The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Almost Immediately Regrets Returning For Cake Week

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

You don't know what you don't know. It's true, both as a frank tautological assessment and as a warning. The warning is in the reminder that there are degrees: Sometimes the depth of what you don't know is known to you, more or less. Other times, not so much. You have to be careful with that—the known unknowns, you might say—because how much you don't know could be vast and deep.

Consider: I do not know how to construct a ham radio. Also, I do not know how to draw the letter "X" in cursive. I know that I do not know these things: What I do not know is how much more I do not know about building a ham radio than I do not know about drawing the letter "X" in cursive. Presumably there is a lot more to the one than the other, but because I know none of it, I cannot say. I assume I could teach myself to draw the letter "X" in cursive by pulling up my browser and typing words into a search bar; probably even the insanely ruined Google could get me pointed in the right direction. I bet I could learn to draw the letter "X" in cursive within five minutes. If I tried that with a ham radio, I would end up electrocuted and dead.

We don't know how to make marzipan. If we're being honest, we don't even know what marzipan is. It's been two years of this insanely dumb blog stunt, where a pair of Defector Idiots endeavor to recreate the baked goods produced by professional-grade home bakers in the popular television series The Great British Bake Off, but there remains this marzipan-shaped gap in our knowledge of baking. How big is the gap? We don't know what we don't know.

We know there are ingredients; we know the ingredients go together in some order; we know that these ingredients combined in the correct order and with the correct method will produce something recognized as marzipan. What we don't know—and this is true even in the aftermath of having attempted this most recent bake—is the correct order or method for combining the ingredients. How much hidden knowledge is stored behind the sentence I do not know how to make marzipan? Judging by our disgusting results, an awful lot.

The challenge this week was to make Paul Hollywood's recipe for eight miniature Battenberg cakes, filled with freshly made jam and draped in a tight-fitting marzipan outer coat. We were tasked with completing this technical challenge with no instructions whatsoever, just a list of ingredients. What is a Battenberg, you ask? I have been trying to tell you this the entire time: We don't know.

Kelsey McKinney: Well, well, well. Look who it is. 

Chris Thompson: Kelsey, my friend, I must ask you: What the hell are we doing here? Why are we like this?

KM: Well, last year, in November, we promised ourselves that we were done. We said that we had hurt ourselves enough in our own kitchens. The Great British Bake Off would survive, even if we did not make a mockery of its technical bakes each week for this blog. But then … well …what did happen? 

CT: The seasons started to change and I caught a whiff of cinnamon from one of those scented brooms while walking into the grocery store one day, and just like that, I felt an urge to do some terrible, terrible baking.

KM: For me, it was the end of the baseball regular season. They say the body keeps the score or whatever, and my body craves losing again. My body wants the tent. I think when you proposed the idea of returning to the baking tent we call "Chaos Mode," I said, “I want to go back to hell.” 

CT: Yes, I believe those were your exact words, said without even a moment’s hesitation. “I want to go back to hell.” Normal!

KM: And here we are, in hell! Isn’t it beautiful?

CT: Kelsey, it is the most beautiful thing of all.

KM: I just want to note that this is the third year we will be competing on the Great British Bake Off. No other contestants have done this. After working at Defector, cooking for this series is the second-longest job I’ve ever had.

CT: Do you feel that your baking has improved as a result of this annual challenge?

KM: I was about to ask you that question, because yesterday, when I began the bake, I felt that it very much has improved. But then by the end, I was not so sure. Do you think your baking has improved? 

CT: I think yes, in some regards, it has improved a lot. This technical challenge—as watchers of the show will have noticed—came with zero instructions. Just a list of ingredients. It required the making of cake sponges, fruit jam, and marzipan. And when the timer started, I just … methodically began making cake sponge, in the proper order, with no freakout whatsoever. That's not to say that this went well, but it was clear to me at that moment that I have actually learned a lot about baking from subjecting myself to this stupid shit.

KM: Excuse me. We also made buttercream. But you’re right: I can definitely do “sponge” better than before. Also, my baking in the offseason—with a real recipe and no insane time constraints— has significantly improved. So that’s something! 

