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.
The leaves have begun to fall from the tree in front of my house. Some turned yellow and then red almost overnight and now they lie on the sidewalk haphazardly, blowing about in the wind. But some of the leaves still remain. They are green. They are attached. They are still alive. The strangeness of autumn exists in this disparity. Because the tree is less dense, more light comes into my house, but because there are still leaves up there, the shadows squirm and billow and cast strange beams on the walls. That combined with the election and the unsettling 80-degree day forecast for this week in the northeast lends a kind of dreadful aura to the air. Something is not right. Something is changing, and it's unclear if that something is for the better.
There is a beautiful marriage that exists between the chilling of the air and the warming of the oven in the kitchen, something ancient and bone deep. In the areas where snow brings a change in season, wheat is harvested in the autumn. It's unsurprising, then, that many people turn to baked goods in the fall. We want pumpkin pie and banana bread. We want the constant, steady rise of a sourdough loaf and the warmth of nutmeg in the air. At this time of year, I always want crumb cakes and apple cider bread and apple pie with a lattice top.
So it made sense that The Great British Bake Off chose Autumn as the theme for this week. There are so many beautiful recipes to choose from! We could have made anything.
But it was a mistake to assume that Prue Leith would allow us to exist within that joy. It was a false dream built of little more than the falling leaves. Instead, that hope was to be our torture, our prison, as we were forced to make something unknown, something vegan, something stupid. The sixth episode of this season of The Great British Bake Off asked us to make Prue Leith's Sticky Vegan Parkin. If those words sound unappetizing to you, just wait until you see the horrors that can be found in the Chaos Tent this week.
Chris Thompson: Happy autumn unto you, Kelsey, my friend! It is now time to make that special autumn-time treat we all definitely know and love, the [checks notes] Parkin.
Kelsey McKinney: Happy autumn to you, Chris! What a beautiful day to celebrate our favorite treat which I had definitely heard of before yesterday, and which I absolutely do not keep accidentally calling patkin!
CT: I know that when I am planning a Guy Fawkes Day celebration, which I for sure always do this time of year, the first thing I think of is a delicious potemkin.
KM: I for sure know what that day is, and also what "bonfire night" is, and also how to make parskin cake.
CT: What did you think of this list of ingredients, when you finally saw it? Did it occur to you that we were making something gingerbread-ish?
KM: Well, Chris. I want to admit that I felt a kind of physical revulsion to this list of ingredients, and also the rage that always leads to mistakes. Prue Leith was really on one with these instructions, and the thing she was on was neither enjoyable nor exciting.
CT: Yeah, I realize that I've been lazily thinking of Prue as our ally this season, I think because Paul has been such a rude jerk to us. But truly she got our asses with this one. Golden syrup? Fine oatmeal? Black treacle? Pushkin?
KM: The thing is ... both of them are our enemy now! We are at WAR! The Tent is a place of pain and misery.
CT: Also the instructions for this one were hilariously incomplete. Prue has been waiting all along for us to slip into a condition of complacency, so that she could uppercut us to hell with a bake that has instructions like "use the melting method" and "make crystallized ginger" and the dreaded "bake."
KM: Yeah! Why is she like this? Why would she foist this misery upon us? Also, notably, this is not a normal recipe for a parstikin cake. It is a vegan recipe, which I guess Prue invented in hell.
CT: To me, someone who makes at least one Guy Folks Day foreskin cake a year, the idea of making it vegan is honestly offensive to the meaning(?) of the holiday.
KM: Wow. Let's break the fourth wall and give our editor Justin Ellis, who is married to a British person, an opportunity to speak now or forever hold his piece.
Justin Ellis: Please do not make me defend aging white royalists just so we can do a bit.
KM: Thank you, Justin. Anyway, fuck the parksistin cake. I hate it!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: How’d your shopping go for this bake? Most of the ingredients seem pretty normal, but there’s one or two hard-to-find items on there.
KM: DID MOST OF THE INGREDIENTS SEEM NORMAL? I would argue many of them were stupid and dumb! Golden syrup? Fine oatmeal? Black treacle? Dark Muscovado sugar? Prunes? All of these are in the list.
CT: OK, yes, now that I look at it again, it's weird with normal accents, and not the reverse. There are four things on there that I pretty much immediately gave up on purchasing: Golden syrup, fine oatmeal, black treacle, and Muscovado sugar. I would wager there is not a grocery store within 30 miles of my home that carries any of those items.
