GBBO - Week 7

Week 7 already and it was Victorian week. More importantly Paul Hollywood gave out a handshake. A rare sign of approval from our male judge.

First up in Victorian week was a game pie. It really wouldn't be Bake Off without pies. No soggy bottoms though this week although poor Flora struggled to get the filling cooked. I can't say I was excited by this bake. Making pies is too much like cooking and as we all know I find cooking extremely boring. If you are not like me though the Bake Off team have kindly published a recipe.

 For the technical we had a tennis cake. I had never heard of it before but it sounds a lot like Christmas cake but with different decorations. The difficulty for the bakers hear was the decoration. They had to make different types of icing and create a tennis net that would stand up. Oh, and the cake had to be cool enough to support it. I would have failed at this. I don't have the steadiest hand in the world at the best of times. No way would I have managed to sit the net up without destroying it. I wouldn't have baked it the icing though. If you fancy this or are taking part in the Bake Off challenge then you can find the recipe on the Bake Off webiste.

 The show stopper is one of the more boring of this season. It involved lady fingers and jelly. The good part was that they had to make it all themselves and they had to pick out the flavours. Anyone else ever heard of a Good Charlotte? Having said that some of them looked impressive. Including Tamal's which was topped with macarons. As a result Tamal was our winner. He got a Paul Hollywood handshake and produced the bets show stopper. It was kind of inevitable. I quite like Tamal though. He's not afraid to make fun of himself and I did think he deserved star baker this week.

It did mean we said goodbye to last weeks star baker, Mat. As I said last week I always felt like Mat struggled a little. Somehow he always managed to pull through. He was also the creator of one of my favourite bakes, the biscuit fire engine. This week though nothing seemed to go right for him at all. Including baking his icing much to the surprise of Nadiya. Mat will be missed as he is the only one who doesn't seem to get too stressed about the bakes.

I thought I would highlight one of my favourite bakers from last year. Chetna. Now, she wasn't the winner but she was one of the most adventurous when it came to flavours. She was also one of the nicest and part of a group that helped each other all the time. You can follow her on twitter and she has her own blog where she often posts yummy recipes.

http://chetnamakan.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/chetnamakan