CT: Yeah! We’re now the kind of people who know from muscle memory how to, like, cream butter or whatever. This isn’t something I will shout about at parties, but baking, which to me has always been mysterious and alchemical, is now meaningfully less mysterious and alchemical.

KM: At the same time, for me, I'm all the more impressed by people who are truly talented bakers. I have two dear friends in Philadelphia who are professional bakers, and seeing what they manage to create is even more impressive with the basic understanding that this series has provided me. Although I am embarrassed that they will see this. 

CT: This is why it is wise to have no dear friends, in my opinion.

KM: Damn. That can’t be right. 

CT: Kelsey, prior to this challenge, had you ever heard of a Battenberg before? Am I even spelling that correctly? B-A-T-T-E-N-B-E-R-G.

KM: No, I had not! Listen: I am so sick of the British. All their weird little desserts with their weird little names, and none of them are even as good as the desserts of a single country on the continent. Am I mad because I came back from my vacation in Paris where I ate beautiful pastry every day and was forced to make this (poorly)? Yeah! I am, Chris! 

CT: That’s a tough reentry, coming home from Paris and immediately having to make this preposterous, fussy thing.

KM: I truly would rather have failed at laminating dough. Even the fuzzy screenshot you sent me was not that appetizing:

CT: Right. It’s not something I would order in a restaurant or take away from a patisserie, in a million years. Even after making it, I still would not ever order a Battenberg.

KM: It looks like a cake for an American Girl Doll who was rich in colonial times. I hate it even more after trying to make it. 

Ingredients and Shopping

CT: We really weren't prepared for the sudden launch of this season of the show. I was just out here living my life, and all of a sudden the first episode had already aired and I had to bake this thing sometime in the following 72 hours. A scary feeling.

KM: I know! It was kind of exciting! Incredibly, I didn't regret our decision to return to the tent. I felt renewed from my vacation with optimism and hope, so I decided to make a special trip to get the ingredients for this bake. Everyone is always yelling at me for “not having the right ingredients” and “making swaps that don't make sense” and “using Campari.” This year, I decided it would be different. I would be different. 

CT: Wow! Is this your way of saying that you acquired all of the ingredients for this bake?

KM: Well …

CT: Uh oh.

KM: I tried! I really tried! I even got two throw-away aluminum square cake tins. They were slightly too big for the instructions, but I got them. The list of things I knew I didn’t have when I left the grocery store was short: jam sugar (what is that? Grow up. Use regular sugar) and apricots. They film this show in the summer! I’m not buying disgusting out-of-season apricots to make jam with in October. I had like 10 pears at home, so I just used those.

There was something else I was also missing, but we'll get to that later. Did you have all the required ingredients? 

CT: I did not. I also did not bother hunting around for apricots—good ones are hard enough to find around here even in season. Instead, I used nectarines.

I also could not find jam sugar. For those who don’t remember this from last season, jam sugar is just regular processed sugar with added pectin. I don’t really know what pectin is, but I gather that it is a gelling agent. Jam sugar is hard to find on this side of the pond, and usually must be ordered. But as we have already covered, we don’t really have time for that kind of thing: The episodes air and we have to turn around and get baking.

I think last year I tried to add gelatin to a jam, and it went all the way to hell. This time, I just used regular sugar and no gelling agent.

KM: Ooooh, I love nectarines. The other point is that you can just make jam without it. Even if I could buy jam sugar, I would not. Am I supposed to store a whole bag of jam sugar in my kitchen? No! That’s dumb. 

Oh wait, we also didn’t have whatever that strip was. 

CT: Right. There were other issues. The bake called for 17-centimeter square tins, which I did not have and could not find. It also called for “2-in-1 baking paper,” which as far as I know is entirely made up. And there was the dreaded strip.

KM: Never heard of her. It called for a 30-by-17 centimeter strip of the “2-in-1 baking paper.” What! Who? Why?! When you sent this over, I began to feel fear—not only did I not understand what those words meant, I had no idea what it could be used for. 

CT: In a twist, this time it was my turn to not have caster sugar, but I was able to cover for this by blitzing a bunch of granulated sugar in a spice mill at the last minute. Also I didn’t have any parchment, although I didn’t realize this until I’d already started the bake.

