Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
How much is there to learn in the field of baking? A lot. When we started this project, way back in 2022, we knew very little. If you had asked either of us to go into a grocery store and return with the ingredients necessary for making a cake—say, a Black Forest cake—we would’ve found the eggs, the flour, the sugar, and the butter. Possibly one or the other of us would’ve picked out a raising agent, without any real sense of why. As for the “Black Forest” part, maybe one of us would’ve grabbed some cherries or some chocolate, but there’s also a good chance one of us (ahem) would’ve grabbed a bottle of Campari.
We would’ve known a custard when we tasted one. But crème anglaise was just goop; crème patisserie was simply another goop. All cake was cake; a jaconde sponge could just as easily have been something you use in the shower. Victoria sponge, for all we knew, might’ve been a Dickens character. Madeleine was a little French girl with appendicitis.
Three years and 29 bakes later, we are still largely having our asses kicked. But we have also come a long way! We’ve got moves, now. For the most part we cannot be outfoxed by weird ingredients, as we have now developed a decent enough intuition about what a given substance is meant to accomplish within a recipe. We have experience, and sense memory, and so we now have pretty good ideas, for example, about what a custard should feel like not just when it is entering your mouth, but when it is thickening in a saucepan. We might not always feel totally confident in the texture of, say, a cake batter, but we know enough to make a decent guess whether the failure ahead of us is likely to be acceptable or catastrophic. We have candied sugar, we have jellied fruit, we have double-boiled, ice-bathed, and flambéed, and we have tempered chocolates both brown and white. We have braided loaves without even once accidentally strangling ourselves. We survived, however narrowly, The Caterpillar Incident.
Now we are back for more. Why? The answer is not entirely clear. The weather starts to turn, from summer to autumn, and we each start wondering, in a quiet, desperate way, whether this will be the year that the other one abandons the tent. Am I the only one who wants to do this? Will it be “peer pressure” if I state, truthfully, that I am excited to get back to baking? What if I just innocently put a photo of a cake into Slack—is that doing an Inception? And if so, is it a strong enough Inception to produce my desired outcome?
As is tradition, the first week of the 16th season of The Great British Bake Off is Cake Week. For those unfamiliar with the show, each week the contestants are asked to complete three challenges, oriented around a theme. The first challenge is called a Signature Bake, and each contestant is asked to produce their signature version of a common baked good. The third challenge is called the Showstopper Bake, and each contestant is asked to produce a totally original and aesthetically spectacular centerpiece bake. The middle challenge is called the Technical Bake, and each contestant is given the ingredients and instructions for making a baked good, but without any opportunity to see or taste or otherwise inspect a finished example, and working within a strict and often severe time limit.
The morons of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off compete alongside these professional-grade bakers for the Technical Bake. We morons do our best to limit ourselves to the same paucity of information, so that we are faithfully testing ourselves against the show’s standards. For this Cake Week, judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood threw in a wrinkle, inverting the format somewhat, and in a way that made it more complicated for us to play by the same rules. We persevered, which is to say that we did the bake, making it as challenging for ourselves as we could manage. It was hard, but neither of us died.
The challenge this week was to make nine of Paul Hollywood’s Fondant Fancies. These are small sponge cakes, filled with fruit jam, topped with a blob of buttercream, and then coated in a poured sugar icing, which congeals into a uniform layer. These are not things that either of us would choose to make, or even to eat, but that’s not the point of the challenge. Fondant Fancies are a good baking challenge, because they require the making of several components, and the deployment of a variety of techniques, and good timing (or luck) in the management of flour and fat and sugar. And isn’t that what baking is all about, plus or minus the friends you make along the way?
Kelsey McKinney: Well well well! We find ourselves here, in the tent, by our own choosing, yet again. Hello Chris!
Chris Thompson: Kelsey! My fellow baking maniac! How thrilling to be here once again, ruing many of the choices I’ve made in my life but also weirdly delighted at the return of this bizarre form of self-torture.
KM: Can you believe that this is our fourth season competing in the Bake Off? For weeks, people have been saying to me, “I’m assuming you and Chris aren’t going back into the tent this year.” And I have been flabbergasted by this! What? They think that just because we say we want to be exploded into a million pieces every time means that we don’t want to do it again? Grow up!
CT: I don’t know why we are this way, but this is now an important part of my whole autumn deal. The weather starts to change, and suddenly I start thinking about destroying my kitchen, and giggling.
KM: I told you this already, but a couple of weeks ago I felt an indescribable urge to wake up my sourdough starter from the fridge. I baked a loaf of bread that was maybe the best one I’ve ever baked, and was thinking about how I missed baking when you messaged me to say it was time to enter the tent again. I’ve been Pavloved into craving the tent the minute the air gets crisp!
