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.
Recently, I was talking to a friend about how the best distance to walk is one in which there is no in-between space. When you first begin a walk, you are close to the place you are coming from, and that distance can last as far as you are familiar with your surroundings, say a mile from your home. Then, there is the period where you feel closer to your destination. This too is a joy and you feel casual and comfortable and can allow your mind to relax. Over time, as you grow more familiar with the the world around, the radius around the starting point and the radius around destination expand until, at some point, they overlap. This is the ideal walk to enjoy because you do not need to worry about missing a turn and you will not become tired and bored and frustrated.
The in-between space is where bad feelings creep in, and I think that's because of the uncertainty. To walk somewhere you have not walked a thousand times before you have to be alert to cars and sidewalk closures and street signs. Your mind must lock in on physical details and locations, not thoughts or dreams. That can be enjoyable sometimes. It is nice to pay close attention to your surroundings. But the longer the in-between time stretches, the less comfortable it becomes. You crave the serenity of confidence in your place in the world. Your legs feel more tired because you are neither beginning nor ending but trudging through some middle space that feels infinite.
Something I would like to clarify is that we never watch the epsiodes of this show before we complete the technical bake. We go into the bake as the bakers do: with only the knowledge of the week's theme, and a list of ingredients. The problem with the choice we have made to enter the Chaos Mode tent that exists in each of our separate kitchens is that all of it exists as in-between space. There is never any familiarity to be found in a recipe you have never seen before while you make a treat that you have (in almost all cases) never even tried or known existed. From the moment we begin, we must be alert. And in that monitoring there is fear and exhaustion and stress.
We may know how to make a cookie, but we don't know how to make this cookie. The clock starts, we begin and for the full time allotted (this week a mere two hours exactly) we have to focus. We are not made to focus! We are but mere bloggers! But we try.
The challenge this week was to make Prue Leith's recipe for 12 Mint Chocolate Biscuits. These seem to be the British equivalent of a Thin Mint: a shortbread cookie topped with a circle of mint fondant and dunked in tempered dark chocolate. What could go wrong?
Kelsey McKinney: Chris, hello. We meet again here in the Tent of Chaos.
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! How are you feeling today, having completed the Biscuit Challenge?
KM: I ate one of my biscuits for breakfast, so I am feeling great! I have to admit, though, that yesterday when I began to consider that we would need to bake again, I felt immense dread. Did you feel dread?
CT: Not at first, but as we got closer to the start, I began to feel overwhelmed and underprepared and just very anxious.
KM: Part of what made me feel dread, I have to admit, is that the method you sent over had a note in it that read “Let it be noted, this is where a baker walked off the show in frustration,” which was VERY concerning.
CT: Yeah, my wife included that detail, which in retrospect cannot have accomplished anything except to make us feel terrified? By any measure, the show’s contestants are one jillion times better prepared for success than we are.
KM: It was honestly masterful on her part. One little sentence, and we were both shaking in our boots!
CT: I am proud to say today that neither of us walked out of the tent mid-bake.
KM: I'm hearing that we're better than the novice bakers on this show? That cannot be right.
CT: Listen, who am I to argue with deductive reasoning? The facts clearly show that we won star baker, basically.
KM: Yeah! Unfortunately for the haters, we are BOTH star baker AGAIN!
CT: What did you think when you learned that we would be making Prue Leith’s Mint Chocolate Biscuits?
KM: I thought, I do not think chocolate or mint will be nice on a biscuit, because despite three years of this, I cannot remember that the British call cookies biscuits. What did you think?
CT: It’s true, when I hear the word “biscuit,” I think of something that I want to slather with sausage gravy, not top with mint fondant.
KM: That’s my culture, baby! But there wasn’t even any buttermilk in this recipe! What are we doing here? I was also quite afraid to make fondant, which I had never done and also am still not entirely sure that I did.
CT: Of all the steps in this bake, it was the fondant that seemed the likeliest to go sideways as hell. But I should know by now—and perhaps next week I will know this and remember it, for once—that the thing that is likeliest to go wrong in any bake in my kitchen is the part where I have to put something into my oven.