It should be noted here that the contestants on the show were allowed to see and taste the Battenberg before they started the challenge, to cover for the lack of a provided method. We obviously did not have this opportunity. Also, we had to get the list of ingredients off of Instagram, because whoever runs the show failed to post the recipe online in the usual timeframe. We were going into this challenge even more blind than usual. 

KM: We had no Battenbergs to see or taste or touch, and we had NO METHOD. Not an instruction to be seen. We were very, very brave. Shall we get into it? 

Stage One: Mixing Sponges and Chopping Fruit

CT: Kelsey, at the moment that we started the timer, I feel like we were both pretty terrified.

KM: It’s so funny. In the decision to return and in the purchasing of ingredients, I was excited and amped up. The minute I put all the ingredients on the counter and got out my notebook, my hands began to shake. It’s the timer! The timer brings terror. What manifestations of terror did you have, Chris?

CT: Just this surreal feeling of unreality, like I could not believe I was about to do this destructive and ultimately humiliating thing. I was very shaky and anxious, and I was dreading the kitchen mess to come.

KM: Are you going to talk about your self-medication in this blog? 

CT: I've consulted with my attorney (a stuffed bear in my child's bedroom) and decided that it is perfectly safe and legal to admit here today that I consumed a half of one very mild THC edible, approximately 10 minutes before we started the timer.

KM: We did not discuss that again after you told me you were taking it. How did it work out for you? Did it help? 

CT: I think it went pretty well, at least in the sense that whatever dread I was feeling immediately before starting the timer did not persist long into the bake. I turned away from the timer and grabbed a stack of metal mixing bowls and spilled them all over the place and it made a huge terrible noise, but soon I was just very calmly creaming butter and sugar and feeling fine.

KM: As soon as the timer went off, I did what I always do and tried to use my notebook to sketch out my order of operations, and about what time I thought I should be doing what. But I made some pear jam last year that was really good, and one key of it was that the pears needed to be chopped and sit in the sugar and spices for an hour, so for the first 15 minutes, I was just peeling and chopping all the pears in my fridge. This was funny to me, because it had almost nothing to do with the challenge. 

CT: It freaked me out a bit when I learned that during the time that I was mixing together my cake ingredients, you were chopping fruit. It’s pretty rare for us to head off in completely different directions at the start.

KM: Yeah, to be honest I was also scared. But then my pears were in their liquid, and I began to follow you.

Oh, I forgot to mention that for the first time in my life, I did remember to preheat the oven! I preheated it to 350, and by the time my pears were done, it was heated. This didn’t matter because my cake batter wasn’t ready, but it felt good. 

CT: Yes, I was very proud of you that you’d remembered to preheat. I did not, and didn’t start preheating my oven until my batter was mostly finished. I had a moment in there where I thought that I’d screwed up the tare of one of my ingredients, but since I didn't have time or resources for another try, I just had to press onward. In retrospect I’m pretty sure that I actually did not fuck this up. I fucked up lots of other things, pretty badly, but not this one. I think.

KM: Oh, that’s an important problem. I really need to buy a new scale. The shitty one I have is still having the same problem as last year: It won’t turn on unless I remove the batteries and put them back in. Also, it will not tare at all. I'm really bad at math, and yet I had to do so much of it in my journal. It doesn’t really bother me to do this math when I have all the time in the world, but under the ticking timer of the tent, it makes me want to die. How did you handle the coloring of the cakes? 

CT: We had to do one neutral-colored batch of batter and one pink batch, so I mixed all the ingredients together in my stand mixer. Then I withdrew roughly half of the batter using a rubber spatula, and then I added a few drops of pink food coloring to the other half and mixed it again. I didn't think that I would have time to be precise about any of this, but also I had the sense that I was making pretty good time and that this was a low-stakes decision.

KM: At this moment, I became so cocky, because I did measure the weight of the total batter, deduct the weight of the bowl, and divide it in half. I made the other half pink, and got them into their buttered and floured tins and flattened out the tops with an offset spatula. The entirety of my cake making took less than 10 minutes. I felt like a god. This was the incorrect way to feel. 

CT: So you used two tins, huh? A rational choice, to be sure.