CT: Kelsey, how would you say you are doing, as a baker? How do you feel your 2025 baking skills compare to your baking skills back in, God, 2022? 2021? When the hell did we start this?
KM: 2022! I would say I’ve progressed considerably in my understanding of baking at an unconscious level. I feel more confident (not always justifiably), but this is more frustrating in some ways because I feel like my understanding and taste and desires are just past my actual capabilities. Plus, I know all the different meringues now. How do you think your baking skills compare?
CT: I’d say I’ve experienced the same sort of progression. I somehow felt not at all daunted by this technical challenge, even though I knew it would not be possible for me to use the same ingredients used by the contestants. I think I have a good understanding now of what failure looks like, in baking, and of what causes failure. So, like, even if I do not know exactly how to make something, I think I can kind of intuit my way to, say, a 75th-percentile outcome. Or, anyway, I feel like I can reliably avoid a 15th-percentile outcome. That may not sound very impressive, but it feels great. I feel almost … powerful? Like I bring a certain level of competence to an activity that used to completely flummox me.
KM: Also, unlike our first bake where I was substituting ingredients like red food coloring with … uh … Campari, I feel when we deviate from the ingredients or method, we do so in a more reasonable way. That said, there is always one bake a season (looking at you, caterpillar) that will destroy us, and I find that dread and intrigue fun.
CT: Yes! That’s exactly it. If I see an ingredient that I know I cannot purchase, I have some general sense of what it is probably intended to do in a recipe, and some vague idea of what else might accomplish that end.
KM: All that said, I’m looking at our headline from last year “The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Almost Immediately Regrets Returning For Cake Week,” and thinking about how last night in my kitchen at like 11 p.m. I was frantically going “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” as I darted back and forth.
CT: Yes, well, somewhere in all this there is our usual mix of unfounded cockiness, and our almost magnetic tendency toward catastrophe. We ride the razor’s edge here at the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off. Chaos mode for life.
KM: Chaos mode forever!
CT: Kelsey, what do you make of this “Fondant Fancy” business? Do you consider yourself to be somewhat of a Fondant Fancy?
KM: If fondant has no haters I am dead in a ditch!!! I hate that shit!! Why would I want fondant when I could have delicious buttercream which never betrays me. As for fancy things, I do sometimes like those, so I was at an impasse for how to feel about the Fondant Fancy business. Especially because I had seen a headline about how fans were calling this technical “evil” and “the worst in history,” I was quite concerned about the Fondant Fancies and had to assume the fondant part had taken control. Can you, having seen the episode, explain what happened?
CT: So, in a Great British Bake Off first, the technical bake protocol was flipped. Instead of being provided with a list of ingredients and a stripped-down method, the contestants were given a chance to look at and to taste the completed bake, but were given no list of ingredients and no method whatsoever. Instead of guessing what the bake should look and taste like, they had to guess what the Fondant Fancies were made of, and how to make them.
Also, they were given decoy ingredients, I suppose as a way of testing the accuracy of their taste buds. This has not gone over great with fans of the show.
KM: This was a problem for us, as the readers can imagine, because we had no Fondant Fancy made by Paul Hollywood to taste and determine how to make! So we arrived at a compromise, which was that your lovely wife watched the episode as usual, took pictures of the fancies which we were shown (usually we do not see a picture! So this was kind of fun!) and she DID give us the ingredients because otherwise how would we have known what to buy/ substitute.
Ultimately, we always have decoy ingredients, because we never have the right ones! Boosh!
CT: Yeah, I felt like this was a fair compromise. We had no method, but we had the correct ingredients, because we had to go shopping for the bake. But we did not have all the correct ingredients, because increasingly the contestants on this show are given science-y things that are simply unavailable on short notice for normal people.
Also, in order to understand the approximate size of the Fondant Fancies, we had to go off of this:
KM: This is where I do think our growth showed, though. In 2021, I would have been lost without a method! Now I see ingredients for cake, and pretty much know what to do with them!
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: Scanning the list again, I see three ingredients that posed a shopping problem. Two of them are bullcrap science sugars that simply are not sold in grocery stores.
KM: I want to admit that I did not have six of the ingredients and also did not have two of the recommended pieces of equipment. 🙂
CT: Yikes! So which six ingredients were you missing? And how did you substitute for them?
KM: I did not have caster sugar, but I have learned that’s fine because I can just blitz granulated sugar in the spice grinder. I did not have self-raising flour, because I know that I can just make that by adding baking powder and salt, and refuse to buy it. I did not have raspberries, because I went to the grocery store and they were $10.99 a packet! So I just used frozen mixed berries that I already had in my freezer. I did not have jam sugar or fondant sugar, and don’t know what they are. And I did not buy “raspberry flavouring.”