KM: I will admit that I did not even try to buy prunes as well. This was just too much for me, and also I do not want to! I went to the cheese store with my friend who is visiting, and they had dried figs, and I decided this was fine because figs are similar in texture to prunes and also the recipe didn't call for that many of them, and I wanted them for my cheese plate.
CT: Important: You can’t spell "prune” without “Pru_e."
KM: Wow! Maybe that’s why I refused! Out of REBELLION!
CT: Figs are so delicious, a much more exciting thing to have in your pantry than the healthy poop fruit.
KM: I wanted to buy them! Figs are delicious! Now I am mad that I put any of them into this bake, but we’ll get to that in a bit. What did you choose to do about the ingredients you did not understand?
CT: Without looking it up, I decided that the closest thing to black treacle that I could lay my hands on was dark molasses. This seems reasonable to me. For the fine oatmeal, I figured I could just blitz some regular oats in the spice mill. I really didn't know what to do about the golden syrup, though.
KM: OK, so we were totally aligned on that. I had a bit of a problem with the golden syrup. I had no idea what it meant, and assumed initially that it meant caramelized simple syrup. That is how much this blog series has broken my brain. But then when I went to find the molasses in my little pantry, I found light corn syrup, which I decided was basically golden syrup, and probably what the dumb British meant. So I used that. What did you do?
CT: Oh! That’s interesting. I went into the bake thinking, as you did, that golden syrup is probably just thick simple syrup made from caramelized sugar. And I figured this would be easy enough to make mid-bake, even though now that I think about it what I am describing is just watery caramel.
KM: Delicious watery caramel!
CT: But in the time since the bake I have learned that golden syrup is a different thing? It's a processed sugar byproduct and the store-bought stuff often contains an acid, for reasons of science. So my watery caramel is not really anything like golden syrup at all. At any rate, my grocery store very much does not carry golden syrup, so I was screwed no matter what.
KM: I actually don't think our assumptions were that far off. I later Googled stuff and realized that we were pretty close in the end. Black treacle is basically molasses. And dark Muscovado sugar is basically brown sugar. And dried figs are just better prunes. So the only thing we differed on was the golden syrup.
CT: Right, I just used dark brown sugar for the Muscovado. But I did use prunes. I now have a canister of the slimy nuggets taking up valuable kitchen space as I type this.
KM: You were very well-behaved.
CT: I am the baking good boy who now has to talk himself into snacking on prunes.
Stage One: Making Crystallized Ginger
CT: A brisk 90 minutes for this bake! Did you find this time-limit terrifying, or liberating, or what?
KM: Frankly, I was thrilled to have a short time limit because my friend Lucy is staying at my house and I did not want her to see me in the state into which I must enter to survive the three-and-a-half-hour bakes. But also, I was so scared. The instructions your beloved wife sent say that there are "aspects of this bake that take much longer than you think," which terrified me because we only had 90 minutes! How did you feel?
CT: I think my primary emotion was relief. We've had some long, long bakes lately, and I was glad to know that however crazed this bake might become, at least it would be over in a short period of time. I might've felt differently if we'd been asked to bake something that I know real well or like a lot, but a polecat cake is something I'd never heard of before and I felt confident that the bake would be a terrible mess. So I was very glad to think that it would be just a small part of my day, a minor commitment.
What was your first act after starting the timer? I mean, after saying "fuck."
KM: My first act was to start my second timer, which I set for 30 minutes. I really felt in my gut that this cake would take 45 minutes to bake and that that was the thing that would take extra time, so I wanted to make sure I was on track for that. My second act was to remove the batteries from my scale and put them back in.
CT: Oh yeah, Prue's cryptic hint definitely got into my head. I never really resolved what she meant by it. I'm still not sure.
KM: Then I began on the ginger. I had a ton of ginger in my fridge from the farm box so I did not carefully peel it and instead just like chopped the sides of it off and then chopped it into cubes and put it on the stove in a 50/50 sugar to water mixture and then left it alone. Is this what you did?
CT: Just about! I also have a lot of ginger at the moment, and I also skipped the peeler in favor of just hacking at it with a chef’s knife.
I put the ginger cubes and the sugar into a saucepan, and then added just enough water to hold the sugar. I've made candied orange peel a few times—most recently for our panettone adventure—so I felt very confident that I could pull off the crystallized ginger part of this recipe with no issues.