KM: Oh no, Chris. You used one tin?

CT: Well, I did not have a square tin. What I have is a 13-by-9 inch rectangular baking pan. So I did some math and found that a 17-by-17 centimeter square tin has 289 square centimeters (Note: It is illegal to correct any of this math, don't you dare), and that a 13-by-9 inch rectangular pan, converted to metric, has 297 square centimeters. Pretty close! Spooky how close it is. Almost as if it was meant to be.

KM: Oh my god. 

CT: What I did was construct a little divider out of heavy-duty aluminum foil, grease the absolute bejeezus out of it using butter, and jam it in there in the middle of my pan. Genius!

KM: Honestly, I do think that’s genius. You’re so smart. 

CT: I think the results of this bake will show conclusively that my brain is rotten and grievously damaged. 

KM: How long did you set your timer for your cakes, and what was your oven at? I put mine in at 350 and set the timer for 15 minutes, in the hopes that they wouldn’t be burned.

CT: You can never be sure what temperature my oven has landed on unless you are using a separate thermometer, which I was not. For one thing, it runs hysterically hot. For another, the indicator light meant to show when it has reached the designated temperature failed approximately 19 hours after the oven was installed, more than two years ago. But I can tell you that I set the oven to about 325 (it has a knob, not a digital readout), and that I set my timer for 20 minutes. This should have been a safe set of choices.

KM: One thing I love about our ovens is that they are not at all consistent. I find that beautiful and exciting. Adds to the drama! 

Stage Two: Baking, Making Jam, Considering Marzipan

KM: What did you do while your cakes were in the oven? 

CT: I peeled, pitted, and chopped a large nectarine. I failed to notice this when reading the ingredients list, but the recipe only called for 100 grams of fruit, which is a very small amount, less than the flesh of just this one big nectarine. This freaked me out because things can become so volatile when heat is applied to very small quantities of food, especially sugar. On the other hand, I was glad to only have to pit and peel one nectarine. I still didn't have a sense that I was ahead of schedule on any of this, so I was moving very fast.

KM: One thing I have learned on this show is that Paul Hollywood is not my mother, and that if I think that the recipe is calling for too little of something and it also is not a cake, I can just do whatever I want. I think I chopped nine pears. I had like three cups of pears. But why would I waste my precious life making enough jam for a baby doll, when I could make all my jam at once and have extra for me to put on toast? My house! My rules! 

CT: That is the right state of mind to take into these things. I, on the other hand, am a huge baby who must follow directions or become lost and confused. 

KM: This is the part where everyone's going to get mad at me now. 

CT: No one is allowed to get mad at Kelsey! It’s illegal!

KM: Chris, did you ever see that TikTok about hoisin sauce? Please watch it. 

CT: You know, I think I have seen this! It’s great.

KM: There are many things in my kitchen that are like hoisin sauce to this man, and one of them is almonds. I like to chop a crunchy nut and sprinkle it on stuff, so I'm always buying almonds. 

CT: Oh God, same. We are nut hoarders.

KM: So a couple of months ago, I began a challenge where I tried to use almonds in every meal, just to get rid of them. 

CT: Almonds just turning up in random dishes, almonds everywhere.

KM: Because of this history and the prevalence of almonds in my home, I didn't check to see if I had them. I assumed that, like every day of my adult life, there would be almonds in the pantry. And there were … about 90 grams of almonds in there. 

CT: Oh no! While that's a useful volume of almonds for topping your cereal, it's simply not enough almonds for this recipe.

KM: It is in fact less than a third of the almonds needed for this recipe. Very bad! The marzipan (which I had never made) also seems to be a key part of the recipe, based on the picture. So I looked in the nuts section of the pantry, found walnuts, and decided they would have to do.

CT: This was another key deficit for both of us: Neither of us had ever made marzipan before. For my part, I’m not all that fond of eating marzipan, and I’m not sure I even really understand what it is, and why it is a thing.

KM: Despite not having ever made it, I knew the whole time that I was making it wrong. 

CT: What was your method for this task?

KM: Well. I ground up my almonds, and then I ground up my walnuts. I added all the sugar to them in the stand mixer.