CT: OK, I also did not have jam sugar or fondant sugar. I remember from past years that jam sugar is sugar with pectin, which is a gelling agent. I’ve never seen this anywhere, and also my local grocery store does not stock pectin. There is another specialty grocer around here that sometimes has pectin but they were out of stock. Fondant sugar is a mix of regular sugar and something called “inverted sugar,” which I gather is powdered from a liquid solution. It’s used to make pourable icing.
KM: I did have pectin in my pantry because the last time we needed it, I wasn’t sure how much we needed so I just bought three packets of it, which turned out to be way too much!
The fondant sugar presented me with a real conundrum, because I had two ideas: The first I got from you which was corn syrup, but the second was “marshmallows?” I really thought the marshmallows would work if I melted them down, but my microwave has been broken for approximately six months, so I decided to use the corn syrup.
CT: To me, the idea of melting marshmallows into a pourable substance is a nightmare. I basically dread everything about marshmallows other than ramming them onto a stick and roasting them over a fire.
I had a memory of us making pourable icing once before using corn syrup and confectioner’s sugar, which is just powdered sugar plus cornstarch. At any rate, I felt reasonably certain that no continental-grade disasters could come from mixing two forms of sugar, and at worst I would have something gloopy and unpleasant but certainly pourable, so that was my solution.
KM: We will get to this, but I think what I made was actually a mirror glaze somehow, which I have never once made correctly when we are supposed to do it.
CT: A funny thing about these substances—poured fondant, mirror glaze—is that they are much worse to eat than, you know, Duncan Hines frosting. There are actual tasty icings, even ones that can be purchased in little branded canisters, but there are motherfuckers out here making poured fondant, which is simply not as pleasant a thing to eat. Go off, British bakers, I guess, but also: Screw you!
KM: The other thing I did not have was the “5cm cake tin” or the “paper cupcake cases.” I have only silicon cupcake cases. I thought I had a big square cake tin, but in fact I only have round cake tins, so I decided after consulting you that I would just use a cupcake tin instead and my fondant fancies would just be round. This felt a little illegal, but whatever!
CT: I also do not have a square baking tin, but I did not consider this a significant issue, having successfully (and unsuccessfully) addressed this challenge in the past. I do have some paper cupcake doohickies, so that was cool.
KM: Something that makes me really crazy is when we have to chop off perfectly good sections of cake in order to make the bake look the way it’s supposed to look. I hate it! I don’t want to do it!
One thing I DID have is piping bags! People can change (a little bit).
CT: Oh wow, since when do you have piping bags? Who are you, and what have you done with the real Kelsey McKinney?
KM: I can be bullied, it just takes a really long time.
CT: I could not find raspberry flavoring, though I did try. I was able to find strawberry extract, so I used that instead. This inspired a subsequent, spontaneous pivot in my bake, but we will get to that.
One thing that this bake has is a really shocking volume of sugar. How did you feel about all this goddamn sugar?
KM: I felt nothing about it when looking at the ingredients, because I don’t really know how much grams are. I didn’t even buy more sugar, because I thought I had an infinite amount already. But after the bake, when I tried the fancy, you can certainly tell. They are so unbelievably sweet, and that’s because the amount of sugar is infinite.
CT: The ingredients list is written in such a way that I became the Vince McMahon meme as I considered the sugar amounts. 170 grams of caster sugar for the sponge, then 150 grams of jam sugar for the jam, then 200 grams of icing sugar for the buttercream, then a breathtaking 600 grams of sugar for the fondant coating. My god!
KM: What’s crazy is that all this sugar is only going into nine two-inch by two-inch fancies!
CT: A frightening confection to have in a home that contains a four-year-old. I’m pretty sure this formed the inspiration for the movie Gremlins.
KM: I think … she should get to eat two! That’s only what? 200g of sugar? HAHAHA.
CT: Calling the police to report that my child is levitating while shooting red lasers from her eyes, after eating three bites of home-baked dessert.
KM: Makes sense, the fondant fancies are supposed to be red!
Stage One: Mixing Sponge Batter
CT: Two hours and 15 minutes for this bake. I wasn’t sure what to make of this length of time. As I prepped my kitchen for the chaos to come, I shifted between feeling that it was such a generous allotment of time and worrying that I was about to die.
KM: I think it should be noted that we started this bake at like 7:45 p.m. This felt exciting because it is fun to bake at night, but also kind of silly. I felt all amped up, but unfortunately way too calm. When the timer began, I wasn’t even darting around! I was cocky!
CT: I assume you started immediately on the sponge batter. What was your method, there?
KM: Well, the first thing I did was—you guessed it—took the batteries out of my kitchen scale and put them back in so that it would turn on! People don’t change that much! But yes, then I made the sponge. I put the butter and sugar in the KitchenAid to cream, then once I felt ready, fed the eggs in there, and then the flour combined with baking powder (at first, I added baking soda by accident but I just scooped it out with a spoon, whatever) and salt. Is that what you did?
