caitmcg
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Posts posted by caitmcg
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1 hour ago, iMonrey said:
There are so many terms and flavors mentioned on this show I have to look up. I don't know that I've ever tasted anything with cardamom in it before
If you've ever had Indian or other South Asian food, you've had cardamom.
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2 hours ago, Rinaldo said:2 hours ago, meep.meep said:
Interesting how Paul's attitude towards fruit pies has changed. In a long ago season, he declared them disgusting.
I remember him saying that about American pies in general.
I don't recall the negative remark about fruit pies overall, but in Series 3 (i.e. the first season shown in the US) they had "American pies" as one of the challenges, and Paul characterized American pies as disgustingly sweet. (That was an odd challenge, in that it stipulated a single-crust pie no matter the filling, which is, of course, not an American thing.)
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10 hours ago, Straycat80 said:
Do they not have blueberries in England? This, I think, is the second time someone (this week, Paul) referred to blueberries as very American.
I understood Paul's comment to mean that the style of the blueberry pie filling seemed to be very American (Prue referred to it as intense), and it certainly looked like a typical blueberry pie here. So I take it that a filling that's made just from blueberries, sugar and thickener to fill a whole pie is not common in British pies. Certainly, the comment came about as they tasted the pie, not as they discussed ingredients beforehand.
4 hours ago, Rickster said:I’ve seen lots of recipes for pecan pie with some bourbon in it, but not whisky. Might have even made one or two…
Of course, bourbon is a type of whiskey (generic spelling rather than whisky as in Scotch), as is rye. I've always assumed the reason it's bourbon in particular called for in American recipes that add it is bourbon is produced, and pecans are grown, in close proximity in the American south.
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54 minutes ago, meep.meep said:
Was there any cheese in the cheesecakes? Looked like oat-butter base, caramelized white chocolate, black current jam, and something plopped on top. I like cheese in my cheesecake.
We weren't shown every step; we saw them working on the base, the blackcurrant jelly, the caramelized white chocolate, and then put the cheesecake batter in, so we didn't see them mixing up the batter, which I'm sure had eggs and cheeae.
54 minutes ago, meep.meep said:Since there seemed to be such wide variance in the types of "cake" presented in the show stopper (Nicky did mousse!)
Nicky also had a chocolate cake of some kind that was sitting on top of her mousse.
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4 hours ago, blueray said:
Okay, I know that there is a difference in the UK. But when Paul said "it looks more like a dessert than cake". My American ears went "what?" lol as they are the same thing here, but then I remembered that in the UK Dessert is pudding...
I think his point was that there wasn't much cake involved. Those comments have been made when there's a challenge that's meant to be cake-centric but there ends up being more mousse, whipped cream, filling, etc. than cake. So it's less like biting into cake and more like eating a non-cake dessert.
2 hours ago, iMonrey said:I didn't quite understand what it meant to "caramelize" the chocolate.
Since white chocolate is basically cocoa butter, sugar, and milk solids, you can cook it so that the sugar and milk solids caramelize. It transforms the flavor and makes it more butterscotch-y and complex. I don't care for plain white chocolate, which is too sweet and bland to me, but I do like caramelized white chocolate.
1 hour ago, SnapHappy said:And is anybody else kind of amazed somebody there had never made a cheesecake before? I think it was one of the boys. I was actually Gobsmacked. In that kind of competition, that would be so elementary & basic to me.
Seems as if there's someone every season who announces that they've never made something basic before, more basic than cheesecake, even, like meringue, when it shows up in the technical, and I always wonder how they've never tried it when they're all conversant in Swiss meringue buttercream, pastry cream, etc.
Anyone else watch this episode and flash back to Cake Week, when Prue said it would be challenging to taste twelve chocolate cakes in a row during the technical?
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22 minutes ago, DoctorAtomic said:
Shouldn't Hanna Gadsby be directing Jean better though? Or have a beta test program?
It was very convenient to the plot that the station seemingly hired her without an audition or prior discussion about the structure of the show. Then again, across all seasons, Jean has been portrayed as a competent therapist who's pretty incompetent at everything else.
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23 minutes ago, TomGirl said:
I can’t find this episode on Netflix. There’s a GBBO bread week episode but it’s from an older season (with Noel and Sandi). Any suggestions?
Look for Collection 11, Episode 3 under the GBBS listing.
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1 hour ago, iMonrey said:
Rowan, Dan and Abbi were all trying to overcompensate for the previous two rounds I thought. Less is more.