KM: You seemed so confident about making the candied ginger when we began that I became less confident. As far as I could remember, I just needed to essentially cook it in simple syrup and then coat it with sugar, but still at this moment I feel uncertain that is correct.
CT: I think that's basically it! Simmer in sugar syrup until you hit the right texture, then coat with sugar.
The part of this that worried me a little bit is that ginger is famously very fibrous, and I worried about whether it would ever cook to a nice tender condition, or if it would remain unpleasantly crunchy and sort of tough deep into the bake. But I figured I could put the simmering ginger onto a back burner and just let it go for a very long time, possibly all the way until the final 15 minutes of the bake, if necessary.
KM: OK that's also kind of what I decided. That's why I put so much water in there. I felt like the ginger needed to like boil in the sugar water for a long time. Though, hilariously, I did not really connect this with Prue's warning at all.
CT: Oh that's interesting! Maybe that's what Prue was warning about? That would be such a bogus warning for a technical challenge. Don't undercook your garnish! Thinking about this now, I think actually this is exactly what she was talking about. She was out to get us!
KM: She was being TRICKY! Which I guess is very Autumnal if you think about it.
Stage Two: Mixing Parkin Batter
CT: The instruction that filled me with dread for this bake was the second one: "Make the sponge using the melting method." Kelsey, do you have any idea what is meant by "the melting method?"
KM: I talked to Lucy about this beforehand only to arrive at my initial gut instinct which was: I guess I'll make the oils and prunes (figs) hot in a pan and then add the other stuff. I still don't know if that's right. I also did not add the milk to the pan. So I cooked vegetable oil, light corn syrup, molasses, and brown sugar in a pan.
This was, in my opinion, disgusting. Is this what you did?
CT: Sort of? First I had to make watery caramel, which I did using lessons learned from Caramel Week. I toasted granulated sugar in a pan until it started to turn brown, then added water and cooked until the sugar dissolved, then continued to cook until the syrup thickened. Then I added molasses and dark brown sugar and started stirring. Then I looked at my ingredients and realized that I still had a bunch of shit that needed to go into the sponge, and so I just started dumping crap into the pan and stirring. The last thing I added to the pan was the oil, but I sincerely had no idea why this would make any sense at all. It looked awful.
Unlike you, I did add the oat milk, reasoning that it probably would not curdle because it’s not real.
KM: Wow, that makes perfect sense. I wish I had considered that. The biggest conflicting moment I had around this was that I had this disgusting, gloopy thing on the stove that was thickening, and I hadn't added the oat milk.
The trauma of caramel week made me terrified that adding the milk would cause the whole thing to seize. After like five minutes of glitching in the middle of the kitchen, I decided to warm up the oat milk in the microwave and then add it. I was whisking the whole time, and still don't know if that was right.
CT: Something that freaked me out a lot was the thought of eventually adding this bubbling-hot sugar lava to a bowl of dry ingredients. I want to mention, in the snootiest possible voice, that we are not a ground-spices household, generally. When the recipe called for a half-teaspoon of ground cloves and a teaspoon of ground nutmeg, that meant I needed to throw some cloves into the spice mill and quickly grate an entire whole nutmeg. This cost me no real time but hell if I'm not going to mention it!
I actually transferred the brown slimy lava to a mixing bowl and stirred it in an ice bath for a few minutes in order to cool it down, before adding it to my dry stuff. This I suspect accounts for something undesirable about my finished bake, but we’ll get there.
KM: Whoa! Ice bath! Please explain this reasoning. I would like to learn.
CT: I don't know, I guess I'm just used to combining room-temperature ingredients when making a cake? Like wouldn't very hot stuff start to cook the flour and the baking powder during the mixing? I just felt like it was way too hot, I didn't like the look of it. Importantly, my ice bath did not make it cold, and I just knew there wasn't enough time for that. But I did bring it down closer to room temperature before adding it to the dry ingredients. Ultimately I suspect this was the wrong move, but I felt good about my reasoning.
KM: That makes sense to me. It was so upsetting to look at the very hot oily mess. I hated stirring it. I mixed all the dry ingredients separately and added them slowly while whisking.
Adding the dry ingredients to the terrible lava did make me feel better because at that point it transformed from a disgusting oily pit and into something that looked like brownie batter, which is a thing that I understand.
CT: How did you do the mixing? Did you go stand mixer mode?
