Sunday
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying, “to the second baketacular of the season. In keeping with our back to basics, or should I say bake to basics”—she waggled her eyebrows—“theme, we’re asking for something as simple as it is sumptuous.
As austere as it is au…ncredible. There’ll be no bells or whistles to hide behind here.
Wilfred and Marianne want you to make rolls.
Twenty-four beautiful rolls of which half should be sweet and half should be savoury.
Which means, yes my lovelies, we want you to spend the next four hours showing us all your buns and your baps.
” She turned her head slightly to camera.
“And to think this goes out before the watershed. As always, your time starts on three. Three, darlings.”
Still a little—a little what exactly? Triumphant? On edge? Flushed?—a little whatever from her apparently successful confrontation with Jennifer Hallet the night before, Audrey took a beat or two to get her focus back on the competition.
The tricky thing with this kind of challenge was multitasking.
Neither bake by itself was that complex, but the two of them together made for some fiddly questions of timing.
The sweet rolls were harder to make, but the savoury dough required a longer rise, so that was where she started, mixing a blend of white and wholemeal bread flour in a bowl and rubbing through butter and salt.
While getting distracted by all the interesting things other people were doing hadn’t exactly served Audrey well so far, she still took advantage of the current, relatively mindless, step in the bake to…
get distracted by all the interesting things other people were doing.
On one side of the ballroom, the man she remembered as Reggie had taken a pencil out from behind his ear and was making some very complex notes on a sheet of paper.
On another, the woman Audrey had filed as Linda—about Audrey’s age, permanently harried expression—was expositing her concerns to the camera.
“I’m doing cinnamon rolls,” she was saying, “and I know that’s really too simple and probably I’ll get marked down for it, but I’m also making spinach and cheese rolls and those need two separate proofs and I think that’ll probably be fine, but the lights make it hotter and that might mess things up and—”
Grace Forsythe swept in from out of shot.
“Well this looks fascinating.” It wasn’t especially, but Audrey had a glimmering suspicion that she was just saying something, anything, to keep Linda from spiralling.
“And I’m so sorry, I missed what you were telling us.
” A pause, just long enough that the prompt could be edited out to make for a smoother, less humiliating piece of television. “What’re you making for sweet?”
“Cinnamon rolls.”
“Wonderful.” Although having said wonderful, Grace made an exaggerated grimace. “But am I right in thinking that cinnamon roll is some kind of awful meme thing that I’m far too old and past it to understand?”
Linda nodded and blinked back what had been the beginnings of tears. “It sort of means very nice person. I’m not sure where it comes from, though.”
“Darling I assure you, none of us are sure where anything comes from, so in that regard you are in the very best company.”
A little concerned that at least one contestant was making something notably more complex than she was, even discounting whatever Reggie was doing that apparently involved a slide rule, Audrey returned to her bake. She added yeast, sugar, and warm water, and began kneading the mixture into dough.
She could probably have used a dough hook, but the time they’d been given was generous and Alanis had been right, there was something satisfying about making your own bread. Something you could get lost in.
And so Audrey let herself get lost.
* * *
Despite having worked in a very time-hungry medium for a decade now, Audrey was still a bit surprised at how quickly four hours turned into zero hours.
She took her rolls out of the oven and then stepped away so that the professional making-food-look-good people could film her creations from flattering angles.
Privately, it was one of the things she was looking forward to the most: watching the series back with her mum and dad and getting to see something she’d baked herself put under lighting that made it look TV good instead of pretty-decent-home-cooking good.
Outside, everybody was gathered on the steps leading down to the garden.
It was one of those awkward filming breaks, too short to do anything useful, too long to not be annoying.
There was something of a generational split, with the older contestants standing around making polite small talk about yeast and the younger generation taking the opportunity to catch up on whatever social media they’d been missing out on while wrist deep in sweet dough.
Every so often Alanis and Joshua would exchange a glance, which Audrey was just online enough to recognise as the you’ve sent me something I think is cool look.
