Saturday
“Jennifer says,” Colin Thrimp directed from the sidelines, “that you need to sound about ten percent less like you want to fuck the bakes.”
The mention of Jennifer knocked Audrey’s never-terribly-fixed internal chronometer back to Wednesday and to the bitter taste the whole confrontation had left in her mouth for days afterwards.
“That’s right,” Grace Forsythe went on, oblivious to both Colin’s instructions and Audrey’s inner turmoil, “it’s pie week.”
A moment’s pause for reaction shots, although honestly Audrey wasn’t sure how she was supposed to be reacting.
Partly because she was still adrift in nasty Wednesday feelings but mostly because she’d always found pie week blah in general.
Bread and patisserie had reputations for being tough and technical, cakes and biscuits for being relaxed and homey.
Pies she always felt, as a fan with a media background, were sort of a filler week.
Something you put in to space the more iconic episodes out a bit.
“And we’re starting you off with something warm, wholesome, and sumptuous—Colin, Jennifer cannot possibly object to my saying wholesome and sumptuous.”
“She says it’s the way you say it.”
“Tell her she’s projecting. Now where was I?
” Grace Forsythe found her spot, cast a wicked glimpse at the camera—one that Audrey felt pretty sure was meant to signal that wholesome and sumptuous was absolutely intended to be read as suggestive even if it wasn’t entirely clear what it was meant to be suggestive of.
“Ah yes, the perfect dish for a balmy evening in whatever month this winds up going out in. Wilfred has obligingly provided you with his finest recipe for a summer vegetable pie, and all you need to do is follow it.”
There was something ominous about the way Grace Forsythe had said follow it. Like the instructions were going to be in code or mirror writing or something.
“You have five hours, starting on three. Three, darlings.”
Five hours wasn’t a good sign either. Both in terms of what that implied about the bake and in terms of how long it meant Audrey would have to keep her game face on for the cameras.
She turned over the recipe and began reading through it.
For the blind bake, the instructions were surprisingly detailed.
Halve the tomatoes, normal, preheat the oven, normal and they’d even specified temperature and timing. Lay out the filo.
Ah.
Audrey checked the recipe again, then checked the ingredients arrayed in front of her on the bench. So that was the trick. They’d been given a recipe that assumed premade or store-bought filo pastry but hadn’t actually been given any.
What they had been given was a carefully measured allotment of plain flour, salt, warm water, and olive oil.
Well this was going to be fun.
And since making unnecessary fuckups on national television would be a particularly shitty ending to a particularly shitty week, Audrey made a concerted effort to focus on baking and only baking.
Having double-checked in case the production team had somehow tucked the “this is how you make filo pastry if you’ve forgotten” instructions into the fine print somewhere and concluded that no, they definitely hadn’t, Audrey bit the bullet and started trying to make a famously fiddly pastry from memory.
The first part was easy enough, mixing flour, salt, and water—the show had even provided a dough hook and mixer as a little extra clue in case anybody hadn’t realised what the game was here. The second bit, though, that was going to be trickier.
“I never buy filo pastry,” Meera was saying to camera from two benches over. “I always make it from scratch. I just hope the recipe I’m used to is the one the judges expect.”
“And how about you?” an anonymously black-shirted producer was asking Audrey all of a sudden. “Normally buy in or make your own?”
In her mind’s eye and ear, Audrey could already see how the two bits would go together on television.
And out of a kind of semi-professional semi-solidarity that she still felt for the crew, if not for the producer, she decided to go with it.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said as if the thought had just occurred to her.
“I’ve got to be honest, if a recipe calls for filo, I usually just grab some from Sainsbury’s. ”
As if conjured by some primordial incantation, Grace Forsythe appeared at Audrey’s shoulder to say, “Other supermarket pastry brands are available,” before vanishing into the ether.
“Got everything you need?” Audrey asked the producer, hoping the answer would be yes because she actually had quite a lot to be getting on with.
The producer nodded. “Yeah. Just wanted to get a bit of contrast, y’know?”
