Great British Bake Off 2018 [** Spoilers **]

RhubarbCrumble

I'm sure Kim Joy is a shoe in for star baker tonight as I suspect she's the vegan of the group herself.

I suspect either Manon or Jon might go. I'd love to see Jon get to the final, but I don't think he's strong enough.

HeidiHeidi

So KimJoy isn't a vegan - well she certainly does a good impression of one

Some of those tarts look proper tasty.....

iamwhoiam

The cynic in me thinks Rahul is going to loose his anxiety and flourish in the next few weeks

HeidiHeidi

He certainly seems to be winning in the tart round. Surprise surprise!!

EPAndlee

That was hard to watch

ger vallely

Raul’s tarts seemed amazing. I hope the recipe will be available.

iamwhoiam

Poor Ruby , thats gutting to see your cake slide like that

HeidiHeidi

Jeepers, that was a bit of a car crash overall :eek:

RhubarbCrumble

Guttted about who went home, but I knew it would be though

Would have found it very hard to call star baker tonight if I had been Paul or Prue. I was saying Manon until the showstopper, but field was wide open then.

I want Rahul to win it now for sure.

ger vallely

I’ve followed this thread but never posted until tonight. I just love the vibe of Bake Off. The contestants just seem to genuinely like each other and the presenters seem invested in them. Fabulous. I felt honestly sad this evening knowing that one of the six would leave. I really like them all. Raul does appear to be in the strongest position right now.

razorblunt

Jeez Rahul is getting incredibly tiresome. “We’ll have to just see how it goes now” he says, resigned as always taking the pavlova out of the oven only for it to be amazing.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

Tried to watch with an open mind but... meh. I’m not keen on coconut and there was a lot of it. Paul seemed unenthused by it all. Seemed to want to get this week over and done with.

Zaph

That was all a bit of a let-down this week. You don't mind the occasional disaster like Ruby's cake collapsing to keep things entertaining. But it's not entertaining if everyone is struggling to the extent that they did. While the right person left (although I would have liked to see him in the final), picking a star baker when everyone has had issues must have been nearly impossible. No more vegan weeks in future please, let them have as much butter, eggs and cream as they need to do some proper baking.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

Vegans out in force on Twitter! Look, vegans, I totally respect your choice of diet but nobody is required to be enthused by vegan week.

I liked Jon but it was his time to go.

Why on Earth did Ruby put the bigger, heavier cake on top?? Glad she stayed though. (Side note: I loved her lipstick).

I didn't like Kim Joy too much at the start but shes grown on me more and more each week and I actually like her now. Her fox cake was gorgeous!

Unfortunately, I still can't warm to Rahul. He's incredibly consistent in his abilities though.

Tar.Aldarion

Could tell with the cakes structure that they lacked experience with how to use the ingredients which was to be expected, loved kim joys amd brionys sounded delicious. Although Rahuls would have been fine if he didn't mess up.

Ruby wtf are you doing putting the heavier cake on top.

Only fools eat horses was an amazing name. Jon didn't seem to try for his own fish, a falafel tart lol. Pity to see him go and also sad that his cake collapsed, it looked a lot better before that.


Rahul so worried as usual and then having the perfect Pavlova is classic him. He had some very funny looks this week like when he was shocked to find some fruit under a towel or when some stuff splashed on him.

https://twitter.com/scottygb/status/1049744143084335104?s=20

https://twitter.com/BritishBakeOff/status/1049748861307228163?s=20

Some of the tastes sounded amazing, would have loved Rahuls indian and manons mushroom one.

Behind the scenes footage of the non animal friendly kimjoy baking

https://twitter.com/AbelandCole/status/1049752305439006721?s=20

.red.

I enjoyed that episode, good to see them out of their comfort zones.
Gutted for Jon but it was probably the right decision.
At the start Manon and Kim-joy annoyed me. Both have quickly grown into my favourites. Kim-joy has a bit of everything, her show stoppers are usually just that.
Manon, well I'd happily have that smile baking cakes for me at home. I also admire the way they like to zoom in on her arse every time she uses the fridge lol.