KM: Wow no! I literally mixed the dry ingredients into the pan with a whisk while it was still on the low burner.
CT: Oh wow. Wow! We did this so differently!
KM: I have no idea if that was wrong! What did you do? You went into the stand mixer?
CT: I also did not go stand mixer mode. I was so worried about the temperature and about the possibility of it just becoming this unmanageable sticky blob that I used a rubber spatula to bring together the lava and the dry stuff, in a huge mixing bowl. This also might have been a bad call because a rubber spatula can't mix ingredients as thoroughly without a ton of elbow grease, but I really did not want the batter sticking to a whisk and clumping into a nightmare mess.
KM: I think this was also a fundamental difference of using caramel versus using light corn syrup. Mine was so sticky, but I was not really concerned about it hardening. And also because I added my milk kind of late, it didn't ever get really that thick. After being fully disgusted with the oily lava pit, I became optimistic suddenly because it started to look like the Ghirardelli brownie mix that I used to make when I was a teen. Unfortunately, it was not this at all.
CT: I also took some comfort from the texture and look of the batter as it started to come together. It did remind me of brownie batter, maybe just a slightly thinner version that what I'm used to. But just the fact that it was a relatively homogenous and spreadable batter instead of like a horrible blob gave me some confidence that I was on the right track.
What baking pan did you choose for your bodkin, and how did you prepare it for the bake?
KM: As some of you may remember, I bought a three-pack of disposable 10x10 inch baking trays for Cake Week. I decided to use the third one of these because it was taking up a lot of space in my small drawer for pans. So I sprayed the shit out of it with canola oil (since this was a vegan bake) and then I tore a strip of baking paper in half and crossed the halves inside the pan and smushed them in there. What did you do?
CT: I had a rectangular baking sheet that I knew was a bit larger than ideal for this bake, but it was all I had. I prepped it basically the same as you, with parchment plus vegetable oil.
The bake called for some sort of loose-bottom square pan but I truly don’t even know what that means. I reasoned that we were making a damn cake, and I know how to bake a cake in such a way that it can be removed from a pan.
KM: For the most part this season I have really tried hard to make the bake good, and it has felt important to me to try my best to create something edible for me and my family to enjoy. But this bake of the terrible parce que nit cake felt so irrelevant to me that most of the decisions I made were flippant.
CT: Kelsey, are you generally not into gingerbread? Or is it the particular flavor combo of this gingerbread that is repellent to you?
KM: I love gingerbread. This is a hot take, but what I really dislike is the conversion of a recipe that is supposed to be made with eggs and milk into a vegan recipe. I respect vegans and their morality, which seems correct to me. But I think a good vegan recipe is not an imitation of something else made with weird substitutions. I don’t think I’ve ever had a truly delicious vegan recipe that is trying to be non-vegan. Just make a different thing! For example, you could make these little cookies, which are delicious and lovely.
CT: I like this take, and I think it’s a good one. I felt so clueless about what the hell a poundkiln is that it never occurred to me to imagine it as a non-vegan confection. But a funny thing about me is I am sort of ambivalent about gingerbread, so at no point was I expecting to love this flavor combination, vegan or otherwise.
KM: Sorry, I have something else to say, which is that the substitution of milk with oat milk is fine to me, but then why did we have to use vegetable oil? Why couldn't we substitute butter for vegan butter?!
CT: That's interesting. Is vegan butter pretty good? I truly have no idea. Does it bake well?
KM: Genuinely, I don't know. But the act of pouring 100 milliliters of vegetable oil into a pan so thoroughly disgusted me that even if these had turned out delicious, I'm not sure I would have been able to eat them.
CT: Yes. Watching the vegetable oil float around the surface of this black slimy mixture was like how I imagine it would be to watch an industrial accident unfold in real time. Insanely unappetizing.
KM: I also want to admit that another bad thing was happening to me while I was doing this batter-making, which is that my friend Lucy was crying laughing at the kitchen table because she was reading the Bake Off blog from Party Week where we failed to make caterpillars for the first time. So at the same time I was making this disgusting blob of vegan gingerbread, I was also being read aloud to from our own blog about our failure. Hilarious, but not exactly encouraging.
CT: That serene evil stare of the caterpillar, watching over you as you frantically whisk a boiling black sludge and tell yourself that it will turn into food. A nightmare.
