Nobody Ate A Baby During A Bland Dessert Week On GBBO
We avoided cannibalism, but then had to sit through an otherwise underwhelming episode.
It's Dessert Week on The Great British Bake Off/Baking Show, a perennial favorite which always gives me plenty of stuff to make fun of. This year, Dessert Week gave me nothing, and I am intensely grateful because holy shit, this show has been exhausting. I've only had to write three recaps so far, and cannibalism has already managed to come up in two of them. I am astounded by how much grade-A material I have not had the time to properly address, like Young Sexy Jürgen, the entire concept of Freya, and literally every single word that has come out of Lizzie's mouth.
If this were any other season my Bread Week recap would have contained no fewer than 600 words about Lizzie's dead pig, but this year I was forced to completely ignore it because a German physicist decided to bake a demonic bread baby. I cannot handle this sort of emotional intensity on a weekly basis, so I desperately needed this uneventful, going-through-the-motions episode, so I can catch up on all the non-Jürgen-related goings on.
Signature Bake: Pavlova
George is probably going to be gone in a week or two, so let's give him a little bit of attention while we have the chance. I had unreasonably high hopes for George before this season even began, because he made sure his official GBBO bio mentioned that he has a dancing dog. Did George provide us with that footage? No. Instead, we got stuck with footage of George cooking with his children, and who the hell wants to watch that.
Prue tells George his lemon curd and biscuit cream pavlova looks awful while looking him dead in the eye, and I have no emotional reaction to this whatsoever. I cannot care about about a man who has made it perfectly clear he not care about any of us.
Also notable in this round: season 12 sex symbol Chigs gets the second patented Paul Hollywood Handshake of the year, but I can't remember what for because I kinda let me imagination get away with me while he was on screen (and no I will not tell you anything about it).
Technical Challenge: Sticky Toffee Puddings
I was really hoping that Maggie would manage to stick it out until at least halfway through the season, because taken out of context, at solid third of the things she says are brilliantly pornographic.
Alas, Bizzaro Prue accidentally left the flour out of her sticky toffee puddings, which I find quite curious as her whole damn schtick has been about how nothing beats the classics. And yet Maggie—a 70-year-old English woman who has been baking her entire life—claims that she's never once made one of the most famous desserts in Britain's culinary cannon. This is something I would ordinarily investigate, but I need to save my strength in case Noel "accidentally" sets the tent on fire next week.
Showstopper Challenge: Joconde Imprime
Alright so forget about everything I said earlier we've got to go back to talking about Jürgen. I wanted to write about Freya today, but then not two minutes into the showstopper round, somebody informs us he has chosen to do with a Tudor theme for his Jaconde—namely, a romantic love song Henry VIII wrote for his wife Catherine of Aragon before leaving her for another woman after five of their children died, banning her from seeing their only surviving daughter, and burning down a whole fucking religion in the process. I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
How I am supposed to be impressed by some bullshit flower-print jaconde when there's a German physicist is piping an illuminated manuscript with cake batter like a 16th century monk? How am I expected to write about Chigs getting named Star Baker when his theme was "The tiles in my sister's bathroom"? The man is devastatingly handsome, yet the only thing that's running through my head is Jürgen singing a 491-year-old love song to Paul Hollywood. Tell me how this is fair.
And now I found out that next week is the first ever German Week on The Great British Baking Show, which means Jürgen is probably going to make a functional nuclear reactor out of gingerbread or some shit like that. Freya better find a way to get her hands on some vegan plutonium, because if not, she's probably fucked.