Then I had no idea what to do. I think this was a key mistake, but I did add the egg whites to the marzipan in the stand mixer. I don’t know, man. I was very confused. Then I made the whole thing into a log and put it in the fridge and I knew it was very, very wrong because it was so, so sticky. 

CT: I had the same general feeling of cluelessness about this. I just put everything into the mixer and turned it on. I had the paddle on there, which was a good thing, because it was like cement.

One thing I found insanely annoying was sifting powdered sugar. God, what a fucking headache. Messy and terrible.

KM: OK, mine was not at all like cement, so that’s a problem. I also found that so annoying. Also … why! Why did it want sifted powdered sugar and regular sugar?

CT: Wait, yours wasn't like cement? What was it like? 

KM: I want to admit that I actually added flour to my marzipan because it was so so sticky, and the stickiness upset me because I thought I was supposed to knead it. I don’t know why I thought this—it just seems like what you should do with dough. But I couldn’t knead it, because it was like kneading taffy, so I added flour. This did not make it any less sticky. 

CT: Oh wow, so you were truly just improvising away.

KM: What I ended up with was a log that was so sticky to the touch, and looked like a giant shit because it was also very brown. 

CT: Would you say that your ground nuts were pretty coarse, or were you able to get them nice and fine? My ground almonds were very coarse, and I was worried about burning out my poor spice grinder. (Note: My food processor recently kerploded, so I had to use my spice mill for all of this, and I have previously killed a spice grinder by overtaxing the motor.)

KM: Well, the thing about walnuts is they are very oily, so they stick together when you grind them. So, they were kind of coarse. I also used a spice grinder, because I didn’t want to get my food processor out and make it and its 500 parts dirty. The problem was that literally two weeks ago, I accidentally lit the cord of my spice grinder on fire, burning it in half (another story). I had a new model of the same spice grinder, which I did NOT like as much. 

CT: Pro tip: Do NOT light the cord of your spice grinder on fire for ANY reason.

KM: Where were you two weeks ago?

CT: You live and you learn, is what I have been told.

KM: Not me! Did you put your marzipan in the fridge? 

CT: I did. I wrapped it in wax paper and socked it in there, not for any good reason, but because I desperately wanted to clean my countertops from all the powdered sugar and flour everywhere.

Stage Three: Cleaning, Cooling, Making Buttercream, Taking Ominous Warnings From The Timer

KM: When my cakes came out, I felt unbelievably cocky. They looked so good. One of them was clearly pink, and one was clearly yellow. I let them cool a little bit on the counter and then socked them in the freezer while I made the buttercream. At this point, I also finally put my pears on the stove to become jam. Important note here: On my exciting vacation to Paris, I bought myself a beautiful copper pot at E. Dehillerin (the fancy cooking store that Julia Child loved).

CT: Ooooh. You love a beautiful copper pot that also has an origin story. Extremely romantic and lovely.

KM: I know! It was my souvenir, and I used it to make the pear jam. Its maiden voyage! 

CT: My cakes did not cause me to feel cocky. When I took them out of the oven, it was clear that I had once again been betrayed by this bullshit appliance from hell. My foil divider worked perfectly, but my sponges were burned around the edges and on the bottom, pretty badly.

My jam was still bubbling on the stovetop, and my marzipan was in the fridge, and my counters were now reasonably clean. I too started to make buttercream.

KM: The buttercream ... we made it because it said so on the Instagram post of ingredients posted by The Great British Bake Off. At no point did I know how it was actually used. Like the jam, I made twice as much of it as recommended, just in case. 

CT: We had one photo of the stupid Battenberg, and it was fuzzy. Neither of us could see where it might include buttercream, but the Instagram post clearly showed buttercream ingredients.

The ingredients seemed suited for a very tiny amount of buttercream, so maybe it was just thinly painted into the joints? At any rate, this entirely superfluous stage required lots more sifting of powdered sugar, so you can be sure I wanted to die. It was only later, in the finishing stages, when we were puzzling over how to assemble this damned dessert, that I started to think very seriously that maybe we were not supposed to have made the buttercream at all.

