S03.E07: The Merge

[chitowngirl]

A challenging safety bake has the teams wondering just how many items they need to make; the teams split for the Elimination Bake with $100,000 on the line.

[CrazyInAlabama]

I have zero idea of the safety bake. Becky and Daniel's idea of cherry turnovers, and beef hand pies sounds good.  Lenore & Jessica cherry hand pies, and pork hand pies.    Kai and Starlet idea of pork / beef / chicken  is interesting each separate and no sweet ones, but doesn't match the jelly on the spoon, they say it's beef and wine on the spoon. Kieran & Janusz (?) cherry only hand pies, they think it's a red herring with the meats, then change to ground pork meat pies too.  Jesse & Justin are thinking cookies with jam (from the parchment paper with the greasy outline) and beef empanadas.  Ronan & Kaitlin mixed berry empanada, and chicken empanada, both look raw, and are. 

Safety bake dish: 6 Cherry Handpies, 6 Spicy Beef Handpies  winner: Becky and Daniel. 

Elimination Bake:

Ronan & Kaitlin Three Queens Cake (Yolanda said she never heard of a Three Queens Cake) Curtis says it looks like a domed princess torte cake. 

Starlett & Kai almond sponge cake dome cake with fondant but they're doing the fondant application wrong. The fondant is tearing. Ganache infused with popcorn, and with a St Patrick's Day theme. 

Lenore & Jessica Battenburg Cake raspberry with marzipan

Jesse & Justin American butter cream Joconde cake

Keiron & Janusz Battenberg cake, raspberry jam rolled in marzipan.   Too much buttercream.

Elimination bake dish:   Battenberg Cake (so Lenore & Jessica, and Keiron & Janusz were right)    Eliminated team: Starlett & Kai

[mlp]

I was worried about Ronan & Kaitlin because I like them.  Remember overly perky and annoying Erin from the first season of the holiday baking show?  Kaitlin seems like an authentic and nice version of that personality.  I'm glad they weren't eliminated.

Keiron & Janusz make me laugh.  They act frivolous but really know what they're doing.  I was impressed that Keiron was on the team that made the cake for the late queen's jubilee.  He must have credentials.

[mertensia]

Dammit. Now I want a Battenberg cake. It sounds so delicious.

I'm not surprised Kai and Starlette left; they had some huge misses. 

I was thinking Princesstorte myself.

Team Tall Alice in Wonderland can go next.

[Ms Lark]

I also thought Princesstorte due to green food coloring (gotcha!). But I really hoped it was Battenberg because I love Keiron and Janusz. Phew!

I was surprised they didn't ditch team "too much buttercream", but I guess they got a lot more of the ingredients right.

Still love the show and hope it gets renewed for next season. BTW Joel was on Seth Meyers Wed night. He did mention CSK at around 4:07:

 

[CrazyInAlabama]

13 hours ago, mlp said:

I was worried about Ronan & Kaitlin because I like them.  Remember overly perky and annoying Erin from the first season of the holiday baking show?  Kaitlin seems like an authentic and nice version of that personality.  I'm glad they weren't eliminated.

Keiron & Janusz make me laugh.  They act frivolous but really know what they're doing.  I was impressed that Keiron was on the team that made the cake for the late queen's jubilee.  He must have credentials.

So, that's who Kaitlin reminds me of!   I couldn't exactly figure it out.  Thanks.  

[blackwing]

I feel like this show seems so arbitrary.  Even just this season, Yolie was admonishing a team that they can't just hedge their bets by making two different things.  And yet, the safety bake consisted of two completely unrelated items, a cherry turnover and a beef empanada.  I guess the only thing they have in common is that it's the same dough for both?

I guess I'm tired of the red herring clues.  In the safety bake, the vegetable peelings in the trash indicated that the vegetables were used in the soup in the fridge.  But how did they explain away the different levels of the ground meats?  Ronan and Katelyn said it was chicken since they thought the chicken had the least amount.  Lenore and Jessica thought it was pork.  Kieron and Janusz copied them because of the smell (and then in the elimination round made sure to mention that Lenore and Jessica thought exactly the same as them for both bakes hahah).

The red herrings in the elimination bake were open to interpretation.  If the green food coloring was used in the beer, why was the calendar showing March 18?  So we are expected to believe that the mystery baker put food coloring in the beer on March 17, then just left it open like that?  Why the 18th and not the 17th?  If the date was the 17th then I would have automatically said it was used with beer on the 17th.  But I would have said, it's the 18th, they wouldn't dye the beer on the 18th, so the fact that it was open means it must still have been used today on the 18th.

The chocolate remnants in the popcorn, ok.  But there was a whole bowl of popcorn there.  Why couldn't it just as easily be said that they melted chocolate to go with popcorn and then used the popcorn in the bake?

