“So since I did chilli chocolate in the first week and it didn’t work,” she was explaining, “I thought I’d do it again. Which will either be my shot at redemption or”—she made a kind of exaggerated wince that would play great on TV—“a really bad idea.”
“All the best ideas are,” replied Grace Forsythe with a smile. “But tell me, do you think a week one bake will be enough for the semi-demi-final?”
To Audrey’s relief, Alanis was back to her trademark confidence. “I’m doing a mirror glaze, and I’ll be putting tempered chocolate decorations on the top in a sort of forest scene.”
“Wonderf—” the sound cut off as Jennifer switched feeds.
“Colin,” she was saying, “nudge Marianne and Wilfred over to the granny and make sure they push theexecutionangle because it’s looking like she’s gone underambitious this week, and I don’t want to lose her.”
Her eyes flicking from monitor to monitor, Audrey followed the darting figure of Colin Thrimp as he crossed the ballroom to find the judges and convey Jennifer’s instructions. And then thesound cut back in as they appeared, seemingly spontaneously, at the end of Doris’s workbench.
“Cherries,” Marianne Wolvercote said, inspecting the arrayed ingredients, “and kirsch—I have a feeling I know where you’re going here and, well, there are very much two ways it could end.”
“Nowt wrong with a black forest gateau, Marianne,” insisted Wilfred. “Just because they were big in the seventies don’t mean we’re never allowed to eat them again.”
Doris nodded. “And you said centrepiece, and when we used to have family dinners, our centrepiece was always a black forest gateau.”
Jennifer slid her headset down for a moment. “Lane, if the old lady fucks this because she doesn’t know what the wordcentrepiecemeans to a TV audience, I’ll be very mildly peeved.”
“She’ll be okay,” Audrey reassured her, not actually especially certain. “She knows what she’s doing.”
On screen, Marianne was peering inquisitorially at Doris’s bench. “These aren’t all black forest ingredients, are they?”
“Got to have some decorations. I’m not just serving up a cake and nothing else.”
Wilfred Honey looked sage. “So what’s the story?”
“When I was young,” Doris explained, “and not so young, come to think of it, there was this bomb site near where I lived—it’s a city farm now, which I reckon is good—and what with it being just waste ground and all, we used to use it for fetes and things. And that felt—I don’t know—that felt nice to me. Because me and my Bobby and the kids, we could get together and we could go and be happy somewhere what was all ruins.” She stopped and looked down, almost wistfully. “Felt like hope.”
With palpable relief, Jennifer turned to Audrey. “Okay, you’re right. She fucking nailed it.”
Filming proceeded well after that, and Audrey’s increasingly producer’s eye view allowed her to better appreciate the artistry with which the whole thing was assembled. The way Grace and the judges teased camera-ready segments from everybody they spoke to. The way the crew flickered invisible behind everything that happened. The sheer volume of footage that was being generated and processed and would eventually make its way onto television screens as a little capsule of magic. All the mirrors and wires carefully hidden away.
Once the contestants had finished their bakes, they were ushered outside for interviews while the camera crew swarmed around their various offerings to film them from televisually appropriate angles. When they were brought back in again, Doris was the first up.
Her finished bake was, by the standards of the show, highly unusual. She had started out by making a perfectly ordinary if well-executed black forest gateau, with a series of ominous rectangular blocks of chocolate shortbread and chocolate brownie that she’d arranged around the outside like ruins. Then, in a fit of something Audrey felt could have been either boldness or pure whimsy, she’d smashed half the gateau to pieces.
Or rather not smashed. Itlookedsmashed, but she’d actually deconstructed it very carefully.
“Well,” Marianne Wolvercote observed as it was laid in front of her. “It’s definitely not just a black forest gateau.”
“Although,” added Wilfred Honey, “I do think smashing it up might have been taking things a touch too far.”
Doris smiled. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Marianne Wolvercote had started tasting. “It’s baked exceptionally well. It has all the flavours you’d expect, and while I know Wilfred has his misgivings, I think the presentation is completely on point.”
While Marianne had been sampling the gateau itself, Wilfred had been trying the brownies and biscuits, and was now expressing his approval. “It’d have been very easy to cut corners here,” he explained, “but you’ve done a good job on each of them. I think we can safely say we’re impressed.”
They were slightly less impressed with Meera’s and Joshua’s offerings. Meera had made a chocolate Eiffel Tower in memory of a family holiday to Paris, but the judges felt it included too few elements, while Joshua had presented a pretty straightforward chocolate cake decorated with chocolate work that was clearly intended to be intricate but that in practice had come out just looking a bit messy.
That left Reggie and Alanis, with Reggie up first. As the engineer of the season, he’d taken the large, freestanding structure mandate to heart, creating a three-tiered cake with each tier held above the last by a latticework of pure chocolate.
As the camera zoomed in on the towering edifice, Audrey’s general respect for Reggie’s engineering knowhow found itself in a low-key argument with her finely honed sense of dramatic necessity and inevitable doom.
It was a very impressive piece of baking. But what made it impressive was that when you looked at it, your first thought was,I can’t believe that actually stays up.
So Audrey wasn’t entirely surprised when it didn’t.
