Meera had been first with a variety of extremely simple bakes of the make-at-home-with-mother variety, which, she explained, she enjoyed making at home right now with her actual children, plus a batch of laddoo, which the judges nitpicked.
“If I were in a mood to be technical,” Marianne was saying, “these aren’t baked.”
It wasn’t normally wise to talk back to the judges, but Meera did anyway, and Audrey could see why. “Neither are donuts, but you did those last series.”
Jennifer pressed a button. “Colin, tell her the point’s taken but to can the meta talk. We let the contestants go on like that and they’ll be doing fourth wall shit all over the place.”
While Colin was relaying this, Alanis raised a hand from the back of the room.
“What did the child say?” asked Jennifer.
“She’s made sambusas,” Colin relayed, “which aren’t baked either.”
Jennifer didn’t quite headdesk, but her head moved in a desky direction. “Fuck it, tell Marianne to be less pedantic and we’ll just accept that Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells will write us angry letters.”
Next up was Alanis, who came forward and set her childhood-on-a-tray down in front of the judges. “So these are sambusas,” she said, “which are really more from my dad’s childhood, but I wanted to celebrate that as well. And this is unicorn toast, and Ididbake the bread myself. And I made rainbow cupcakes to go with it.”
Wilfred Honey and Marianne Wolvercote looked down at the riot of colour before them with the most kids-today looks on their faces that Audrey had ever seen.
“What I find really distressing about this”—Marianne Wolvercote picked up a multicoloured cupcake—“is realising that you would have been about ten years old during this particular trend.”
Alanis nodded. “Yeah. When I was younger it was rainbow everything for days, and I wanted to get that feeling back.”
While she’d been talking, Wilfred Honey had picked up a sambusa. “Now this,” he said, “has a lovely golden-brown colour to it, which is exactly what I want from a pastry and—if I may say so—to me feels more like a proper food colour in general. And the flavours aregradely. The spices are coming through wonderful.”
“This, on the other hand…”Marianne Wolvercote was poking at the unicorn toast. “Now as it happens, I do know how hard it is to get those swirls to look just right. But the problem is that, well, this was a trend that went away for areason. Making something brightly coloured doesn’t actually make it taste better, and while the bread itself is competently executed, I don’t think the cream cheese and marshmallow fluff topping actually adds anything to it.”
Alanis gave a fair enough kind of nod. “Yeah, it wasn’t as good as I remembered.”
Next up was Joshua, with his mix of homemade party rings and, for reasons Audrey wasn’t at all privy to but which he’d presumably explained in an earlier to-camera segment, mini Cornish pasties. It being the semifinal, he received a base level of praise just because of the high standard of the competition, but unless Doris did extremely badly, Audrey was pretty confident that he’d donenowhere near enough to overcome the youngest contestant, oldest contestant, mum framing that Jennifer had as good as admitted she was going for.
That just left Doris. Like Joshua, she’d leaned heavily into keeping things simple. Like Alanis, she’d gone for recipes that unmistakably spoke to the exact time and place of her youth. They were all rationing-era—something called glory buns, a tray of jam tarts, and, in pride of place, a simple loaf of fresh-baked bread.
“I grew up round these parts,” she explained to the judges. “Well, did some of my growing up round these parts at any rate. And it’s food like this what I used to look forward to the most.”
Marianne Wolvercote jabbed at a tart. “Simple,” she said, “but excellently presented.”
“And by ’eck it takes you back,” added Wilfred Honey. “It’s true not everything was better in the old days, but I can’t fault a nice bun, nor a jam tart, and that bread is just wonderful.”
The cynical part of her brain that Audrey sincerely wished she could switch off made her turn to Jennifer and ask, “Is that really what they think, or did you tell them the old lady needed a win?”
“Given the news you’re about to give her,” Jennifer replied, “would you say she doesn’t?”
* * *
Doris did, in fact, get the win in the end. Audrey had skipped the gazebo talk, fearing that she’d find it too depressing, but that just meant she didn’t know what had been said and had to assume the worst. She tried to tell herself it had been a clean victory. That everybody else had made some kind of crucial mistake, like not pushing themselves hard enough or serving something that lookedbetter than it tasted. But she couldn’t quite shake the feeling it should have gone to Meera.
Once the unsurprising news of Doris’s victory had been delivered, Grace Forsythe moved on to the equally unsurprising news of Joshua’s defeat. And since that would be the cue for the contestants to start going their separate ways, Audrey set out at once for the ballroom so that she could catch Doris on the way out.
She ran into Joshua first.
“Hi,” she said, a little awkwardly. “Sorry to see you go.”
He gave her an almost rueful smile back. “It’s cool. I got all the way to the semifinal, and I was up against three amazing women who really deserved to go through.”
There was the tiniest edge of rehearsal in his voice, which made Audrey suspect he’d used the same line for the cameras. “That’s very chill of you.”
Joshua nodded. Then just as Audrey was about to move on he said, “Alanis told me you spoke to her the other week. And, thanks, I suppose.”