KM: [Defector Business Guy Jasper Wang don’t read this part.] We should buy you a new oven and expense it! You’re being unfairly kneecapped by your oven!
CT: The sacrifices we make to live our values as a worker co-op, frankly, make me fucking SICK.
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: How did your shopping go for this bake? Anything in there trip you up?
KM: OK, listen up, haters and losers! I did really well this week, surprisingly. No one is more surprised than me. I had most of the ingredients (sugars, flour, butter, chocolate) in my pantry already, so I went to the little grocery store because I knew they had white chocolate there. The only two standout ingredients that I didn’t have in my house were rice flour and mint extract. The tiny store had rice flour! So I bought that (it was $7 for not very much flour), but the store was all out of mint extract! So, that was the only thing I was missing.
CT: What did you use instead of mint extract?
KM: I do understand that mint is in the name of this bake. I’m aware of this failure. But the thing is … I didn’t have any! And I could not purchase any! The rest of the bake seemed pretty neutral in terms of flavor profile, so I decided to use orange extract, which I assume was in my pantry from one of last year’s bakes.
CT: That seems both fine in terms of not mattering really at all to the baking method, and also delicious. Chocolate and orange, a classic combination.
KM: Chocolate and orange are nice flavors together! How did you do with the ingredients?
CT: I did great! Like you, I had most of the stuff already. I found rice flour at my big grocery store, and the various chocolates. I even had piping bags and nozzles. I remembered to get parchment paper.
KM: Wow, I cannot believe we both had rice flour! Oh my god, I also had piping bags! I guess I got bullied into buying them last year. I did not have nozzles, but that’s fine for this bake since you only needed the bags to do little lines.
CT: The bake instructions did call for two sizes of cookie cutter rings. I’m in a dumb position where the cupboard in my kitchen where I store baking stuff is completely chaotic and overstuffed with shit that I use, like, once a year. But of all the crap in there, one thing I do not have is any circular cookie cutters. I have Santa-shaped cutters, and tree-shaped ones, and one that looks like maybe it could be a reindeer. But no circles. And I just cannot bear to buy new ones and stuff anything else into that damn cupboard.
KM: I will admit that when I went into the fancy cooking store in Paris, I really considered buying regular cutters because they were cheap. But I didn’t want to buy them because they’re boring! I have santa cutter, and a tree cutter, and my favorite cutter: the little pig for marranitos.
CT: Pig cookies!
KM: Do you know about marranitos?
CT: Hmm, you might’ve told me about these before? My memory is shit.
KM: They’re important to me: delicious pig shaped, gingerbread-esque Christmas cookies! I love them! But sadly, this recipe would not allow for pig shaped cookies.
CT: Right. It would’ve been fine, I think, to make Santa-shaped shortbread cookies, except that we were supposed to top our cookies (biscuits) with a smaller concentric shape of flavored fondant. And I obviously do not have Santa Cutter and then Baby Santa Cutter. So I needed to find things I could use for cutting circle shapes. I settled on a pair of decorating nozzles. One of them is really surprisingly huge, like I have no idea what it is supposed to fit to or how it would ever be used, but it’s about 2.5 inches in diameter at the base. And then a smaller one that was maybe about an inch or so.
KM: What the hell is that nozzle for? That’s way too big!
CT: I sincerely have no idea where it came from or how it is meant to be used. But there it sits, and finally I found a purpose for it.
KM: I returned to my trusty ravioli stamp, who continues to stun everyone with her abilities. But I did not have any smaller circles that were also metal. In fact the only thing I could find in my house that was the right size-ish was this little crystal glass for digestifs that I found in a box on the street (a time-honored city tradition). So I decided to use that.
CT: Oooh! Fancy crystalware! Nice. We’re a high-class operation.
KM: Yeah! No baby stuff like metal rings to cut out precise shapes here!
Stage One: Making the Dough and Uh ... Fondant?
CT: We once again experienced The Dread Surge at the moment we started our timers.
KM: I have to admit that I was so grumpy yesterday before we began this bake. I was just in a terrible mood for almost no reason, so when I put on my tennis shoes and my hat and went down to the basement, the dread I felt was also mixed with rage without any purpose.