“You mean between me and the one who actually knows what she’s doing?
” replied Audrey with what she hoped was an in-on-the-joke smile.
And when the producer, without replying, followed Grace etherwards, Audrey shrugged and turned her attention back to baking.
Once her dough was prepared, she separated it into nice round balls on a baking tray and covered them with a damp tea towel.
And then froze. Because she knew it had to stand, but had no idea how long it had to stand for.
Fortunately, from a brief glance around the ballroom, it seemed like nobody else did either.
Well, almost nobody else. Meera seemed pretty confident, and so did Reggie, but the rest of them were just giving each other mutually supportive I’m-as-in-the-dark-as-you-are looks.
They were in a pastry standoff, sizing each other up like filo-based gunslingers.
Eventually somebody would crack and start rolling out, and then everybody would be racing to be as neither first nor last as they possibly could.
As the minutes ticked by, it became clearer and clearer to Audrey that, much as she’d been dreading the idea of having to bake for five hours, having to bake for maybe two hours and sit in silence staring at a mixing bowl for the other three was way worse.
Nothing quite encouraged you to stew in your own thoughts like staring at a mixing bowl.
Was Jennifer right? Had Audrey become the kind of person who assumed her way was the only way? Of course, part of her job was guiding people to the conclusions she wanted them guided to, but there were some places you didn’t go and some lines you didn’t cross.
Sometimes, said Natalie, you’re right and other people are wrong, and they just have to live with that.
The problem was—and this was also something Natalie had frequently reminded her—Audrey didn’t have that confidence. At least, as one of the people just living with being wrong, she’d always thought it was confidence. From the other side, she wasn’t so sure.
In the end it was Linda who broke the filo stalemate, only managing to wait an hour and a half before the mounting pressure to do something, anything, other than sitting down waiting for the seconds to drain away overwhelmed her and she started frantically rolling her pastry into sheets.
Most of the rest of them went at around the two-hour mark, which seemed comfortable, leaving them enough time to finish up their pastry without cutting too much into the pie-making window.
For a while, at least, assembling her pie gave Audrey something to do other than dwelling.
But once it was in the oven, her choices were another round of unwelcome introspection or intrusively spying on the other contestants.
She chose spying. But, unfortunately, there was very little to spy on.
Alanis and Joshua were still giving each other looks that Audrey really hoped didn’t qualify as flirty, Doris was stacking all her things up neatly to make life easier for the techs who came and did the washing up, and Reggie was doodling something with that pencil he always carried.
Despite what Natalie had said about her reality-TV-viewing habits, Audrey had always been deeply aware of the artificiality of the medium.
And one thing that had struck her as particularly artificial was the sense of companionship you typically saw contestants displaying.
The way people would be declaring that they’d made friends for life after one or two weekends making cakes in vague proximity and breaking down in tears at being parted from somebody that Audrey, watching from home, barely remembered was on the show.
Except now she was here, she was realising that it was way less fake than she’d thought.
She was…invested in these people, and not how you were when you watched from home.
They were part of her life. Well, part of part of her life.
And it really did feel that there was a bond between them, forged by the whiplash mix of tedium and intensity that you got with filming.
She was weirdly going to miss them: Reggie’s pencil and Meera’s quiet confidence and Linda’s nervous energy.
And, of course, Alanis and Doris whose lives, in their own way, had drawn her in.
After what seemed at once far more and far less than five hours, the bakes came out of the oven—some looking sorrier for themselves than others and Audrey’s, to her relief, not looking especially sorry at all—and were set down at the front of the ballroom.
And that was it. There was nothing to do now but wait for judging.
* * *
In the framing that Inveterate Productions had apparently chosen for the series, “a summer vegetable pie” was meant to be another simple task that the contestants were required to execute well.
In reality it had involved making filo pastry from both scratch and memory, making it quite technically complex, and not especially about nailing the basics.
This, Audrey suspected, would be quietly elided in editing. But it didn’t change the reality that it had been a tough challenge, and that performances had been decidedly mixed.