Watching the little exchange took enough of Audrey’s attention that when Doris popped up behind her and said, “So I’ve given it a think,” she gave a frankly embarrassing jump.
“And?” She turned, trying not to sound too eager or anxious.
“And I figure why not. Might be nice to talk about the old days.”
For something that had been, on some level, a whim of the moment, Audrey felt surprisingly relieved.
Perhaps it was just that it would have been really embarrassing to fuck up something as basic as “convince an old lady to talk about the blitz.” Only, talking to Doris had been—well, honestly, she wasn’t sure what it had been.
Intriguing? Interesting? Nice? Stop calling things nice, Audrey, said Natalie.
It’s a meaningless word and you know better.
The thing was, Audrey wouldn’t exactly have said she was lonely.
She had her family, her coworkers, a less-active-than-when-she-was-at-university-or-in-London-for-that-matter-but-still-probably-fine social life.
But when she’d been listening to Doris, she’d felt something more.
A sense of connection maybe that she hadn’t realised how badly she was missing.
“Thanks,” she replied, hoping she sounded mostly professional. “Can I catch up with you after the judging?”
“Seems like that’d be best. Perhaps you can buy me a cup of tea.”
It seemed a fair exchange. There’d be more formal paperwork to sign at some point, probably some quite fiddly paperwork since there was a TV production company in the mix as well.
But for now Audrey preferred to think in terms of conversation.
Of one person telling a story to another.
In a lot of ways that was why she’d gone into journalism in the first place.
Bakes filmed, the contestants were herded back in to their places where they waited to come up one at a time and have their rolls assessed on the basis of sweetness, crustiness, and simple-thing-flawlessly-executedness.
The first few contestants—Meera with her chilli cheese rolls and lemon buns, Joshua with his playing-it-surprisingly-safe combination of stilton-and-walnut mini-loaves and blueberry and white chocolate finger buns, and Jim-the-dad with a straightforward fruit-in-one-spinach-in-the-other combo—did fine.
None of them had excelled but nobody got a frown and a This was a straightforward bake, so we expected perfection either.
Alanis was next, approaching the judges’ table with a confidence that Audrey wished she could borrow about ten percent of. “So these,” she said, “are salted honey sweet rolls and sun-dried tomato and herb savoury rolls.”
Marianne Wolvercote and Wilfred Honey scrutinised Alanis’s bready offerings. “They’re well finished,” Marianne conceded, never wanting to give too much praise too early in case it compromised her position as the mean judge.
“Aye,” agreed Wilfred Honey. “The glaze on them buns is smashing. Clear and bright and even. You know, they look so tasty, I might even not mind you’ve put salt on them.”
With the confidence of eight years of stage rivalry, Marianne Wolvercote turned to her co-judge. “Putting salt in sweet pastries is quite common, Wilfred.”
“I know it’s common, I just miss the days when sweet was sweet and savoury was savoury.
” Despite his protestations, he took a large bite of one of the salted honey rolls, and when he’d finished chewing, gave an approving nod.
“But I’ll tell you what, when that’s the result, I see the point of it.
I think sometimes these things are just trendy, but I really feel you’ve made a strong choice there. ”
Marianne Wolvercote was nodding along with him. “I agree with Wilfred. This is top-notch. The balance of flavours is just right. Subtle but really comes through.”
“And the savoury’s lovely, too,” added Wilfred Honey. “Good crunch to the crust, and even with the flavours it still tastes like bread.”
“As opposed to what?” asked Grace Forsythe, from the sidelines.
“Takes a lot of work to make bread taste like bread,” explained Wilfred Honey, sagely.
Secure in the knowledge that her bread tasted like bread, Alanis returned to her station, to be replaced by blue-collar John, whose rolls had come out perfectly adequately but whose buns had caught a bit.
Then Audrey was up, yesterday’s fears that she’d erred too close to basic flooding back as she placed her sweet and savoury rolls in front of the judges.
“The jam’s homemade?” she offered, apologetically.
“Well I am a fan of blueberry,” Wilfred Honey said, taking a nibble. “And these have come out well. They’re very simple, but we wanted simple.”