CT: Yeah, I was worried at the outset that this was going to be a grim march. We had at least one of those last season, where we were miserable from the start and just stayed miserable the entire time. But very quickly we began to kick the absolute shit out of this challenge. What was your first move, after the start of the bake?
KM: My very first move was to remove the batteries from my scale and put them back in. I accidentally discovered a new hack, which is that if I just put the bowl on the scale while it’s waking up, it will tare! This is huge! So much less math. So I began my biscuit dough by whipping up the sugar and butter in the stand mixer while I measured out the dry ingredients. Is that what you did?
CT: Oh wow, no! My first maneuver was to put the dry ingredients—my personal definition of “dry ingredients” includes sugar, sorry—into the stand mixer and just pulse a couple times. I had this idea that I needed to handle the butter as little as possible, and therefore to handle the dough as little as possible once it had butter in it. So I premixed all the other stuff, and then added the butter, and then used a rubber spatula to sort of chop everything together into a very loose, crumbly mixture.
My thing is, I can never remember which batters or doughs need lots of handling and which ones need no handling, and shortbread, like lots of other baking things, is almost entirely mysterious to me.
KM: What? Wow! I love to be different! What I love about this series is I truly never know which one of us is right. That makes perfect sense to me, to be honest. I whipped everything up in the stand mixer without a care in the world. I will over-handle and over-knead everything to death and no one can stop me!
One thing I would like to note here is how terrible the rice flour felt. Did you touch it?
CT: Yes. It had the feel of that slightly coarse, sandy pan-searing flour. Not very pleasant at all, did not feel edible in my hands.
KM: Why did it feel like that? It is what I imagine a bunch of silica packs would feel like if you blitzed them into oblivion. I did not like touching it and it upset me.
CT: I remembered last year when we had to make those vile, slimy custard cream cookies, which I think were also basically shortbread? But at any rate, when we made those, I did not mix my butter in enough at all, and I wound up with these big smears of butter that melted away while baking and left huge holes in my biscuits. This time, I did put some effort into more fully distributing the butter. But I didn’t want to use my hands, because I still had this idea that it would be bad to melt the butter a lot. I don’t know.
How did you feel about your dough after mixing?
KM: I had this moment right as the dough was coming together, where I was like, “Oh wow, it looks like cookie dough!” because I truly could not keep it straight in my head that we were making cookies. So I felt kind of good about it once I remembered that it was supposed to be cookie dough.
CT: Was it pretty crumbly? I dumped my dough onto my rolling surface and it was like a pile of crumbles. In earlier times this would’ve freaked me out but this time I sensed that I was on the right track. Here I should note that I had taken another half of a weed gummy prior to starting this bake.
KM: I love these weed gummies for you. It was pretty crumbly, yeah! At this point, I tried to reward myself with a “chef snack," which was one tiny piece of dough that had fallen to the wayside while I kneaded the dough together to be less crumbly. Unfortunately it was not a piece of dough but only a chunk of butter and sugar. It still tasted good, though.
CT: Yum! Also, Kelsey, they say that you are not supposed to eat things that contain raw flour. So maybe you saved yourself from salmonella or whatever.
KM: Who says that? They’re not my mom! I don’t care about salmonella! I am here to LIVE FAST AND BURN BRIGHT.
CT: I would like to know what kind of sick freak never eats raw cookie dough. Truly what even is the point of being a child if you aren't eating raw chocolate chip cookie dough off the beaters.
KM: All this obsession with salmonella from eggs and flour, when you could die any moment of any day! I also ate the cookie dough, to be clear. It is my kitchen. I do not have to respect the rules of a professional kitchen.
CT: Did you have any trouble rolling out your dough?
KM: I put it between two pieces of butcher paper, which is a hack I learned last week when I was desperately trying to roll out my terrible marzipan, and this worked great! I rolled it out and then I shoved it in the freezer. Did you have any trouble?