I get why Kai and Starlett were eliminated, but it's too bad, I liked them, especially since as a mother/daughter team it was an interesting dynamic.  

I also think that of the three teams that were wrong, they got the flavor profile wrong, but theirs seemed to be the best baked.  Justin and Jesse's cake was all buttercream, and Ronan and Katelyn's cake was gummy and the jam was bad.

13 hours ago, mlp said:

I was worried about Ronan & Kaitlin because I like them.  Remember overly perky and annoying Erin from the first season of the holiday baking show?  Kaitlin seems like an authentic and nice version of that personality.  I'm glad they weren't eliminated.

Keiron & Janusz make me laugh.  They act frivolous but really know what they're doing.  I was impressed that Keiron was on the team that made the cake for the late queen's jubilee.  He must have credentials.

I can't stand Katelyn, she is my least favourite contestant.  She is sunny and perky when they are doing well but the minute anything goes wrong she instantly cries.  She cried when their chicken empanadas were raw.  She cried when the confectionator showed a Battenberg and not their "so obscure that Yolie hasn't even heard of it" gummy cake.  She has an ugly cry face and I can't stand her "oh look at me I'm so tweeee Minnie Mouse hair buns".

I like Keiron, he seems like a cool dude, but I can't stand Janusz.  I disliked him on The Great British Baking Show.  Here he seems even worse, he seems to play up the camera lot more here than he did on TBBS, it's little things like the one single dangling rubber duck earring or whatever it was that seemed to violently shake every time he moved his head.

[borealis]

Looks like Katelyn conflated (the name) Three Kings Cake and (the actual cake) Princess Torte to come up with "Three Queens Cake".

[pezgirl7]

On 11/8/2024 at 11:27 AM, blackwing said:

And yet, the safety bake consisted of two completely unrelated items, a cherry turnover and a beef empanada.  I guess the only thing they have in common is that it's the same dough for both?

…………..

But how did they explain away the different levels of the ground meats? 

For the safety bake, Curtis called them both hand pies, and they used the same dough. So I guess that’s all they had in common. 

For the meat, there was ground beef in the trash, and the cutting board had a cow on it. There were no other clues that showed the two other types of meat were used. 

The green food coloring was a bit confusing, but it seems that most of the teams were able to rule it out. 

I’m really surprised the husband and wife and still around, but I guess you don’t have to be the best to advance, you just can’t be the worst.

I’ve never heard of a Battenberg cake, but it looks like something from Alice in Wonderland and now I want to try it! 

[Quilt Fairy]

On 11/9/2024 at 8:57 PM, pezgirl7 said:

I’ve never heard of a Battenberg cake, but it looks like something from Alice in Wonderland and now I want to try it! 

Sounds like you've never watched The Great British Bake-Off.  It's well-known on that side of the pond.  I've never had it, but it looks rather insipid and overly fiddly to me.

[pezgirl7]

1 hour ago, Quilt Fairy said:

Sounds like you've never watched The Great British Bake-Off.  It's well-known on that side of the pond.  I've never had it, but it looks rather insipid and overly fiddly to me.

This is the only baking show I watch. I don’t bake, but I like the detective aspect of the show, and Joel makes it fun!

[proserpina65]

On 11/9/2024 at 9:57 PM, pezgirl7 said:

For the meat, there was ground beef in the trash, and the cutting board had a cow on it. There were no other clues that showed the two other types of meat were used. 

Apparently the fact that cumin was used was also supposed to guide them to beef, although it wouldn't for me since I've had pork dishes with cumin in them.

On 11/13/2024 at 7:48 PM, Quilt Fairy said:

Sounds like you've never watched The Great British Bake-Off.  It's well-known on that side of the pond.  I've never had it, but it looks rather insipid and overly fiddly to me.

It's not something I'd ever want to make since it does appear overly fiddly, but I wouldn't mind trying it sometime.  I've thought that when they did it on GBBO, too.

I'm glad they had to do a savory dish in this episode.  Far too often on all these baking competition shows they only end up doing sweet stuff.

 

[Dirge]

On 11/7/2024 at 9:48 PM, mertensia said:

I'm not surprised Kai and Starlette left; they had some huge misses. 

Including Joel's name -- it sounded like they were calling him "Joe" the whole time. 

On 11/8/2024 at 9:27 AM, blackwing said:

I also think that of the three teams that were wrong, they got the flavor profile wrong, but theirs seemed to be the best baked.

I get your point about wanting to reward good baking, but for this show I'm afraid that teams would end up just baking something they're good at if they can't decipher the clues. So for this show only, if I were judging, I'd have to go with clues over bake. 

Edited November 17 by Dirge