Stage Three: Baking, Making Glacé Icing
KM: It took much longer to make the batter than I thought and by the time it was done, there were only 50 minutes left on the bake, which was bad for me because I assumed that it would take 45 minutes to bake. So I basically threw it in the oven at 400 degrees. What did you do here?
CT: I had that weird flustered feeling that everything had come together too quickly, and Prue's warning rang in my head, and I was sure that I had skipped something or shorted something. I think I had approximately 53 minutes left when my batter was finished and poured into the pan and leveled.
So for lack of a better plan of action I just put it into the oven, at 375. It was pretty thin on my over-large pan so I thought it might take like 30 minutes to bake, and I had the definite sense that all of my timing was way the hell off.
KM: At this point, I also looked over at my ginger and the bubbles on the top were the color of caramel, which was bad because it meant the sugar had gotten too hot. So I rapidly removed the ginger from the pot. For some reason, I decided to put the ginger cubes onto a drying rack on top of a sheet tray with butcher paper on it instead of just … directly onto the butcher paper. So then it all got stuck there when the sugar hardened and I had to remove them all by hand.
But in the end, I was pretty confident I had done that correctly because the ginger tasted delicious when tossed in extra sugar.
CT: What happened to the syrup? Was it indeed caramelizing?
KM: Oh yeah baby it was caramelizing. I ended up making MORE ginger syrup with just the scraps of ginger I had chopped off. This took a while, but worked out fine in the end. I finished up my second ginger syrup near the end, but that was fine.
CT: I think I left my ginger in the syrup longer than you did. I don't know if I was using older ginger (I did buy it from the bin at the grocery store and it had been in my kitchen for a couple days already), but I felt like it just was not really softening enough. I tried a bite of one and it seemed too crunchy. I was not yet worried about this, but I was aware that I was setting myself up for a situation where I had to pull and cool the sponge, make the icing, and finish the ginger all at the same time.
KM: Yes, I was also concerned about timing at the end. Especially since I anticipated the cake coming out with only five minutes left. But when my timer went off at 30 minutes, I checked the cake, and the skewer came out clean. Too clean, even. Perhaps slightly over baked. This was stunning because it had before been so mushy and disgusting, but I pulled it out!
CT: I think I also left mine in a minute or two too long, out of the same incredulity. Just a gut feeling that in a 90-minute bake I should not have so much time left on the clock when the sponge comes out of the oven.
KM: I just really did not anticipate it being done! I stabbed it like six times to make sure, because I too felt it should have taken longer! But then it was out, and it looked kind of normal like brownies, and I began to feel that in fact I would get a delicious little treat at the end.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: Did you make your glacé icing before or after you removed the sponge from the oven?
KM: I made it after because I ended up with extra time. I took my cake out of the pan and put it in the freezer, because it was so hot, and I assumed it needed to cool a little before assembly. Then I put the one tablespoon of syrup as per the recipe into the sugar pile. This did nothing, so I added extra water until it became a reasonable texture.
CT: I was so bothered by the proportions for the icing. One tablespoon of syrup is supposed to hydrate this huge Scarface-level pile of powdered sugar? Surely not! I wound up putting four tablespoons of ginger syrup plus several squeezes of lemon juice, and whisking this stupid mess until finally it became something that could be drizzled. I was really excessively angry at Prue throughout this stage.
As you can tell from the using of ginger syrup, just before making the icing I finally strained the ginger pieces, laid them out on a silicone mat, and sprinkled them with caster sugar. I still did not feel that they were chewy enough but it had been a solid 70 minutes by then.
KM: I was so angry. The icing tasted fine, but it clearly wanted to be piped, and the recipe did not call for piping and also I did not want to pipe it because I was mad again. At this point, the time was ticking down, and I also just did not care. The prepreikin cake could go straight into the trash if it needed to.
CT: Piping would’ve been fun. I feel like if we’d had another 15 minutes, it really would’ve been nice to do fun swirls with the icing.
KM: Yes! If I'd had more time, I might have done it. With the time dwindling, I ended up dragging my still warm cake from the freezer, stabbing it, dousing it with ginger syrup and then just frantically throwing stuff at it.
CT: This was a chaotic finish, which I guess makes sense with a 90-minute time limit. Lots of flinging of sugary substances and shouting. I actually set my sponge on top of a layer of ice cubes instead of a cooling rack—my cooling racks have gone missing and are presumed lost—but I felt this was an ingenious solution.
KM: Did you check the basement? We could scroll through the archive later to see when the last time you had them was! I do think that's an ingenious solution, though. You're brilliant!