I asked my wife to double-check the recipe, and the one she found on the show's website did not call for buttercream. I felt like a total asshole. Later—more than a day after we'd finished our bakes—we learned that, no, in fact, we were correct to make and use buttercream. Let this be a lesson to the producers of The Great British Bake Off: Post your recipes on time, man!

KM: There is always so much powdered sugar everywhere in these challenges. Every time we do this, I am envious of the actual contestants who have sad producers to clean up their kitchens for them. 

CT: Yeah! It’s a real advantage.

KM: Luckily, at this point, there was a bit of downtime. My jam finished up, and I shoved it in an ice bath then put it in the fridge to cool down. Everything was cooling. Everything had been made. There were still like 50 minutes left. I cleaned my kitchen, started a load of dishes, and vacuumed up the full cup of sugar I accidentally spilled onto the floor in the early stages.

CT: How were you feeling at this point? Would you say that the timer gave you confidence here?

KM: No. Whenever there is a lot of time left on the timer and I have nothing to do, I become scared. Also I knew very clearly that the marzipan would not work. I felt an immense amount of dread around that, because I knew it was wrong, but didn’t know why, and also knew there was nothing I could do. How did you feel? 

CT: I was both enormously grateful that I had a few minutes to clean up my kitchen again, and also really worried that I must’ve missed a step or misinterpreted something, because I could not imagine how we still had most of an hour’s worth of work left ahead of us. I was also worried about the marzipan, not because I had any sense that I’d done anything wrong, but because I simply had nothing to compare my brown boulder of marzipan to. I figured it was probably not right, but I had no way of knowing how wrong it might be. All that was left to do was to just start grabbing shit and assembling.

KM: I forgot about the sense of resignation that often comes with this assignment. You work so hard, and you are always very sweaty and tired by this point—or at least I am—and yet you must move forward into a stage you do not think will work. There is no choice. Each week, I understand the man who dumped his cake into the trash a little bit more. 

CT: Oh man, yes. That feeling that you simply cannot walk away from it, no matter how disgusting you feel or how certain you are of failure. You have to trudge forward, even in places where you know that doing so will cause things to become worse.

Stage Four: Assembly

CT: We had to cut our sponges and assemble them into some sort of checkerboard pattern, glue them together with jam, and then wrap the whole thing in marzipan. Also we had buttercream, which at this point we both thought we were wrong to have made, but we were both determined to find some use for it.

KM: I had drawn a diagram in my notebook at the very beginning, so that I could understand how many of each cake square I needed, and determined that I need to cut the sponges in eight vertical sections and then in half in order to get the 16 sponges of each color I needed. My sponges looked good, so I trimmed them up with a very sharp carving knife. This is the best I have ever done at this kind of cake. I feel really proud of the cakes I made, to be honest. When I was cutting them up, I was smiling at them. 

CT: Aww, that’s so nice. Wholesome baking content.

KM: Yeah, wholesome before the STORM. 

CT: I was not smiling at all. My cakes were burned, they’d crumbled a bit coming out of the pan, and there was a reek of char. The foil divider was stuck to the bottom of the sponges.

I made a pretty key mistake here: I failed to go back and read the one paragraph of information we were given ahead of the bake, which clearly specified that we were to make eight miniature Battenbergs. That would’ve certainly changed the outcome of my bake, although probably not for the better.

KM: I cannot explain how funny this is to me. I spent so much time trying to figure out how to cut the cake early on in the bake, so I can't imagine not being obsessed with that. 

CT: I was just looking at the photo and working out the logistics of making the Battenberg. I was so focused on what the hell a Battenberg is that all thought of making more than one Battenberg escaped my brain.

KM: How did you even turn two square cakes into one Battenberg? 

CT: I knew that it wouldn’t be long enough, just from the dimensions of the rectangle. So I cut each half of the rectangle into four slices, and basically made two Battenbergs, but lined them up end to end, so that once they were wrapped in marzipan, it would look like one fuckin’ HUGE Battenberg.

In my defense, at this point I still thought that we were supposed to be making one large Battenberg.

KM: Oh my god. It makes sense in a way, because the picture they sent is only one Battenberg and there's absolutely no sense of scale to it. It could be one giant Battenberg! 

CT: I do think I would’ve found this preposterous dessert less offensive if the one on my counter at the end was not an 11-pound log.