CT: I did not, although I briefly considered not rolling it out, and instead shaping it into a log, from which I would simply snip round cookie shapes when it was time to bake. But this seemed like too bold a deviation from the method, which clearly tells us to “roll out and chill” our dough. I ran into trouble with the second part of that, because like you I put my dough into the freezer, but evidently underestimated how quickly it would chill in there. I swear, within 10 minutes it was frozen solid.
KM: Oh I like that deviation though, because we don’t have round cutters. The method this time was actually kind of bossy! There was way more information than last week.
CT: It was wild going from Paul’s obnoxious zero-method stunt to Prue’s comprehensive instructions. I had the feeling that maybe Prue was trying to make up for Paul being a jerk, by being nice to the bakers. I appreciate you, Prue!
KM: Thank you, Prue! The next step of the instructions was to “make peppermint cream,” or in my case “orange cream.” I will also note that at this point I remembered that I needed to pre-heat the oven, and pre-heated it to 350. How did you make your cream?
CT: I really had no plan for this, and as with marzipan last week, nothing really to measure my success or failure, because I don’t actually enjoy fondant at all or understand why it is a thing.
KM: Same! I’m very against fondant actually, because why would I want fondant when I could have buttercream?
CT: My guiding notion here was simply to avoid scorching the white chocolate. I hate cooking with white chocolate. Hate it! And I knew that we had to melt it, which terrifies me. So in an effort to rig the outcome, I put the butter and white chocolate together into a mixing bowl and then very gently melted them together over a double boiler.
KM: I had this vague memory from some other dreaded Prue recipe last year of the white chocolate misbehaving, so I also put butter into the mixing bowl of the double boiler with the white chocolate! Wow! Synchronized!
CT: This worked pretty well, I thought! We are becoming too powerful as bakers. When it was all melted, I added the peppermint extract, and then began the hellish, miserable task of sifting 100 grams of icing sugar into the bowl. To me, this was the worst moment of the entire bake.
KM: It worked great, to be honest. But sifting icing sugar was awful yet again. Sugar always goes everywhere. If anyone has a hack for this, I am all ears because unlike the bakers inside the tent, the only production assistant in my kitchen is me.
CT: The other problem I had here is I wasn’t sure what was supposed to be happening to the icing sugar. Should it be melting? My “fondant” was taking on a kind of curdled texture as the sugar went in, and I thought maybe I should keep it warm, that if the sugar was warm maybe it would melt and become smooth. So I kept returning to the double boiler to add heat. I have no idea if this was right or wrong, and I cannot say that it accomplished anything except the wearing out of my wrists.
KM: Oh, interesting! Yet again I assumed: Whip it in the stand mixer. I don’t know if this was right, but the white chocolate to me is a very annoying subject, so my assumption was that I would melt it with a tiny bit of the butter, let it cool for a hot second and then dump it in the stand mixer. It worked fine, I guess.
CT: I plopped my blob of peppermint goo onto a silicone mat and used a rubber spatula to kind of spread it around until it was flat enough to eventually cut out 12 little discs, and then I jammed it into the freezer.
KM: Ooooh, silicone mat. I wish I had one of those. At this point, I became terrified of the fondant, because the instructions said to spread into a rectangle and then “freeze until firm.” I just had this vision of cutting out the fondant and the rectangle being too small and having a panic attack. So I used my kitchen sharpie to trace my fancy crystal glass (cookie cutter) 12 times on butcher paper and then I drew a box around that. Then I flipped the butcher paper over and spread the fondant to that size.
CT: It’s funny, we’ve been mostly projecting confidence and triumph so far but our chat transcripts show that we were having quite a time at this stage.
KM: Wow, I have no memory of this at all. I have revised history in my heart, and believe that we were calm, cool, and collected the whole time.
CT: At this point we had flat sheets of fondant in our freezers and flat sheets of shortbread, also, uhh ... in our freezers. I had the sense that we were way ahead of schedule, which unlike last week gave me a boost in confidence.
KM: Yeah, at this point, I was feeling very cocky, because there was so much time left and the two hardest parts seemed to be over.
CT: I ran into trouble, though, when I pulled out my dough and started to cut it into cookie shapes. It was way too cold, and my first cut caused the frozen sheet of dough to crack.
