Sunday
“Welcome,” Grace Forsythe was saying over the live feed, “to the last challenge before the semifinal of this the eighth season of Bake—”
“Colin, ask Grace what the fuck she thinks she’s doing with her stress patterns.”
In the ballroom, Colin Thrimp relayed the question and Grace Forsythe, speaking into open air, explained that if Jennifer had to ask, she’d never know.
“The eighth season,” Grace Forsythe repeated, “of Bake Expectations. And because this is chocolate week, you are to be set a challenge worthy of Willy Wonka himself—before you say anything, Colin, that is not advertising; it is a literary reference. You are to craft the most spectacular, most elaborate, freestanding chocolate centrepiece you can possibly imagine. The judges have asked me to remind you that this is a baking show and so it should have a baked element, but that otherwise not even the sky is the limit. We expect to see chocolate work, we expect to see spun sugar, we expect to see something that the Daily Mail can say was ‘extremely graphic’ even though it really didn’t look very phallic at all.
You have four hours starting on three”—she paused, as always, for effect. “Three, darlings.”
Monitoring by video, Audrey was glad that she was already out of the running.
Chocolate work had never been her strong suit, and as she watched the other contestants bring their remarkable constructions together, she felt very, very sure that she’d have just embarrassed herself.
The other thing she was glad about was that Alanis appeared to be continuing in her earlier fine-ness.
Grace Forsythe was with her now, as she happily whipped up a cake base while chatting to the camera.
“So since I did chilli chocolate in the first week and it didn’t work,” she was explaining, “I thought I’d do it again. Which will either be my shot at redemption or”—she made a kind of exaggerated wince that would play great on TV—“a really bad idea.”
“All the best ideas are,” replied Grace Forsythe with a smile. “But tell me, do you think a week one bake will be enough for the semi-demi-final?”
To Audrey’s relief, Alanis was back to her trademark confidence. “I’m doing a mirror glaze, and I’ll be putting tempered chocolate decorations on the top in a sort of forest scene.”
“Wonderf—” the sound cut off as Jennifer switched feeds.
“Colin,” she was saying, “nudge Marianne and Wilfred over to the granny and make sure they push the execution angle because it’s looking like she’s gone underambitious this week, and I don’t want to lose her.”
Her eyes flicking from monitor to monitor, Audrey followed the darting figure of Colin Thrimp as he crossed the ballroom to find the judges and convey Jennifer’s instructions. And then the sound cut back in as they appeared, seemingly spontaneously, at the end of Doris’s workbench.
“Cherries,” Marianne Wolvercote said, inspecting the arrayed ingredients, “and kirsch—I have a feeling I know where you’re going here and, well, there are very much two ways it could end.”
“Nowt wrong with a black forest gateau, Marianne,” insisted Wilfred. “Just because they were big in the seventies don’t mean we’re never allowed to eat them again.”
Doris nodded. “And you said centrepiece, and when we used to have family dinners, our centrepiece was always a black forest gateau.”
Jennifer slid her headset down for a moment. “Lane, if the old lady fucks this because she doesn’t know what the word centrepiece means to a TV audience, I’ll be very mildly peeved.”
“She’ll be okay,” Audrey reassured her, not actually especially certain. “She knows what she’s doing.”
On screen, Marianne was peering inquisitorially at Doris’s bench. “These aren’t all black forest ingredients, are they?”
“Got to have some decorations. I’m not just serving up a cake and nothing else.”
Wilfred Honey looked sage. “So what’s the story?”
“When I was young,” Doris explained, “and not so young, come to think of it, there was this bomb site near where I lived—it’s a city farm now, which I reckon is good—and what with it being just waste ground and all, we used to use it for fetes and things.
And that felt—I don’t know—that felt nice to me.
Because me and my Bobby and the kids, we could get together and we could go and be happy somewhere what was all ruins.
” She stopped and looked down, almost wistfully. “Felt like hope.”
With palpable relief, Jennifer turned to Audrey. “Okay, you’re right. She fucking nailed it.”
Filming proceeded well after that, and Audrey’s increasingly producer’s eye view allowed her to better appreciate the artistry with which the whole thing was assembled.
The way Grace and the judges teased camera-ready segments from everybody they spoke to.
The way the crew flickered invisible behind everything that happened.
The sheer volume of footage that was being generated and processed and would eventually make its way onto television screens as a little capsule of magic.
All the mirrors and wires carefully hidden away.
Once the contestants had finished their bakes, they were ushered outside for interviews while the camera crew swarmed around their various offerings to film them from televisually appropriate angles. When they were brought back in again, Doris was the first up.
Her finished bake was, by the standards of the show, highly unusual.
She had started out by making a perfectly ordinary if well-executed black forest gateau, with a series of ominous rectangular blocks of chocolate shortbread and chocolate brownie that she’d arranged around the outside like ruins.
Then, in a fit of something Audrey felt could have been either boldness or pure whimsy, she’d smashed half the gateau to pieces.
Or rather not smashed. It looked smashed, but she’d actually deconstructed it very carefully.