CT: Well, no. My first maneuver was a pointless misstep: I separated my eggs then put the whites into the stand mixer, and began beating the hell out of them. I had somehow failed to grasp the meaning of the words “self-raising,” and I thought I was being very smart and clever to put air into my egg whites, so that I would have a light sponge.
KM: OK, so your sponge was extra light! Airy, even!
CT: Ha, well, no. Not at all. So I whipped up my egg whites and then added caster sugar, in a meringue-making way, until I had a glossy and semi-stiff foam. It was here that it occurred to me that I was about to add more than a stick of softened butter, plus three egg yolks, plus a heap of flour. By the time the yolks and butter had been incorporated—I did switch to the paddle attachment for this, in a futile attempt to salvage the operation and redeem the egg white maneuver—all the air was gone from the meringue. The flour just finished the job.
KM: Noooo! You still got this done fast, though. I was dawdling so much that you messaged that your sponge was in, and I was like lazily buttering the cupcake tins.
CT: Oh yes. I was really flying. And I was so proud of myself for my efficiency of movement! It’s just that it was very confident-looking bullcrap. Like doing three cartwheels and a round-off to get from the living room to the bathroom.
KM: Wow! OK, Simone Biles. I was not doing any gymnastics. I did make one really good decision in here, though. I was looking at the cupcake tins, which I thought were pretty well-buttered, but was not certain. I did not have cupcake papers, so I decided to cut strips of butcher paper and put them into the tins, so that when the cupcakes were done and cooled, I could pull up on the paper and pop them out. This worked great! I felt like a genius!
CT: Yes! Wow, we really have learned some shit. I did a very similar thing: I buttered my cake tin and then decided to cut a rectangle of parchment to line the bottom. I was taking no chances. I’ve had bakes go entirely to hell at the moment where a sponge is meant to depart a baking tin.
KM: Whoa, really?! Wow. We were in sync! I also during this period of time did my now-customary move, which is putting a baking sheet into the freezer so that I can put other things on top of it and not worry that they will tip over. I did this kind of without thinking, which is again proof that we are learning.
CT: Oh wow, that was inspired.
How did you feel about your batter?
KM: It seemed very thick to me. Almost everything we made for this bake felt too thick for me. I genuinely wished that I had just gone based on vibes. It was a huge pain to scoop it into the cups because it was so thick. I ended up just using a palette knife.
CT: That’s how I felt as well. It seemed too thick, more like an icing than a batter. I expected to be able to pour it but I could not. Also, and maybe this is just me, but I don’t love the scent of almond extract. I’m not super into extracts, just as a thing. So I couldn’t get very excited about the batter, because of that extract smell.
KM: None of the extracts are really for me. I’m a purist, I think. Grind up the real thing and put it in your cake!!! Why couldn’t we have used almond flour to make it almondy?
CT: I think almond flour might even have been a decoy ingredient in the show? I’m not sure. Anyway, I just kind of wish I had left out the almond extract, even if it meant just having a one-note yellow-cake flavor.
KM: I would have used the almond flour, and it would have tasted better. I just want every yellow cake to be yellow cake only. That’s my preference as well. Alternatively, it could be lemon. I like lemon.
CT: Yeah, lemon would’ve been great.
Stage Two: Baking Sponges, Making Jam
KM: I put my cakes in the oven at 375 and set the timer for eight minutes. Then I turned them around, baked them for eight more minutes, and then they were done, according to the skewer, so I took them out.
CT: This is where I think doing the bake with cupcake tins was good. I put my tin into the oven at 350 degrees and set a timer for 15 minutes. But when I checked at about 12 minutes, it was still basically liquid through the middle, and I started to freak out a little bit. Here I was both helped and hurt by my decision to consume a THC gummy before the start of the bake.
KM: Wow, you left this out of your method.
CT: You see, because I was very gently high, I had a hard time remembering, for the briefest of moments, whether I’d turned on my oven. Fortunately, because I was gently high, it was also not possible for me to freak out very much about this. One can only get so riled up when one is in The Dude mode. Anyway, I was able to confirm that my oven—dialed to the convection bake setting—was indeed on and up to temperature.
KM: Wow. I was very riled up by this point, because I was lagging behind you. While my cakes were in the oven, I started both the jam and the buttercream. For the jam, I basically ignored the method entirely. I put a bunch of fruit in the pan, dumped sugar on top of it, added water and lemon juice and lemon zest and salt, sprinkled the weird pectin packet over it, and set it on the flame. Then I also began to beat the butter and icing sugar for the buttercream. By the time I put my cakes in the freezer, both of those things were done, but I also somehow only had like an hour left, which felt like too little and too much time.