KM: I created a system for myself that was kind of an assembly line, where I paired up all my sliced cakes to create the cubes. I put buttercream on one log side and pear jam on the other, and then smashed them together.

Then, I put buttercream on one pair and jam on the other pair and smashed them together. They looked genuinely great. I'm really proud of how my checkerboards turned out. 

CT: The assembly of the cake sponges was, I thought, reasonably easy. It was really the draping of the marzipan where this project went entirely to hell:

KM: The marzipan itself was a monster. 

CT: A really disgusting substance. Mine was very much like a spackle—very thick and heavy and terrible. I gather you had the opposite problem.

KM: When I removed my giant poop “marzipan” from the fridge, I wanted to cry. It was still so sticky, and I really do not like the way almond extract tastes, and because it contained so much sugar, it was so sweet. Mine was like taffy, if taffy were ugly and also boring. 

CT: The photo of this dessert showed a thin pale-colored substance, but ours were like different textures of poop. Insanely unpleasant.

KM: Yeah, both of ours were BROWN. Much later, I realized that probably we were supposed to blanch the almonds to remove their skins, but I didn’t even really have any almonds anyway, so that was never going to happen for me. 

CT: It honestly never occurred to me that I should’ve blanched my almonds. But also: screw that!

KM: Yeah! Marzipan sucks! 

CT: How’d it go, laying that sticky oozy mess onto your lovely checkerboard cakes?

KM: Awful. I was so proud of my cakes, so this part was miserable. 

CT: Our messages from this time were very dark. I could sense that you’d become entirely demoralized.

KM: I have no memory of that, but my misery was acute. I had these adorable little cakes, and I loved them so much. Then they had to become awful. How was your experience? 

CT: Horrible. I ran out of jam and had to use buttercream in places where I never intended, but the worst that happened was when I tried to wrap the marzipan over the cakes, it crumbled away in big hunks, leaving these gaping shredded holes that had to be patched up with little shreds of loose marzipan.

I cannot overstate how much this began to look like a large elephant’s turd, sitting on my countertop.

KM: All this challenge did was make me believe that marzipan is bullshit and I hate it. 

The Finished Product

CT: Kelsey, now that it’s over, how do you feel about your Battenbergs?

KM: I feel bad, man. They looked like garbage, and the marzipan tasted so bad.

CT: Show Battenbergs?

KM: I guess! Here are my collection of Battenbergs. I hate them so much.

CT: Well, yes, I do not feel like this is something I would want to eat.

KM: Show Battenberg(s)? 

CT: Here it is: One huge brown poop, for dessert.

KM: Hmmm. Yeah. See, the brown is just very unappetizing.

CT: Did you taste your Battenbergs?

KM: I did, yes. The cake tasted great, and the “marzipan” tasted weird and too sweet. I ended up taking all the “marzipan” off of my cakes, pushing them into a big sticky ball and dunking it in the trash, so that I could just have the cakes. Did you try yours? 

CT: I tried one very dainty bite of my huge stupid Battenberg, and really did not appreciate anything about it. The jam is very tasty, but it’s lost under the marzipan. I served a slice to my wife, then looked over and she was peeling away all of the marzipan. My toddler likes it pretty well, but I think that's largely because it has pink in there.

KM: Wow. Children love the Battenberg! In the end, I had so much extra jam and buttercream from my personal decisions that I just added more jam and buttercream to all my cakes after the timer went off. They are very delicious. 

CT: Man, I wish I’d done that. I can’t wait to throw this stupid thing away. We are trying to get away from throwing food waste into our trash, but we have not yet gotten around to proper composting, so this hideous fucking thing will soon be hurled straight into the woods, where hopefully it will confuse and delight the native wildlife. 

KM: Beautiful! Very kind (or evil) of you to donate the Battenberg to nature. 

CT: Wow. One bake down! 

KM: You know what next week is, Chris? 

CT: Uh-oh. I do not.

KM: Biscuit week! Or as we say in America: Cookie time! 

CT: Oh, hell yes. Cookie time!

KM: Next week, I fully believe that we will enter Chaos Mode of Cookie Time and emerge victorious. 

CT: So it is written!