When I competed on "The Great British Bake Off" in 2018, my second week in the tent was a sweaty, melty mess.
Trying to make tray bakes and celebration cakes with tempered-chocolate collars on the hottest day of the year was a recipe for disaster.
Read on for my full experience competing on week two: Cake Week.
Blame it on the weather — or just call it a well-curated production trap — but the drama is real
Remember when Noel Fielding wore that massive Victorian dress and paraded around the tent on season nine?
That was for our benefit, not yours. He was merely trying to cheer up our angry faces.
For some reason, the weather gods are never on our side — or the production company has good connections at the national forecast department. It always seems to be that when it's hot, you play with chocolate collars, and when it's cold, you're asked to bake bread.
Week two had one of the longest days of filming for the showstopper. We were struggling in the tent because the challenge was to make a three-tiered celebration cake covered in tempered-chocolate collars in about four hours.
If you've ever made cakes before, you'll know this sounds close to impossible. But somehow, we did it.
I still remember struggling with the chocolate not setting in time and running out of freezer space.
All the drama you see on screen really did happen — poor Luke Thompson, who left that weekend, nailed his recipe in practice but just couldn't get his white-chocolate cream filling together on the day. His cake came sliding down right in front of our eyes. I was truly heartbroken.
The production team could always provide chillers, coolers, or fans to help alleviate some of the horrific melting that occurs inside the hot tent. But really, where's the fun in that?
The technical challenge stunk up the entire tent
The technical challenge of "Bake Off" is always the fun bit.
Viewers hear that the recipe was chosen by one of the judges, but it really comes from some very detailed research by the Food Ex team at Love Productions. They literally go through thousands of recipes from around the world (hopefully that doesn't spoil the magic for you).
When the team tests out these often little-known recipes, they somehow decide they're doable. But add in the cameras and time constraints, and it's a recipe for failure — unless you're Rahul Mandal, my season's eventual winner.
The technical challenge for week two was supposedly Prue Leith's choice, gâteau vert, Monet's favorite cake. None of us had ever heard of or tasted it before.
It's a pistachio genoise sponge with pistachio marzipan and green fondant icing made with the juice of boiled spinach. I love spinach, but I promise you the tent stunk.
Nevertheless, that cake was just scrumptious, and I highly recommend trying out the recipe.
With 11 contestants baking through 3 different challenges, you might be wondering where all that food goes
Food never gets wasted in that tent.
The bakers get to try a selection of their competitors' creations, and we critique them during our breaks.
The rest usually gets absolutely hoovered into the bellies of the production company in seconds — even faster if the bake got a coveted Paul Hollywood handshake as a seal of approval.
Unfortunately for me, I never got a handshake, but there were a ton on my season. Someone even made a bar chart to display how many each baker had.
It's evidently a life-changing experience — Hollywood's sausage fingers are supposedly magic.
That's all for week two. Follow along as I fill you in on more details and recap my goodbye from the tent.
But until then ...
Here are 3 behind-the-scenes secrets fans don't see on screen:
1. We have to share everything about our bakes with the Food Ex team.
Us bakers get really fancy and innovative in the tent with techniques, ingredients, and recipes — or sometimes we just find some random story from our villages back home to connect with. But you can't get any secrets past the Food Ex team.
They have to know everything about everyone's bakes before the cameras start rolling.
2. Someone is always in your face with a camera asking you questions while you're trying to finish in time.
At any given moment in the challenge, the bakers will have a story producer in their face asking questions, getting them to read out their recipe, and recording all their disasters.
Yet we still manage to finish within that stipulated time you hear the hosts screaming on the series. Magic, isn't it?
3. We had to loudly announce every time we opened our ovens so they could get the golden shot.
To get the famous "going in" shot — opening the oven to place or remove your bake — we always had to announce, loudly, when we were going to the oven.
This spectacle catches all of the steamy glasses, dropped bakes on the floor, and in-oven disasters you get to see on screen.