CT: Oh wow, you were really zooming. I also began my jam during the bake, but I felt no urgency whatsoever about the buttercream. My sponge wound up staying in the oven for 30 minutes, which I think was a touch too long, but it gave me plenty of time to do the jam. Since I did not have jam sugar or pectin, I elected to use gelatin for the thickener.
Also, because I had been forced to pivot to strawberry flavoring for the fondant icing, at the last second I decided to switch from raspberry jam to strawberry jam. I considered this to be a beneficial choice, too, because in general I would prefer to have strawberry jam in my refrigerator, and these damn judges love for use to make nine times as much jam as we will eventually need.
KM: Yeah, one of the insane things about the ingredient lists on this series in general is that they will always give you just enough icing so that if you over-ice one thing, you crave death, but everything unimportant, you make a gallon of. I didn’t pay any attention to their measurements so I made the amount I felt true which was one Bonne Maman jar worth of jam. Honestly, the jam turned out really well. I ate some this morning.
CT: I also decided mid-bake that I would use the immersion blender to homogenize my jam. In retrospect this might’ve been a mistake, but only because it makes for a slightly less delicious thing to have around the house. Other than that, this process went smoothly (puns intended).
I bloomed the gelatin in a ramekin of cold water, then added it to the strawberries after they’d been mashed and brought to a simmer. Then I murdered it all with the immersion blender. Voilà.
KM: I did consider that Paul Hollywood would almost certainly want me to run the jam through a sieve to get out the little seeds and make it smooth, but he is my enemy, so I didn’t. I just mashed the previously frozen fruit with a potato masher while it was in the pot, and called it a day.
CT: How did you decide to cool your jam? I lined a small baking tin with plastic wrap and then poured the jam into a pool along the bottom, and then put the tin into the back of my fridge.
KM: Wow! This was innovative! I let my jam cool for five minutes on the counter so that I could move the glass jar without burning my hand even more than it has already been burned. Then I moved it to an ice bath and put that in the fridge. I don’t really know why I put the ice bath in the fridge other than that I needed counter space.
CT: I’m very impressed by your diversity of methods. This might’ve been the most vibes-based bake that I have ever done for this series. I was like Huh, yeah, there’s room in the fridge. It never even occurred to me to chill my sponge. I just turned it out onto a cooling grid and left it on the counter. Yeah, OK, there’s room for that there.
KM: I was genuinely … just doing shit. Not having a method made me feel free. It actually made me question whether I should trust the method in the future. I think not being in the actual tent, and having fridges full of food for us to eat, is a huge disadvantage that requires creativity.
CT: Yeah! I think I also felt free and relaxed because there was no method. I was not constantly dashing over to my laptop to read and re-read the same lines of instruction, hoping that they would orient into a deeper understanding, as if staring into one of those stereogram images. I just went with what felt right in the moment, my first guess.
KM: I also think seeing the photo of the bake really helped with this. Instead of trying to decipher information about how to put the jam inside the cake not knowing what it was supposed to look like, we just had a picture and tried to make the picture. That’s simpler in some ways.
Stage Three: Making Fondant Icing, Making Buttercream
CT: How did you feel about your little circle sponges when they came out of the oven? Did you feel like the bake was basically satisfactory?
KM: I felt they were very cute! Once they were basically frozen, they popped right out of the tins with my butcher paper method, and I felt very satisfied with them. They did however have a bit of a muffin top problem where they had expanded over the edges of the tins but not into a nice cupcake-y dome, so I cut those off and ate some of them as a snack before I realized I would probably need them.
How did you feel about your sponges?
CT: I just had the one big sponge, and I was aware that it was overbaked, but this was not a catastrophic overbake, where I am sawing away at the charred edges with a serrated bread knife. It was close enough that I knew it would be fine to eat, if not exactly wonderful. Like your little muffin guys, my sponge had taken on a rounded shape, so I knew that I would need to shave it, down the line. That was a problem for the future, at this stage.
Once my sponge was turned out onto the cooling grid, I decided it was time to make the fondant icing. This was the only part of the bake, other than assembly, that I was really worried about at all. I wanted to get straight to it, even though my kitchen was pretty chaotic at this point, because I was worried that I would need a couple of tries.
KM: Yeah, I genuinely had no idea what we were doing here. The fondant icing was mysterious to me, but the worst part to me was “600 grams of powdered sugar sifted.” This meant I had to use my stupid sieve and bang it back and forth to sift it. (I forgot that I did in fact acquire a sifter over the break, and I will not forget that again.) There was powdered sugar everywhere. My whole kitchen covered in sugar!!
CT: Truly, that is the worst part about this baking series, and indeed about baking as a hobby. Sugar and flour go everywhere, and it just sucks so bad. I have a sifter, and crucially I was able to remember that I have the sifter, and to use it, but this was still messy and unpleasant. Thankfully, because I was not following the recipe exactly—I could not, because it calls for fondant sugar—I decided to only use 300 grams of powdered sugar, and to make up the difference with Karo syrup.