None of them were making changes on the fly, though (the exception being Dan after he screwed up by using all his bread dough before making all his shapes), they were executing the plans and recipes they had developed before entering the tent. So their overambition may have been part of what doomed them, but it was hardly spontaneous. If anything, Dan was probably thrown off his game by how badly the technical went (he was apparently saved by having done pretty well with his signature).
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Dan got lucky, that's for sure. I guess one good bake and two really bad ones trumped three mediocre-to-bad ones, in the case of Abbi and Rowan. I certainly thought Dan was going, but if it came down to the other two, I might've thought Rowan over Abbi – at least they really liked all her flavors.
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15 minutes ago, Ancaster said:
Oh, and only one each, for elevenses. (Another Britishism for @iMonrey to look up!)
For a North American, it might depend on one's consumption of childhood literature; Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington, and the Hobbit all partake of elevenses.
15 minutes ago, Ancaster said:I remember being surprised when they had the Jaffa cake challenge, since I can't imagine anyone ever actually makes them from scratch.
Then again, how many actually make custard creams from scratch?
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16 hours ago, Bastet said:19 hours ago, SuprSuprElevated said:
I totally get that for the work big done, I would expect to pay those prices. But it's also not chump change, not for nuthin'.
That was my point in looking up the location after checking myself on my reaction to the price; that's far below what someone would pay here, in a large city, and it's less than someone should be paid anywhere for that type of work, but for where she is, that's probably the most she can charge to maintain business given the local economy.
Yeah, I live somewhere very much the opposite of where she is (an urban area on the west coast with a high cost of living) and unadorned whole pies at my neighborhood bakery cafe start at around $30 these days. I can't imagine what such an ornate, labor-intensive pie made with good ingredients would command around here.
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53 minutes ago, dleighg said:
yeah, I'd never heard of custard powder. What are its ingredients? What does "custard" taste like actually? cream and egg and sugar as far as I can tell.
It's basically cornstarch with added colorant and flavoring, to which you add sugar and milk and cook it to make a custard sauce, like a mock crème anglaise. Similar to old-fashioned cooked (vs. instant) pudding mix.
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2 hours ago, Rickster said:
I found it a bit funny that making a custard filling in a baking competition required using custard powder (probably something like Birds) instead of making it from scratch, but I guess it was the way to get the right consistency and texture.
The filling was a French buttercream (hence pouring the hot sugar syrup into the egg yolks), so the texture was probably fine on its own. I assume the addition of custard powder was to impart that classic flavor, akin to the filling in Nanaimo bars, which is American buttercream flavored with custard powder.
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17 hours ago, SuprSuprElevated said:
That almost looks like it’s embroidered.
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5 minutes ago, sugarbaker design said:
Abbi won the technical challenge.
You're right, I reversed her and Dan's places.
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1 hour ago, iMonrey said:
I want to say an hour and a half was too short for the technical, since most of the entries were judged as underbaked or underchilled. But Dan and Tasha managed to pull it off.
Tasha was eighth in the technical. I think you meab Abbi, who was second after Dan.
1 hour ago, iMonrey said:Josh's showstopper was a work of art. So glad he got the handshake after all, I was kind of pissed when he walked away without one.
Handshakes are pretty unusual in the showstopper, haven't there only been a couple? I know when he gave one to Rahul, that was the first.
Overall, I thought the showstopper was a good challenge. The illusion seems like it requires a bit more than, say, making a biscuit board game, but it's far less ridiculous than having them make self-supporting biscuit mobiles, where there's as much concern on the contestants' part for engineering as for baking. This was all about the bakes and the looks.
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A good article about Kwame Onwuachi in the New Yorker, that goes deep into his background, career (I had no idea he'd briefly abandoned cooking for a try at acting after his well-known setbacks), and current very successful endeavors.
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7 minutes ago, theatremouse said:On 9/30/2023 at 3:30 PM, dleighg said:
I'm too lazy to go back and check, but did the baker of one of the signature bakes (the vertical spiral) say that it was inspired by a Cosmopolitan cocktail-- but it he didn't mention cranberries???? It *was* pink as I recall.
He said cherries, which I found puzzling.
I also could've sworn broken-buttercream-guy literally said outloud the butter was too cold, so it's not that he didn't know what went wrong...
The cosmo-inspired cake was the lobster showstopper, per wikipedia, and yes, he said cherries. Cranberries would've worked just as well paired with orange and lime, though.
