The Great British Bake Off/Baking Show – Week 9 – Patisserie – Semi-Finals Recap

It is the semi-finals and the theme is patisserie.

Signature: 2 different batches of 12 financiers

A financier is a small French almond cake, flavored with beurre noisette, usually baked in a small mold. Light and moist with a crisp, eggshell-like exterior, the traditional financier also contains egg whites, flour, and powdered sugar. The molds are usually small rectangular loaves similar in size to petits fours. These molds work for the financiers Lekue mold or Chefmade pan and I have used both. I also have a collection of individual cake pans for these cakes.

Three of the bakers were told that their financiers were overbaked a bit. Josh had beautiful little cakes and received a Paul Hollywood handshake.

We have almost 200 online recipes for financiers in our Library. I often get friands and financiers mixed up. The main differences between friands and financiers are financiers use brown butter and friands don’t and financiers are traditionally made with almonds only, while friands are often flavored with fruits, nuts or other ingredients. We have 87 online recipes for friands in our Library.

Darcie: Often financier batter rests for a good bit of time before baking to better hydrate the cakes, making this challenge all the more difficult. Not overbaking would be key to getting a good result, as the bakers discovered. At first blush I found this challenge a bit simple for semi finals, but the time pressure and added decorations made it seem more fitting.

Technical: Prue’s tarte au pommes in 2 1/2 hours

Most of the bakers didn’t realize the amount of time necessary to bake the tart in the blind baking step. Tasha struggled with this challenge and her tart was a mess. The offering from Josh was nearly perfect.

Darcie: This was a fiendishly difficult challenge, both for the knowledge about how much to blind bake and what is the right thickness for the apple slices to bake properly. Cutting thin slices by hand is not something I am good at or like to do – I use my trusty KitchenAid attachment to get perfect slices every time. It doesn’t look that that was available to the bakers, however. After seeing Tasha’s mess of a tart my heart sank because I so wanted her to go on to the finals and I felt like it was not looking good by this point.

Judging ranged as follows: Tasha 4th, Dan 3rd, Matty 2nd and Josh in first.

We have 44 online recipes for Tarte aux pommes in our Library.

Showstopper: 4 hours to prepare a Millefeuille/Millefoglie dessert.

We have 112 online recipes for Millefeuille/Millefoglie in our Library.

Tasha struggled with her showstopper and while her lamination was good – her curd was grainy but tasted lovely. Matty’s taste of Italy looked like a centerpiece and his flavors were good – his puff pastry was off. Josh offered a nearly perfect perfect mille-feuille and Dan’s guitar shaped dessert was delicious but his mirror glaze was rubbery.

Josh was deemed star baker and Tasha went home. I wanted Tasha to make it through to the finals.

Darcie: While I liked this challenge for patisserie week, overall this episode didn’t seem like a semi-final; it felt a bit uninspired. Maybe that was just because I watched it the day after the Thanksgiving food overload. Tasha made a bold choice to go with an inverse puff pastry, something that seems devilishly difficult. However, this choice meant she had less time to perfect the other components and finish her dessert. Although we don’t get to see the whole judging and of course can’t taste anything, I thought her millefeuille topped Matty’s because the key component – the puff pastry – was much better.

However, I could tell before the judging even started that Tasha was going home (on her birthday no less!) and I was so sad that I had to stop watching for a while to gain the composure to see the final result. It’s amazing how much you can feel for someone you have never met and have only seen a handful of times on a television screen. I think that speaks to how good this show is at getting the baker’s personalities to shine along with showcasing their baking prowess.