CT: It worked! I even returned the sponge to my patented ice rack after turning it out of the pan, and left it there while I brushed on the syrup.
I felt like I had so much syrup, and I didn't want to waste it, so I put an awful lot of it on the sponge, three or four generous applications. This was problematic because my sponge, whether solely due to the dimensions of the pan or due in part to something I got wrong in the mixing, was pretty flat. A little bit of syrup goes a long way in one inch of cake sponge. I could practically watch it becoming heavy.
KM: I put a lot of my syrup onto the sponge, and then the extra syrup I had, I put into a little Tupperware container because ginger syrup is a great little ingredient to use in cocktails! And I assume I will be having many cocktails this week on account of [waves hands at the air].
CT: Oh that’s a really good idea. I so wish I'd thought of that.
KM: A flavored syrup plus one spirit plus soda water? That's a cocktail!
CT: A delicious ginger-inflected brown-liquor cocktail, perfect for autumn and for drowning one's existential angst.
KM: Plus, I have to admit that once my cake began cooling, I lost hope again. This did not seem as if it was going to be delicious. And the yummy ginger syrup seemed like a waste going into the body of this weird concoction. In the end, I finished assembling with 12 seconds left, which is the closest I've cut it this season. And my cake looked ugly.
CT: Oh wow, that is cutting it close! I think by having an easier cooling task due to having a thinner sponge I was able to proceed a little bit ahead of you, and so I finished decorating and slicing my plopcram cake with about 90 seconds or so left on the clock.
KM: The slicing, I have to admit, was a really unpleasant experience. Did you have this?
CT: Yes! It was so disheartening to have this sticky sponge cling to the knife and gunk up the sides of each square, so that it looks all smushed and gross. This is one of those things that professional bakers know how to do, I guess. At any rate, I extremely do not.
KM: It stuck to the knife and crumbled. Everything about it looked ugly and bad. I used a bread knife, which seemed like the right call, but perhaps was wrong. Anyway I ended up with a knife covered in goop and icing everywhere and a state of dissatisfaction in my heart.
CT: Love to have your spirit crushed one final time, at the buzzer.
KM: I did not even want to try this cake, to be honest. When it was finished and the timer went off, I had to kind of like force myself to want to try it. Bad time!
The Finished Product
CT: Kelsey, how do you feel about your finished bupkis?
KM: I feel like it is a piece of garbage which I do not even have the energy to hate. How do you feel about your finished whatchamacallit?
CT: I feel relieved, on the one hand, that it is definitely an edible and decently respectable cake. On the other hand, it’s not something that I feel motivated to eat, so I'm missing the satisfaction of enjoying a homemade sweetie treatie.
KM: Show your cake bars?
CT: Here are my messy cake bars:
You can see the carnage caused by the knife, and the sloppy icing, how flat they appear, and how unpleasantly redolent they are of an overworked meatloaf.
Show bars?
KM: Here are my yucky bars.
You can see here that they look soft, and that might be appealing if they did not taste so weird and unfortunate. The flavor got stuck in my mouth for a long time and also they were so oily.
The candied ginger tasted good, though. I ended up throwing all of mine right into the garbage. These are not good. And I refuse to believe that it is my fault.
CT: I will say that if someone put one of these on my plate without telling me anything about it, I would not necessarily guess that it was vegan. On the other hand, I also would not enjoy it very much. The bars are intensely sweet (probably my fault), are as gingery as the very grouchiest ginger beer, and feel—to use a Paul-ism—too stodgy. I gave half a bar to my child and she tried a bite, then spent a few minutes prodding it unenthusiastically with a fork, and finally declared it "very spicy" and did not finish it.
I did enjoy that my kitchen smelled pleasantly autumn-ish last night.
KM: Yes! All the ginger smelled great and autumn-y! That I will admit.
Luckily, we did so well on our showstoppers and our other bake that we are moving on anyway! Congrats to us!
CT: The judges were honestly blown away by our showstopper bakes. Just absolutely floored by their beauty and technical perfection.
KM: We are the kings of autumn! Do you know what next week has in store for us, Chris?
CT: I am told that next week will be the return of Dessert Week! I can say with total sincerity that we aced Dessert Week back in 2022, and with somewhat reduced sincerity that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Star baker, here we come.
KM: WOW! Certainly we will be the best at making desserts! I cannot wait.