KM: Interestingly I also did this, but later changed my mind, which I will explain later lol.
CT: Uh oh! That sounds ominous.
Here was my thinking: Essentially I would be adding confectioner’s sugar to a pourable sugar, and counting upon the thickener in the confectioner’s sugar to turn it into something icing-like. But I was worried that I would need some volume of non-sugar moisture in order to melt the sugar and, uhh, activate the cornstarch? And the list of ingredients calls for “5–6 tablespoons of water.” So I put six tablespoons of water into a saucepan, plus the Karo syrup, and put that over a low flame.
Once it was simmering, I started spooning in the sifted powdered sugar, and whisking like crazy. The eventual goop was way too loose, I thought, and so I wound up sifting in a bunch more confectioner’s sugar, but without measuring it, so I really can’t say how much in total wound up in the icing.
KM: Again, I ignored the ingredients. What I did was put all the clear corn syrup I had into the pot. This turned out to be about half a cup, even though it looked like more in the bottle! Then I put also half a cup of water in there, put it on high heat and brought it to a boil! Then I put that in a bowl and dumped all the powdered sugar in there at once and whisked it. So we did almost the same thing, with some small variants.
CT: I love it when we happen upon a similar solution, whether by rational decision-making or by shared lunacy.
Once I had a texture that I liked, I added what looked like five drops of the strawberry flavoring. Immediately I regretted this, because it now smelled like extract. I then spooned out and set aside maybe like a third of a cup of this goop, because the images we’d seen of the finished fancies showed decorative white stripes. Into the remainder of the goop I then added five drops of pink food coloring, and five drops of red food coloring. This made a very festive hue, but the Pepto Bismol–ish color with the glossy sheen and the scent of extract combined to create a substance that I instantly hated with every molecule of my being. It reminds me of the sort of vile semi-plastic crap that would turn up on the very most worrying piece of off-brand candy you’d pull from the bottom of a Halloween bag in 1992.
KM: This is an interesting departure we had, because I assumed the white decorations on top of the fancies was supposed to be done with buttercream so I dumped a shit ton of red food colouring into the “fondant.” This seemed thick enough to me at first and was the right color of red, so I left it on the counter, whisking it ever so often, while I moved on to assembling. I did taste the fondant and I hated it immediately. It was so sickly sweet and tasted like only sugar. I do not respect sugar as a flavor.
CT: Your buttercream was long finished by this time. I had not started mine, but I looked at the timer and saw what I considered to be an outrageous amount of time left in the bake. I decided here to clean up my kitchen, which was in terrible shape. But first I put cling wrap over the two vessels holding the fondant, because I’d noticed as I stirred in the coloring that they were developing a film, which I took to be an ominous sign. Cleaning my kitchen took a solid 15 minutes, but it was calming.
KM: I also cleaned my kitchen at this point not because I wanted to, but because it was covered in powdered sugar, which was getting everywhere! I was tracking it around on my shoes and everything I touched had powdered sugar on it! Awful! No thank you!
CT: I found the buttercream step to be very reassuring, because it was all so familiar, almost intuitive. Put some softened butter into the stand mixer, turn that sucker on, and then sift some confectioner’s sugar down in there. Yes, I released a huge spore-cloud of confectioner’s sugar and I’m sure I’ll have a sticky kitchen ceiling for the rest of my life, but this was otherwise very easy, and fine.
KM: Yeah, I don’t even really remember making the buttercream to be honest. I just did it and then it was done and I was kind of upset with it because it was very thick, but I just put it into the piping bag anyway.
CT: I also found it to be very thick, less fluffy than I remembered. I wonder if it’s always been this way, and it’s only in my mind that buttercream has a fluffy texture? Anyway I did not consider this to be a huge problem. I spooned the buttercream into a large freezer bag and plopped it onto the countertop, to wait.
KM: I made the same mistake I always make with buttercream and put it into the fridge. This of course made it too cold and too hard when it came time to assemble. We live, but we do not learn.
Stage Four: Assembly
CT: I’m looking at the Slack record, and it appears that I began assembly approximately 90 minutes into the bake, with a whopping 45 minutes left to go. The first step, for me, was to convert my mostly cool sponge into cubes. This is where I finally shaved off the rounded top, leaving behind a nice trim block of extract-scented yellow cake. I then sawed this slab into squares.