RhubarbCrumble

.red. wrote: »

I also admire the way they like to zoom in on her arse every time she uses the fridge lol.

Mr Crumble also admired said arse last night

razorblunt

I think I'd be quite annoyed if I were Jon getting booted during Vegan week, on a show noted for "generic" baking it's a bit much. Having one challenge following a Vegan recipe may have been enough, at least then they can balance it out with other challenges.

zenbuffy

I really enjoyed last night's episode. I actually said to my family at the start "are they not allowed to use internal structure in their cakes" because we had seen Ruby's cake fall during the preview so, of course, knew it was going to happen. I thought it happened because there was no dowelling, but obviously not.
I don't know why she didn't just show two unstacked cakes instead of trying to stack them when it patently wasn't going to work. A moment of madness, perhaps! The bottom tier was so badly skewed that there was no way the top tier (which bizarrely looked a little bigger?) was going to sit on it, it was doomed from the moment we saw that side angle of a completely sloped cake. I also think it looked, from some angles, like she didn't quite trim the dome off the top layer of her cake, which meant the top wasn't flat. Again, disaster waiting to happen if you're going to put something on top of it.
I'm sorry to see Jon go, I imagine his cake would have sunk even lower and perhaps fallen also were it not for the fondant holding it together on the bottom layer. Before the judging, even when we were just getting finished glimpses of the cakes, I had pointed out the bulging icing to my family and said that I thought that was going to collapse. 
I don't know that a lot of home bakers have a great deal of experience with dowelling and tiering cakes, most people probably just bake one tier for most things. It's absolutely necessary for a cake that's going to sit for any amount of time though, or is in any way large, because the tiers will just smush each other and the cake will collapse without it. 
I saw a lot of drama online about it being vegan week, but I don't understand it tbh. I thought it was interesting to see the bakers pushed out of their comfort zones, and that's a thing that happens every week with the obscure technical challenges, etc. Plus every baker has something they are always great at and, imo, something they are terrible at (for example, bread week would be my undoing, even though I think I am good at cake), so they are rarely just sitting on their laurels, brilliant at everything every week. I thought it was interesting to see the different takes on alternatives to egg, and a good opportunity for people to learn about some different ingredients that you could use to get familiar flavours. They did a free-from week before, where they had to do dairy-free and gluten-free and whatnot, and people didn't seem quite as annoyed by it. Each to their own, I guess!
For my part, I've done a fair bit of dairy-free baking already, and some vegan baking too. I made a mistake in attempting to use a different vegan butter than I usually use, and found that it made awful buttercream. Tasted lovely, but was so loose and sloppy. It was a nightmare to work with and never firmed up as much as my usual buttercream (dairy-free or otherwise) would. In future, I might use it for baking the cakes, but not for buttercream, or at least not on its own for buttercream. Because of the consistency of the buttercream I had to change my decoration plans at the last minute, so this is not how I originally intended this cake to look at all. Nevertheless, the end result is still pretty. My family were impressed, and though they were a bit skeptical when I promised last week that I'd make them a vegan cake they wouldn't know was vegan, they were totally sold after a bite, and everyone had seconds

This is my chocolate raspberry vegan cake, with hurriedly improvised ombre icing :silly:

Now, Danish week. WTF am I going to make for that???

EPAndlee

RhubarbCrumble wrote: »

Mr Crumble also admired said arse last night

I applaud that camera man every week

Tar.Aldarion

Your cake looks amazing zenbuffy! Which vegan butter was the one that is better for your buttercream?

HeidiHeidi

Pardon my ignorance, but what is vegan butter ("butter"?) made of

tea and coffee

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

Pardon my ignorance, but what is vegan butter ("butter"?) made of

Stork in the gold foil is actually vegan!!
Any veg based spread or margarine is. I was surprised none of them used egg replacer

zenbuffy

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

Your cake looks amazing zenbuffy! Which vegan butter was the one that is better for your buttercream?

