, baking, cooling and decorating. Plus two 45-minute proves. That adds up to fifteen minutes longer than the contestants were given - they were set up to fail. 

Is it Paul Hollywood’s fault that I failed? No. Were an entire tent full of contestants given an unfair challenge? I would argue, yes. 

Next week: Chocolate. Suddenly, I’m expecting one last heatwave.   

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