KM: According to the Slack transcript, I began assembly with almost an hour left, which is wild because I really thought that I was running out of time. That’s because I was pretty sure that the cakes needed to be cold between every single step. The first step of assembly that I did was to scoop out a circle of cake from the top of my cakes which was the bottom of the cupcake. I’d decided that the way to get the jam in the middle was by scooping out a section of the cake, putting the jam in there, and then cutting out a circle of the cake tops I had already trimmed, and shoving that on top of the jam. This worked much better than I had hoped, to be honest. I used the weird circle on the end of the church key beer opener to scoop out the center and a teaspoon to stamp out the circles. How did you get your jam in the middle?
CT: I had a hard time with this! Just coming up with a plan of action left me stumped for a few minutes. What I eventually did was use a paring knife to cut a deep square into the middle of each cube, then reach down toward the bottom with an offset spatula and kind of pry the core out of there.
I cut little squares of jam out of my congealed pool and used them to fill up the cavity. Some of the cubes wound up with three or four slices of jam in there, due to the pool of jam not being exactly even in depth. This mostly worked, though!
KM: I think having a circle theme really helped me here. It is much easier to cut out something that looks like a circle than to cut out a square!
CT: Yeah, and particularly when I had to kind of lever out the square-shaped cores with a spatula, I could never quite make myself forget that the bottoms would be really ragged and misshapen. But whatever, this is such a finicky and silly confection, at a certain point I guess it felt emotionally satisfying, and maybe even righteous, to take an action that amounted to telling the recipe’s creator to go screw.
I did not elect to put a sponge topper on the jam cubes. That felt like too much. I mean, for chrissakes, it’s all going to the same place.
KM: The reason I did this is because in the picture, it looked like there was sponge on top of the jam! I didn’t WANT to do this!
CT: Yeah, it’s in the picture. I cannot deny that this was a deviation, on my part. I just couldn’t bear it. Things looked sort of orderly and I just knew that I could not manage, practically or emotionally, the mess of trying to affix tiny sheets of sponge onto haphazard cubes of jam.
How did your buttercream work out, as far as piping it on there?
KM: It was too hard!!! I had to roll the piping bag between my hands to try and warm it up, but ultimately I blame the recipe for this. The buttercream was too thick. I did a kind of cheater’s crumb coat, then piled it up kind of ugly with the little offset spatula onto the tops and put the cakes back in the freezer.
After six minutes in there, I could use my finger to make them more dome-shaped, but they still looked kind of bad. What did you do here?
CT: I ran into trouble here, because I had failed to notice that my freezer bags have that stupid folded bottom? Where the corners do not terminate at a point, but instead at a kind of weird W-shaped thing?
KM: OK so you had a built-in tip! Exciting shapes!
CT: That’s certainly a glass-half-full take on things. When I snipped off the corner, instead of a single “nozzle,” I had a double, so that when I tried to squeeze out the buttercream, I got two entirely separate worms of buttercream racing each other to the surface of my fancies. This was terrible.
KM: LOL!!!
CT: So I had to do a gross and unhygienic thing, where, instead of squeezing the buttercream onto the sponges, I squeezed basically upward, and then used my finger to pinch off one of the worms, and then manually pressed the blob of buttercream onto the fancy. And then squeeze again, behead the other worm, and press that blob onto the next fancy. So that all of my blobs were all bruised with finger-shapes. Super extremely unpleasant, and demoralizing. Also, because the buttercream had more FUCKING extract in it, I didn’t even get to enjoy tasting the mess on my fingers.
KM: This was such a messy bake. The next part was even messier for me. I decided to suspend my fancies above the bowl of fondant and spoon it over.
This did not work instantly. My fondant was too runny. At this point, I just set that fancy aside and dumped a ton more powdered sugar over into the bowl and whisked. This worked.
CT: Oh yeah, this next part was also a huge mess. What did you use to suspend the fancies? The offset spatula?
KM: A regular spatula! But the problem was I couldn’t get the fancy off the spatula without touching it, so then I had to carry one dripping fancy across the kitchen to get a fork so I could remove it from the spatula. Then I had to stop doing the construction to clean up the pink fondant everywhere. The fondant was now pink instead of red, because I dumped a ton of powdered sugar in there. Messy! But eventually they were all covered and I put them in the freezer. What did you use to suspend your fancies?
CT: Oh God. Porting a dripping fancy across the kitchen. A nightmare!
I still had that cooling grid, so I just arranged my fancies atop it, with a plastic cutting mat beneath it. At this point I had 12 fancies, because I’d resolved to use the extra sponge and jam.
KM: Wow, brilliant!!!!! Bonus fancies!
CT: Almost! But as you foreshadowed earlier, I did not have enough icing to make 12 fancies. I used a ladle to pour fondant over the fancies. This worked, but only in the sense that at the end I had nine fancies and each one had some portion of icing on it. Had I thought this through a little better, it might’ve occurred to me to dip the sides, although I feel very certain that my buttercream blobs would’ve fallen right off and submerged into the fondant, creating a hellish mess. But because pouring—an incredibly inefficient way of coating a three-dimensional object—was my only method for getting fondant onto the fancies, you can imagine, most of the icing wound up on the cutting mat, and most of the corners of the fancies are under-iced.
