The Great British Bake Off

Lottie absolutely made the wrong call in trying to scuplt ice cream. A firmer set recipe in a mould would have been the only possible way to achieve that design.

Ice cream in that tent never goes well. They put it in for drama and drama alone.

If they wanted them to do well, blast chillers would be there. Plus bigger freezers in general. Even those high end domestic ones will never cope with extreme conditions

Of course they should have got air con and bigger freezers in. Just goes to show that this isn’t about baking but about personality which is why we watch it.

I'll miss Lottie, she had a great personality and I loved her snarky asides. Everyone else, to use a baking ingredient term, IMHO, is just a bit vanilla

Seriously though, an ice cream challenge in a tent without air conditioning, on one of the hottest days of the year, with only a domestic fridge's freezer cabinet and an ice cream machine is just crazy

Yes, it seemed unfair since nobody had enough time to do it properly. But I suppose they consider it like the ice cream challenge on such a hot day... everyone is equally disadvantaged, so they judge against the other contestants, not against the ideal.

I would love to try a Sussex Pond Pudding, though... the example one looked delicious! I've never seen it on a dessert menu, though... I gather it's not common?

I seem to remember that it was fashionable in the 80s and featured on restaurant menus. I assume for individual portions they use a section of lemon rather than a whole one.

As OxfordSimon said, it is not that difficult to do. I was surprised that they seem thrown by pleating the grease-proof paper as that is a fairly basic skill and yet the contestants achieve complex technical tasks in other challenges that I couldn't possibly do.

I once served Sussex Pond Pudding it to my family and the air inside the lemon made the suet pudding pulsate as if it were alive, which freaked out my father.

I was just going to say that the BBC website says it takes 2.5 hours, and then realised that the actual recipe says 3.5 hours and it's the way that Google interprets the information that makes it show 2.5 in search results:

www.google.com/search?q=How+long+does+a+sussex+pond+pudding+take+to+steam&rlz=1C1GGRV_enGB768GB768&oq=How+long+does+a+sussex+pond+pudding+take+to+steam&aqs=chrome..69i57.11657j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

But I guess the real test was: who knows enough about steam puddings to realise that they take much longer to cook and the one that'll be in the steamer the longest will win?

It does amaze me how often the contestants say they've never seen or heard of something before. Surely you spend a bit of time swotting up on what's in Leith's Cookery Bible before you enter?

The point of jelly art is to make something the viewer can judge easily, I think, since the actual important bit (tasting) we can't do.
Some of them did look very pretty.

Well that Danish horn thing was just odd. Certainly not patisserie.

It must have been a close call to send Hermon home. She did have a shocking showstopper and only herself to blame given the last minute change of recipe.

I find it hard to imagine anything other than a male winner given how messy Laura has been thus far.

But the lack of kitchen time between recording sessions is really showing now. Inevitable under the circumstances.

Gonna be the young 'un

Those horn of plenty things were hilarious, but I do have a dirty mind.
I'm hoping for Peter to be the winner.
20 years old and producing that quality of stuff. Impressive!

I think the wrong person was sent home yesterday. Peter really upped his game and had a great “week”. He’d be my choice to win. I hope it’s a decent showstopper for the final, some choices of challenges have been really odd in the past.

I'm calling it now, I think David will win! It's the kind of upset that often happens and I feel like Peter (who IMO would be the rightful winner) peaked a week early and had an exceptional week.

I also thought the wrong person went and I really don't like how they don't take previous weeks into consideration. It leads to what's happened this time, someone who has had quite a few disasters making it to the final because there was always someone worse and someone who has been great throughout having one bad week and going because there are no longer enough people to mitigate the damage.

But as Mary Berry says, it's only a cake!