I think you're right about the cold butter comment, so I assumme it was a case of rushing to try and get things done (and probably nerves) on the first challenge.
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2 hours ago, Rinaldo said:
Wasn't she saying that it's tricky to cook them in a way that allows them to retain their flavor?
For those who agree with the quoted sentence above, I commend the blueberry pie recipe in Virginia Rich's The Baked Bean Supper Murders (part of a mystery series that includes recipes for everything mentioned), designed to deal with the problem: it combines a cooked berry filling with raw berries in a prebaked pie shell, topped with whipped cream.
That's the ticket. For a similar recipe online, this is the one from Rose Levy Beranbaum's classic Pie and Pastry Bible. Or for a tart, Alice Medrich's recipe (I love the her tart crust, so easy and with a wonderful texture).
38 minutes ago, dgpolo said:The early ones are on the Roku channel, even the first two, which I had never seen before Roku started to carry it.
Those first two were never broadcast in the US. You can watch the Roku channel free online, as well as via a Roku device.
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15 minutes ago, peeayebee said:
hadn't heard of a vertical cake before. Is that an English thing? Or did they make that up for this episode.
They've been a bit of a thing for several years. If you search for vertical roll cake online, you will see many recipes, including on a lot of American sites.
I forgot to mention in my earlier post that, as an Oaklander, I was amused by Amos's green-and-yellow 'A' sweater, as it's an A's sweater, down to the font, just minus the 's.
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The signature was a little more difficult than most cake week signatures have been, when they're the very first challenge of the competition. Often they've been standard things like drizzle cakes, fruit cakes, and regular Swiss rolls, and the vertical swirl cake is definitely a bit more technically challenging. I did like that while the technical was a cake that has the iconic look for the show, it's also a very common layer cake where they were being judged on their mastery of the components and there were no big losers.
1 hour ago, dleighg said:Didn't Amos do very well in the technical? Second perhaps? Guess that proves that the technical doesn't count for much.
I've always assumed it's something like 25% each for the signature and technical, 50% for the showstopper, more or less. Doing great in one of the first two can help you, but there's no coming back from really tanking the showstopper. He did great in the technical, was sort of middling in the signature (he had issues with his chocolate drizzle and the whole thing was a kind of messy), and his showstopper was a disaster. You could really see how very dense and heavy his cake layers were.
1 hour ago, Quilt Fairy said:Also that Noel said the interpreter would be signing "BSL", which took me a second to realize must be British Sign Language. I've only ever seen sign language referred to as ASL.
Sign languages have their own grammar and vocabularies, and there is a huge number used worldwide, even at the local dialect level.
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2 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:
I was thinking there's got to be lawyers out there suing everybody over violations.
Unfortunately, with regard to the ADA, the way it's structured means the only real mechanism for enforcing compliance is bringing suit. (This is also true regarding other kinds of discrimination in many instances in the US.)
I guess I should have guessed they'd do an abuse/control storyline before the show ended, since they haven't made a point of addressing it in their teen relationships before. (It didn't seem the show regarded Adam and Eric's relationship as having that dynamic, even if many of the viewers did.) I do really love Jackson and Viv's friendship, though.
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21 hours ago, mrsbagnet said:
That fight between Eric and Otis needed to happen. So much between them is left unsaid.
17 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:They didn't have a problem talking.
They've always been accepting and supportive of each other and of one another's interests, but Otis looked very uncomfortable when Eric brought up that they never discuss his Christianity or talk about race, and quickly changed the subject. It's entirely realistic that he would be uncomfortable given that he's young, white, and probably a nonbeliever (or at least someone non-religious) given his upbringing. But these are issues that have become more front-burner for Eric lately. and that he's able to address with his new friends, so it is understandable that he would want to be able to speak openly about them with his best friend, too.
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1 hour ago, DoctorAtomic said:
Oh, so these 'mock exams' are some kind of SATs that we'd take?
No, A-levels, which are subject exams based on courses of study. I think the closest US approximation might be AP exams, but these are required for university admission and it will be based on them, rather than on the whole body of secondary school grades. That’s my understanding, anyway (I’m American.)
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S14.E06: Botanical Week
in The Great British Bake Off
My understanding from people I've known who've made TV appearances is that the most basic requirement is not wearing solid white or cream or black. Obviously, loud prints are A-OK in the tent. And whatever they choose, has to be comfortable enough to wear for two long shooting days.