It had been a while since I’d checked the clock so I was very worried about the timer, and believed that I could only afford one pass at this.
KM: Yes! I also had no extra time! I looked at the clock after my fancies had been in the freezer for three minutes, and it said one minute left, so I just threw them on a plate and got the best-looking buttercream decoration on top of them as I could manage. The “fondant” was so sticky that the plate got covered in it and looked bad!
CT: Aha, but you see, here is where I played myself: I had loads of time left! I was over there flinging pink slime everywhere in a panic, and it turned out I had almost 20 minutes of time left on the clock. I didn’t bother putting the fancies in the fridge or freezer between coating them and decorating them, so that when I drizzled the white fondant over them (I put this fondant into a condiment squeeze bottle, like a genius) the white stuff just sank into the pink stuff, looking very disconcertingly like a particular bodily fluid had been spilled over these stupid cubes.
KM: I have no idea how you ended up with so much time. I was frantic the whole time near the end. I was still in the middle of drenching my fancies in “fondant” when you messaged you were finished! I’m still not really sure that what I made was fondant. It was so shiny. VERY shiny. I highly suspect I accidentally made some kind of mirror glaze that isn’t fondant at all
CT: I was so unhappy with how they looked that in a desperate bid to save them, I rummaged around in my tub of baking crap and returned with a bottle of crystal decorating sugar and a little tub of rainbow sprinkles. On they went, but the effect was to make the fancies look even more obnoxious and plastic. Awful.
My fondant was also very shiny. I guess that’s from the Karo syrup? Who the hell knows. It has such an unpleasant sheen, I hate it. Fake Plastic Foodstuffs.
KM: I also really disliked the size the fancies were. They were too big for even two bites, in my opinion, but too sticky to pick up. So what you ended up with was just an incredibly sugary half of a slice of cake that you had to use a fork and knife to eat. When I tried mine, I was quite unhappy.
The Finished Product
CT: I gather from the trajectory of this conversation that you are not thrilled with your Fondant Fancies. Show fancies?
KM: Here are my stupid fancies. The round shape with the round dome does kind of make them look like boobs, and that is the only part of them that I like.
CT: For what it’s worth, I find your fancies to be very festive and cheerful, perhaps due to their roundness. To me, with the benefit of firsthand experience, a circular fancy is superior to a cubed one. These look great.
KM: Show your fancies?
CT: Here, look at these pieces of shit:
KM: I actually really like the kind of tie-dye effect of the two not-fondant colors, and I REALLY like the sprinkles. Unfortunately, I do not wish to eat your Fondant Fancies either. Did you end up trying them?
CT: They’re just so uncanny. Nothing edible is shiny like that.
I have not yet tried a fancy. I suppose I ought to. Hold please.
KM: Oh wow. Readers, we are being blessed by a live review!
CT: I hate it. Ew ew ew. Unbelievably sugary, super-duper fake-tasting. The fondant is so obviously wrong, it’s way too gluey to be something you would make on purpose.
KM: HAHA! This was exactly the experience I had. The only good part of mine was the jam, which luckily I made way too much of.
CT: Even my jam is just blandly sweet, probably because the strawberries are grocery store–grade. Sheesh.
Wow, a triumph! How are you feeling today about your Cake Week performance?
KM: I feel like we did a great job with the ingredients and method we have, and that in fact the recipe is to blame. How do you feel?
CT: I think I agree. I also recognize that if I’d make these exact fancies, the ones that I hate so much, back in 2022, I would be pulling backflips of joy right now. And if I’d tried to make these fancies back in 2022, it’s very likely that my home would’ve been vaporized in a mushroom cloud. I’m a much better baker today, and therefore a much snootier judge of a bake.
KM: I think also we’ve learned a lot about what kind of bakes we respect. It is not that I am against very intricate and annoying methods and constructions. I’m not! It’s that I’m against using those methods to make something I don’t want to eat. I guess this is one benefit of being on the actual show: You don’t end up with nine weird desserts you don’t want in your fridge until eventually you throw them all away.
CT: Yeah! And those bakers don’t have to spend their own (read: Jasper’s) money on this crap, and they don’t have to clean the noxious pink slime from their own damned kitchens.
KM: Noxious, pink, unbelievably STICKY slime!!!
CT: Kelsey, are you prepared to learn the theme of our next bake? The field of our next battle with sticky pink slime?
KM: As long as it is not “Mexican” Week again, I am ready to learn. Hit me!
CT: Biscuit Week! Going biscuit mode! Crikey!
KM: Hell yeah!! I have no doubt that we are going to conquer Biscuit Week no problem, because I love biscuits!