KM: I also ran into this problem. My dough was too cold! I could not even get my ravioli stamp to cut it.
At this point, I went into a fugue state, and washed my hands and then began pressing my hands onto the dough to try and warm it up so it would cut. This worked, but it took like five minutes.
CT: Precious minutes!
Stage Two: Baking The Shortbread
CT: How long did you anticipate baking your little shortbread raviolis?
KM: Well, I had truly no idea how long this would take. I think I rolled my dough too thin because when I cut them, I ended up with enough dough for 16 without re-rolling the scraps. By the time I was done cutting, the dough was soft. So I put the 12 most gorgeous girls back in the freezer, and I threw the four ugly ducklings into the oven, so that I would have a good estimate of how long they would take.
Also, I am not wasting cookies! I love cookies!
CT: That’s such good mid-bake improvisation, Kelsey! Do you feel like this gave you the information you were after?
KM: It did, kind of. I put my beautiful gorgeous girls into the oven seven minutes after the first ugly ones went in. And when I went to turn my gorgeous girls at the 10-minute mark, the ugly ones still didn’t look done, so I assumed they would take 20 minutes. But then after the next 10 minutes, the ugly ones were too crispy, so I knew it would take less than 27 minutes lol. I ended up pulling the gorgeous ones at 23 minutes.
CT: Our experiences were so different. I had preheated my oven to 350, but at the last minute, I was convinced both that this was too cool AND that my oven would run too hot if set to this temperature, and thus burn my biscuits. And I was correct about that latter part. I set my timer for 12 minutes, figuring that this could not possibly be long enough for them to burn. But within minutes—literally like three minutes—I could smell char. Sure enough, the biscuits on one side of the pan were already getting caught around the edges.
So I quickly spun the pan around to at least distribute the negative effects of the worst oven in creation. But in the process, my biscuits slid until some of them were now resting on the edge of the pan, and were bent. And it was clear that the interior of the oven was simply too hot for recovery. In total my biscuits spent less than 10 minutes in there, and they were overbaked when they came out. And the entire time, the temperature was set to between 325 and 350.
KM: Oh NO! That’s insane. How hot was your oven to char the biscuits in three damn minutes? You were doing too well in the bake, so your oven sabotaged you. Yet again I am saying we should do a con and expense the oven. How much could an oven cost? Do NOT tell me.
CT: I sincerely would like to haul my range out into the front yard and fire a bazooka at it.
KM: I am free and available to join you for this adventure.
CT: I assume that after 23 minutes in an oven ostensibly running at the exact same temperature, your biscuits were lovely and perfect.
KM: The gorgeous ones were not burnt, which felt lucky. And I pulled them out and put them immediately back into the freezer because if I’ve learned anything on this show it’s that everything needs to be cold all the time.
CT: I also put my stupid burned biscuits into the freezer. I was not feeling great.
KM: One interesting thing happened while my cookies were baking that I would like to discuss: the fondant.
CT: Uh-oh.
KM: NO UH-OH! This is good, kind of.
CT: Oh! A rare yes-oh!
KM: While the cookies were in the oven, I checked on my fondant which seemed to be very solid, so I pulled it out to investigate it. But then I was looking at the fondant, and looking at the crystal glass I had planned to cut the fondant with and thinking that I would almost certainly shatter the crystal with my bare hands if I tried to push it through the fondant. I did not want to do this because I quite like the crystal glass.
CT: Oh, interesting. So you needed another mid-bake pivot?
KM: Well, here I made a choice that I truly think was ingenious. My water was still in my copper pot and very hot, so I swirled the glass in there, and then WITH THE HEAT OF THE WATER ON THE GLASS, I could twist the glass through the fondant, and this worked perfectly. I felt like an absolute god.
CT: Oh wow. Science! Thermodynamics and whatnot.
KM: I guess! So when my cookies came out, my fondant was also already in circles still being frozen in the fridge.
CT: Cutting the fondant was nice, I thought. Very clean and satisfying.
KM: Was yours able to cut just with the strange nozzle at your disposal?
