Cool hands and cool heads are needed for pastry week, which isn’t easy when you’re baking against the clock in a tent in the heat of summer. Jon immediately warns us: ‘Pastry is possessed by the devil; you turn your back and it will eat you alive.’
Immediately turning up the heat even more, the deep-fat fryers are on for a Signature of a dozen samosas – six savoury and six sweet, each with a complementary dip.
Briony worries that her husband is putting on weight after sampling so many of her Bake Off experiments and practice runs. Her ‘Home Comforts’ samosas consist of six filled with beetroot, port-soaked cranberries and spinach and six with mascarpone and peanut butter.
Dan claims he’s ‘too posh to push’, ditching the rolling pin in favour of a pasta machine. Cheerfully chatting and turning, he realises too late that he’s overworked the pastry and has to start again. Rolling by hand a second time, he rushes to fill his samosas with chopped walnuts, pear and Stilton and caramelised hazelnut and banana.
Fondly recalling the halcyon days when he ‘wooed his wife’, that old-romantic Jon recreates a chicken, white wine and pesto dinner in his pastry parcels, followed by a dessert course of orange and vanilla crème patissiere. Manon also favours chicken, adding confit lemons and green olives to her savouries, with a tarte-Tatin-inspired batch of Cox’s apples and salted caramel.
Kim-Joy flavours Granny Smith’s apples with ginger and chai spices and tentatively adds a little Kashmiri chilli to her onions and paneer. Feeling more confident with her decoration, she inscribes her samosas with Pythagoras’ theorem.
Frustrated by the notion that an Indian baker ought to make samosas, Ruby says her family has better things to do. Nevertheless, she opts for the totally traditional filling of onion, peas and spiced potatoes, paired with a paste of orange-infused dates and almonds. Rahul’s family clearly does make samosas as he draws on his mother’s recipes for paneer singara and misti singara – the singara being a crispier sister of the samosa. Filling with potato, paneer and ground coriander and almonds, coconut, cashew nuts and ricotta, Rahul slashes the delicate pastry for a pretty finish.