“Well,” Marianne Wolvercote observed as it was laid in front of her. “It’s definitely not just a black forest gateau.”
“Although,” added Wilfred Honey, “I do think smashing it up might have been taking things a touch too far.”
Doris smiled. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Marianne Wolvercote had started tasting. “It’s baked exceptionally well. It has all the flavours you’d expect, and while I know Wilfred has his misgivings, I think the presentation is completely on point.”
While Marianne had been sampling the gateau itself, Wilfred had been trying the brownies and biscuits, and was now expressing his approval. “It’d have been very easy to cut corners here,” he explained, “but you’ve done a good job on each of them. I think we can safely say we’re impressed.”
They were slightly less impressed with Meera’s and Joshua’s offerings.
Meera had made a chocolate Eiffel Tower in memory of a family holiday to Paris, but the judges felt it included too few elements, while Joshua had presented a pretty straightforward chocolate cake decorated with chocolate work that was clearly intended to be intricate but that in practice had come out just looking a bit messy.
That left Reggie and Alanis, with Reggie up first. As the engineer of the season, he’d taken the large, freestanding structure mandate to heart, creating a three-tiered cake with each tier held above the last by a latticework of pure chocolate.
As the camera zoomed in on the towering edifice, Audrey’s general respect for Reggie’s engineering knowhow found itself in a low-key argument with her finely honed sense of dramatic necessity and inevitable doom.
It was a very impressive piece of baking. But what made it impressive was that when you looked at it, your first thought was, I can’t believe that actually stays up.
So Audrey wasn’t entirely surprised when it didn’t.
The moment it started to topple, Jennifer was barking instructions into her headset faster than Audrey could keep up, directing every camera and every member of the crew to make sure the event was chronicled as completely and as cinematically as possible.
“Fantastic,” she was saying, “two and three, keep on the cake; five and nine, I want reaction shots. Faces, people, show me faces.”
And faces she got. Expressions of shock and empathy from other contestants and pure mortification from Reggie. And somewhere off-camera, Grace Forsythe was coming forward and making yes-isn’t-this-exciting-but-we-have-a-show-to-shoot noises.
Once the footage was collected and the floors were cleaned, Reggie—encouraged by Grace—made his way up to the front of the ballroom.
The judges were very nice about it, explaining that they’d only be able to judge based on what they’d been served, but that his ambition had been commendable.
“What remains,” said Marianne Wolvercote as gently as she could manage without harming her brand, “is nicely baked. And if the structural integrity of the piece had held, you might have had something first-rate.”
Wilfred Honey gave one of his trademark grandfatherly nods. “You’ve had a bad week, lad. And that can happen to anyone.”
That left Alanis, who approached the judges with the perfect mix of confidence and humility, laying down her chilli-chocolate-mirror-glaze-cake-with-forest-scene with just that little bit of extra care in the wake of the great entoppling.
“Now, this looks beautiful,” Marianne Wolvercote began.
And it did. It was recognisably the same cake as week one, but elevated as only two months of intense competitive training could elevate.
The glaze was bright and reflective, and it was decorated on top with a dense, three-dimensional forest rendered in tempered chocolate.
As the cameras panned around, Audrey could see that amongst the trees walked a girl—or the silhouette of a girl—in a flowing dress, the path beneath her feet picked out with a dusting of chilli flakes. It looked like an edible fairy tale, or perhaps an edible self-portrait.
“The presentation is just lovely,” Wilfred Honey agreed. “It’s so good it almost feels bad to cut it.”
Marianne cut it. She levered out a slice and subjected it to the autopsy-level scrutiny she applied to every bake that wasn’t an obvious dud. “Good texture,” she said. “Even layers.”
While Marianne was analysing, Wilfred Honey took a forkful. “Aye,” he said, “you’ve done well there. No complaints.”
“Is the chilli coming through?” asked Alanis, almost shyly.
“It is,” confirmed Wilfred Honey.
Marianne Wolvercote had just finished her own sample and was looking a little more reserved.
“Ordinarily, I’d suggest that Bake Expectations isn’t a show that allows do-overs, but I think you’ve been clever here.
It’s definitely more of a reimagining than a simple repetition, and on this occasion it was a good opportunity to show us what you’re capable of.
” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself. “Well timed.”
With that the judges retired, and Audrey followed Jennifer out to the gazebo where both the actual decision and the for-the-cameras fake decision would be made.
Having seen this side of the curtain, it was beginning to feel a little anticlimactic.
While the tension of Grace Forsythe needlessly stretching out the reveal of that week’s winner and loser was clearly artificial, artificial things did tend to work a lot of the time.
Being in the room with everybody else, each of you wondering, Will it be me?
in one direction or the other created something real from something that wasn’t.
By contrast the flat, matter-of-fact discussion in which Grace, Wilfred, Marianne, and Jennifer decided in less than seventy seconds that clearly Reggie was out and that on balance Alanis looked better for the win was almost the opposite.
It took something real—the final decision over who would be going forward in the series—and made it feel like nothing at all.