CT: Yes. The smaller nozzle had a nice cutting-type edge to it, and the fondant was the right consistency to cut cleanly without cracking. I didn’t put the fondant circles back into the freezer, I just put them in the fridge. I tasted a little corner of the fondant and found it to be more sweet than I would’ve wanted. There was not even a hint of white chocolate flavor left, after the extract and all that icing sugar. Oh well.
KM: I have to admit, I loved cutting the fondant. It felt so satisfying, you’re right. I also had a chef snack of my orange fondant, and it was so sweet. But it didn’t taste bad! I’m truly not really sure what the white chocolate was for. Was it for science? Because if it was for taste, it failed.
CT: Maybe science. I guess maybe without the white chocolate, it would’ve been just butter and sugar? Which, hmm, actually would’ve been fine.
Stage Three: Tempering Chocolate
CT: The equipment list for this bake told us to have a cooking thermometer, and Prue’s pre-bake warning was about being precise with temperatures, but I didn’t even bother getting my thermometer out of the drawer. Not because I am so experienced that I don’t need it, but because I have no idea what the right temperatures are for anything and so having a thermometer will not help. If I made “fondant” correctly for this recipe, it was entirely by luck. And if I did not make it correctly, no one will ever care, because the thing that I made is perfectly edible.
KM: I have a meat thermometer, but that’s for meat. Again, I have never had a cooking thermometer. I know what she is getting at which is that you want the chocolate to be some temperature (maybe like 120 degrees Fahrenheit) before you declare it tempered. But the thing is, I don’t have one. So I just melted my chocolate in the double boiler by feel and heart, which is what baking is actually supposed to be all about. I will also admit here that on account of my four ugly darlings, I ignored the instructions to melt 210 grams of dark chocolate, and instead tempered 310 grams so that I would have enough chocolate for my ugly cookies.
CT: Goddammit. I so wish I had done that. I wound up using about 220 grams of dark chocolate, and the exact problem I ran into is that it was not enough for even a tiny blip of imprecision. Truly this pisses me off so much.
KM: They want you to be perfect the whole way through! It’s impossible. I melted more because I’m flawed, and I know this about myself.
CT: In this case in particular, it’s annoying, because the precision is not based on flavor but rather on surface area. It’s not like this is Prue saying, “This amount of chocolate provides the best mix of flavors.” You need a certain amount of chocolate at exactly the right temperature and consistency in order to coat your cookies, and this recipe’s ingredients give you not one single gram of wiggle room.
KM: Also, the recipe called for a five-centimeter cookie. Who knows what size our cookies were? I have no idea how big my ravioli stamp is! It’s certainly bigger.
CT: How did the tempering go for you? What was your method?
KM: My method was the same method I always use and never know whether or not it is correct. I divided the chocolate in half, melting one half of it to the consistency I feel in my heart and body and mind is correct, and then I pour it over the other chocolate and mix it up. What was your method?
CT: Basically the same, although I think I probably melted about two thirds of the chocolate and then added about one third to bring it back down to temperature. I know there’s supposed to be some Le Cordon Bleu (or whatever) method for tempering chocolate without a thermometer, but as far as I can remember it involves like wiping hot melted chocolate onto your face? Or something? I wasn’t going to do that. I basically just stirred until it was fully melted, and then stirred some more until Vibes told me it was hot enough to melt the rest of the chocolate. And it worked!
KM: Maybe we will look that up later.
That’s exactly what I did. It’s what I always do! And it always works fine! We are right. It is the baking elite who are wrong.
CT: By the time we were done tempering the chocolate, I think we had like 20 minutes or so left on the timer? Time enough to dip, cool, top, coat, and decorate, if you move quickly.
KM: Something exciting happened to me at this point.
CT: Let’s hear it! I love exciting things.
KM: My pal Fred texted me that he was in my neighborhood and plan-less, and asked if he could come over. This is exciting, because I love friendship and I love living within walkable distances of my friends. But it also meant that I essentially injected my experience with a host! It was like having Noel!
CT: Wow, I consider it bold to even acknowledge a text message during the final half-hour of one of these bakes. I think often about what would happen if Noel turned up in my kitchen during one of the stressful stages of a bake. I really worry that I would scream something incoherent and throw a handful of knives at him.
