Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off continued this week, with the contestants taking on Dessert Week for the Bake Off theme.
For the Signature, they were tasked with making steam puddings, while this week’s Technical was a lemon meringue pie. Finally, for the Showstopper, the contestants had to put multiple skills to the test to make a sponge cake with a surprise element inside.
And while it was a piece of cake for Sandro, who won his first Star Baker accolade, Carole‘s Bake Off journey came to an end after she failed to impress with all three bakes.
Here, reigning Bake Off champ Giuseppe Dell’Anno talks Dessert Week, as he warns the Great British Bake Off 2022 line-up of the “risks” ahead, and why Carole will “always” be his favourite contestant.
Watch Giuseppe share his verdict on Bake Off’s latest episode below – and keep watching at the end of each video for more from Giuseppe!
Giuseppe on Dessert Week
With Dessert Week, I felt like we were getting back in the Bake Off tent that we all know and love. After the debates that tacos sparked with Mexican Week, we had some very traditional bakes. We went with a lemon meringue pie, steamed puddings, and a Showstopper that offered a good balance of challenge and opportunity for being inventive and impressive with the design. So all in all, I think that it was a good balance, and we also saw some very remarkable bakes – certainly worthy of the best traditional Bake Off.
Favourite bake
I have a couple of favourite bakes for Dessert Week. One is undoubtedly Janusz’s Showstopper. For me, his mousse cake ticked all the quintessentially critical boxes of a Bake Off showstopper. It was very inventive, very original, very ambitious. It was very well designed, and it was perfectly executed. It was very colourful. It would have been sitting proud on a very elegant dinner table. And when Paul cut through it, it revealed a flawless design. The rainbow cupcake that was hidden within the mousse cake was immaculate. Perfect! I think that Janusz himself was quite surprised to see it coming out as beautiful as it did.
The other bake that made me me gasp last night was Syabira‘s watermelon steamed pudding. They were extremely well conceived, very quirky, and you could see that the sponge also was perfectly moist and fluffy as a steamed pudding should be. But what literally blew me away was the fact that she went and managed to include watermelon seeds in her steam pudding. I mean, if that doesn’t deserve an applause I don’t know what does!
The proof of the hidden pudding is in the cutting. What a colourful reveal! #GBBO pic.twitter.com/YGnCKWuMLH
— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) October 11, 2022
Least favourite bake
In terms of my least favourite bake, well the whole technical was a big disappointment! I mean it was a lemon meringue pie and the bakers were going on about not having much instructions on how to make lemon meringue pie, but at the end of the day, I mean if you’re on Bake Off, lemon meringue pie is very basic cake that everybody should really be able to do blindfolded. Even those that are not very familiar with the specific bake, because after all it’s made out of meringue, a curd, and a short crust pastry, that regardless of your heritage, any baker should be familiar with. So the the overall outcome was pretty disappointing because there weren’t any that were particularly well executed, and most of them were cracked or leaking. It didn’t feel like the right Bake Off standard if you like.
“Carole is still my favourite”
Carole is still my favourite this season and she will be my favourite this season even if she’s no longer on the show. She will remain an iconic figure in Bake Off, with her pink hair, being genuine and wearing her heart on her sleeve. She’s given us another pearl this week, which was the Chantilly Cream being renamed. So, she’s given us a lot of quintessentially, quirky Bake Off moments and I will be forever grateful. I don’t think she will be forgotten easily and she should just be proud to have reached through. In itself, that is a massive achievement. Sadly, this week, pretty much every single bake she made had huge issues and the judges didn’t have a choice.
Life. #GBBO pic.twitter.com/NqxH5uSOUn
— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) October 11, 2022
Tip of the week
Gelatine is a very difficult beast to tackle. If you don’t use enough, your mousse or your gelatin will not hold its shape. If you use too much it will end up very rubbery, chewy and unpleasant to the palate. Unfortunately, the difficulty is in the fact that you cannot tell a priori how much gelatine is the right amount, because it depends on how much alcohol you’re putting in the mixture, how much flavouring you’re adding and also what sort of texture you want to achieve eventually. So I would say that, sadly, the only way to get it right is to test the recipe until you fine tune the amount of gelatine.
As a rule of thumb, typically four leaves of platinum grade gelatine sets about half a litre of liquid to a very stiff jelly. According to my own taste, that’d probably be too stiff, so I hardly ever use three leaves, but that’s just the starting point because as I said, you need to fine tune the content until you reach the perfect consistency – and that is coming from somebody who actually bombed it last year!
Giuseppe answers…
Were you surprised to see Sandro win Star Baker, after Maxy and Janusz’s recent streak?
Well, Janusz did extremely well and I was expecting him to get the accolade this week. He was first in technical, but then again Sandro did very, very good with his steamed pudding. His apple and cherry crumble steam pudding was very dainty, very nicely and simply decorated. It was certainly one of those things that if I saw it in window in a bakery shop, I would be very happy to buy, but I think what clinched it for Sandro was his Showstopper mousse cake. I mean, whoever attempts to shape a mousse cake as a sphere that holds itself up deserves a round of applause at the very least. He did it and he did it successfully. And you can tell that the judges really liked not only the technical achievements of his cake, but also the taste and the texture – they were clearly swept away by it. I’m sure that’s what secured Sandro Star Baker this week.
Sandro’s ‘It’s a Mousse World’ Dessert Week Showstopper. #GBBO pic.twitter.com/0oEQCYsu3E
— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) October 11, 2022
Who is at risk going forward?
It’s very difficult to pick someone who is at risk, because we are now in a situation where there are only seven bakers left and they are starting to be pretty much at the same level. We’ve got the usual suspects that are performing very well, but surprises can always happen. Like this week, one of my favourites [Syabira] didn’t perform right up there at her usual standard. So, I think that we’re reaching that stage in the competition now where it’s not really who’s in danger of going because of what they do wrong, but who’s in danger of going because they have a trip on the path or because they stumbled upon some silly mistake. I just hope that nothing particularly unfortunate will happen to any of them and will make them stumble.
Is Syabira being too overly ambitious?
Syabira is being ambitious and that’s what she needs to keep doing, because that’s her trademark in a way – unusual flavour combinations and unusual ingredients is what makes her so likeable from a baker’s perspective. I think that she should just keep going and keep doing what she’s been doing so far. Wobbles at this stage happen to everybody, and it is not by playing it safe that you win Bake Off. If she’s in this for the win, she needs to keep being ambitious and even more than she has been so far.
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A Week in the life of Giuseppe
This week has been very interesting for me! Yesterday I was on Steph’s Packed Lunch on Channel 4, preparing a nice batch of biscuits and having good fun on live TV. And this week, finally my book is going to be out, so on Monday I was at Waterstones, Piccadilly for the official launch event and finally meeting a lot of my supporters and the people that get in touch on social media – and what a pleasure it was.
I’m glad that I’ve got a few more of those events lined up in the next few weeks, because I want to shake hands with everybody and I want to see these people live. For me, this week is going to be particularly exciting and I can tell you everything about it next week, because I will be taking part in the National Television Awards. The Great British Bake Off has been nominated again this year, so fingers crossed, we might be in for another prize!
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To make your own show-stopping bakes at home, Giuseppe’s debut cookbook, Giuseppe’s Italian Bakes (Quadrille, £20) is available to pre-order, out 13th October.
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