Thank you :happy: I have used stork (the block on, in the gold foil, as tea and coffee said above) with great success in the past. It firms up beautifully as buttercream. The new stuff I tried was the Flora vegan spread, which I think probably contributed to a beautifully moist and crumbly cake, but which was a disaster for the buttercream. If I make this again, I'll do Flora for the cake, and stork for the buttercream. 
I've done some dairy-free baking for friends with allergies before and stork is pretty great for it. It's literally just a simple substitution and you're good to go!

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

Pardon my ignorance, but what is vegan butter ("butter"?)  made of

There's a ton of options. In the shops now, you'll see soya and avocado based spreads too, as well as vegetable oil based spreads. Having played around with them (as above), I think that some are better for certain applications than others!

tea and coffee wrote: »

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

Pardon my ignorance, but what is vegan butter ("butter"?)  made of

Stork in the gold foil is actually vegan!!
Any veg based spread or margarine is. I was surprised none of them used egg replacer

I'm also surprised none used egg replacer, though I have to say that I've had very mixed results with egg replacer in the past, so I'm not the biggest fan myself! I've been meaning to revisit my good old reliable cupcake recipe with egg replacer again and see if I can prevent it sinking in the middle as it did when I used the egg replacer!

Tar.Aldarion

A lot of the butter "spreads" are essentially vegan, vegetable oil, avocado oil, soya, sunflower etc. here is a sample recipe for something a little nicer too: https://nutritionrefined.com/vegan-butter/
Then you have fancier stuff like this that uses cultures and cashews:




Prue's pavloca, Rahul's coriander pesto and roast veg tart and Manon's mushroom tart recipes are up online now with the other recipes http://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/news-and-recipes/recipes/


It was weird for me to see them treat nutritional yeast as some exotic thing when I've used it for so many years. You get it at first and you think, oh that's all right, kinda nutty kinda cheesy. Two months later it's like crack and you just need another hit of the stuff. You can tell the judges don't go outside their comfort zone too much.

zenbuffy

I've been interested in trying to find some different butters, or maybe a cultured butter. I've been making some butter at home recently (dairy butter, I mean) and also some cultured butter, which tastes really great. I'm curious to taste vegan cultured butter!
I was actually quite pleased to find that I recognised all the substitutes they were talking about, the nooch, the black salt, etc.  I'm not vegan, but I do like to try and work outside my comfort zone a little, and be inclusive when baking for friends, which has meant exploring many of these alternatives to make a treat that everyone can enjoy

Tar.Aldarion

I love people like you, it means I can eat too and I'm always so grateful. I was over at a friends birthday recently and his wife had made the cupcakes vegan, chocolate and red velvet ones. He didn't care if they were vegan or not so I got about 30 to bring home and was scoffing them for days with my housemate. She is on the must be rewarded list.

I use black salt a lot, I love that stuff so much. Was a bit confused buying it at first when it was pink. Very strong so have to be careful using it or you may ruin the dish but used right that sulphuric taste similar to eggs is so good. I haven't seen any cultured butter here yet but cultures in vegan cheese is becoming a lot more popular which is pretty cool, a lot of the flavour of certain cheeses, like blue, comes from the cultures and they can be used in the vegan process too. Some of my friends have their "cheeses" being tended in their fridges for weeks as they age. Was at a cheese and wine night recently in Dublin and it was cool to try the attempts.


I have a bake off coming up amongst friends, must think of what I can make. I've not used aquafaba before apart from making mayonnaise so might try some meringue/pavlova soon in honour of the show. Am also doing a vegan Afternoon Tea in the Shelbourne soon so be good to see what they have come up with at a professional level.

Aisling(",)

Oh vegan week was a bit of a disaster! I loved Kim-Joys showstopper she was a deserved Star Baker. I look the style and flair she puts to every task.I am partial to an animal motif on food.

Jon was my favourite so now I'm hoping for Briony or Kim-Joy to win.
Rahul was very unintentionally funny this week.He just kept pulling very droll faces everytime something went tits up.

Obvious Desperate Breakfasts

RhubarbCrumble wrote: »

Mr Crumble also admired said arse last night

I actually noticed Manon’s peachy arse during the final group hug the other night and I’m a heterosexual woman!