KM: I know I was very brave (and also I was just waiting until my chocolate was ready for me to dunk stuff in it) so I let him in, and then I understood just how hard it is to answer any question when you are in the middle of baking. Fred asked me questions about the bake and I truly have no idea how I answered them. Terrifying to imagine doing that on television.
CT: Just speaking in tongues and whimpering, swirly-eyed and crazy.
KM: It was also kind of crazy, because this was maybe the best I’ve ever felt going into assembly, so I kept being like “This is not normal,” and “Usually I am not this calm.” And Fred did not seem to think I was calm at all.
CT: Yeah, sometimes when I’m doing one of these, my wife will be in the other room and I’ll hear her say something like, “You poor thing,” very often at a moment where I feel like I have things pretty well under control. It’s like the end of Saint Maud (spoiler alert), where like to me I am a Seraph with Golden Wings and the Light of Heaven shining down, but to an observer I am screaming and dying in flames.
KM: Wow.
Stage Four: Assembly
KM: How did you decide how to assemble your cookies? I spent like a full minute just staring at the pieces, to be honest.
CT: OK, I did have a moment of genius here. I knew that dunking would be a mistake, because my cookies were brittle and the bowl was too deep and my fingers are dumb inarticulate sausages. So instead I arranged my biscuits bottoms up on the plate, and I used a small silicone brush to swipe tempered chocolate on them, very evenly. It worked brilliantly, and took only like five total minutes, and soon they were back in the freezer.
KM: WHOA! This is VERY smart, and I think you’re a genius. Wow. I wish I had done that so much. I instead went dunk-dunk mode. I began with my ugly children to see if it would even work, and it worked OK, but I was shaking so much, so I just did the bottoms as fast as I could, put them on a wire rack, and threw them back in the freezer. Then I melted the milk chocolate in the double boiler, and put it in the icing bag, and it seemed so hot, so I put it in the fridge. This was a mistake.
CT: Oh no! Not the fridge!
KM: I don’t know why I thought it had to go in there! It was so dumb. I was just panicking!
CT: Yikes!
I had another moment of genius with the milk chocolate, although it was slightly unintentional. I was starting to feel a little bit frantic, although we had a lot of time left. I had already measured out the milk chocolate, but looking at it, it just seemed like so little, and I was so worried that if anything went wrong I would be screwed, and I am famously terrified to apply heat in my kitchen to very small quantities of food. So I just grabbed another huge handful of milk chocolate chips and put them into the bowl at the last second. This SAVED MY ASS minutes later.
KM: See, I did not make extra here, which I should have. The moral is really that we should just always be making more than they say and ignoring the instructions.
We really did have so much time. With 10 minutes left, all I had to do was assemble the top halves!
CT: How did this part go for you, the assembly of the top halves?
KM: OK, so I pulled out my pieces (the fondant circles, the ugly and beautiful cookies with half-chocolate), and I set them on the counter. I decided that the fondant could not be expected to adhere to the cookie on it’s own, so I attached all of them with a little bit of chocolate to the cookie, let them harden for like maybe one minute, and then dunked them again. Even with all my extra chocolate, I still ran low for this part so that for my last ugly cookie, I had to use my hands to scoop the chocolate out of the bowl and put it on the cookie. Fred at this point was like “What are you doing?” and I was like “Fred, NOT NOW, I DON’T KNOW,” or something.
CT: Oh wow, the chocolate glue method was ingenious. I did not think of that, although I wouldn’t have had enough chocolate for it to work, in the end.
I tried to use a spoon and then a rubber spatula to scoop tempered chocolate onto the biscuits with the fondant circles.
KM: Wow, I wish I had seen you doing that and then could have copied you.
CT: No, this went poorly. The tools were imprecise, and the chocolate was becoming a little bit too thick, so mostly the chocolate just kind of plopped on there in a blob and then started to harden. My cookies were looking very stupid. Also, because the method was not precise, and because I had basically trusted Prue’s amounts, I realized after my third cookie that there was no way I would have enough chocolate for all of them.
KM: To be honest, it really seems like that should have worked to me. I’m mad on your behalf that it didn’t. Did you temper more? What did you do?
CT: I didn’t think I had time to temper more. In fact, I was wrong about this. But I did have the extra milk chocolate that I’d melted, so when I finally ran out of dark chocolate with two cookies left, I just dunked a spoon into the piping bag and plopped milk chocolate on them. They look even dumber than the rest, but who cares. Truly! Who gives a shit!
KM: Oh, that seems fine to me. Not everyone likes dark chocolate. They are wrong, but they exist. What happened to me at this point was the same problem, different chocolate. Putting my piping bag in the fridge caused it to harden, which meant it would NOT come out of the bag. At this point, I was running around going crazy mode and you messaged me that you were done and Fred was like, “I hate to tell you this, but Chris is done,” and I was like “Noooooooo!” So I MICROWAVED the whole bag of milk chocolate that was left, shoved it into a piping bag, and just squirted it on top as fast as possible. Literally the second I put the bag down, the timer went off.
CT: Oh my God!
I finished the bake with a whopping 10 minutes left on the timer. But I had lost track of time, so I had no sense that I was so far ahead of schedule. I was running around and doing things hastily because I thought I had seconds left, but it turns out if I’d looked at the damn timer, I would’ve realized I had plenty of time to temper another batch of chocolate. When I finished and saw how much time was left, I felt like a huge asshole, and then I had to confront the ugliness of my stupid cookies not as Prue’s failure but as my own.
Which, when you think about it, is still really her fault and something she should apologize for.
KM: That’s so much time! It’s also annoying because in the real bake, someone would be calling out time stamps. In retrospect, I should have delegated this job to Fred, but instead I was touching my phone so much that in the end it was covered in chocolate.
CT: Yeah, come on, Fred. Pull your weight if you’re gonna loiter in the tent.
KM: Yeah!
The Finished Product
KM: Show cookie?
CT: Oh man. I really do not want to show these stupid things. Here goes:
KM: OK, I genuinely think you should be proud of these. I think if you had had more dark chocolate, they would have looked perfect! It’s not your fault that Prue gave you so little chocolate.
CT: Right! I mean, I can say for them that if you saw them on a table at a potluck, you would for sure eat one. They aren’t, like, disgusting.
KM: I would for SURE. They look a little spooky too, which is in season.
CT: Now, so that our readers can see how this was SUPPOSED to go, please show us your lovely cookies.
KM: I’m so proud of my beautiful cookies (not the ugly ones which are not pictured):
CT: Absolutely gorgeous. When you showed me these cookies the first time, I gasped out loud. So nice. Also I was filled with the bitterest sense of envy.
KM: I want to admit that Fred did help me take these photos by shining his phone’s flashlight onto them while I took the pictures. They looked extra good compared to when I take the photos in my dimly lit kitchen, with no consideration for attractiveness. One funny thing is how much they look like raviolis because of the fringy edge and the dome in the middle.
CT: How’d the orange turn out? Deliciously orange-y?
KM: They definitely do not taste like mint, but I think they taste good. As far as bakes for this show go, these are ones I actually like! I am eating them of my own volition. How did yours taste?
CT: They’re yummy, for sure. It’s a bigger commitment than maybe it appears to eat one of them. It’s a meal-sized cookie, and very sweet. Also slightly messy, in my case, because the shortbread isn’t contained by the chocolate. Still, I’m happy to have a plate of them in my kitchen.
KM: Yeah! They are like three-bite cookies, which is kind of surprising, and the chocolate melts everywhere all over your hands!
CT: I'll give Prue some credit, here: She hooked us up with some tasty treats.
KM: Yeah, these are good, and I can imagine that if we were not under a time limit, they might have even been enjoyable to make!
CT: Kelsey, do you have any idea what’s on the slate for next week?
KM: Oh no. What is it?
CT: The most exciting week of all! Bread week! The special week when by tradition the show’s judges do not allow us to bake bread!
KM: God. All I want is to make real bread that rises.
CT: Please, for the love of everything holy, allow us to make bread for Bread Week.
