Masterchef Recap: And Eating It Too
You’re hot then you’re cold, you’re yes then you’re no, you’re smart then you’re dumb, you’re socialist then you’re libertarian.
Yes, the familiar strains of Katy Perry’s smash hit “A Brief Elucidation Of Various Antonyms” leads us in to yet another episode of Masterchef Australia, the number one cooking show in Australia that doesn’t actively try to break up happy marriages.
It’s elimination day, and Matt the Amateur says the standard of cooks is “crazy”, which the fact they are up for elimination seems to refute. Unless he means genuinely crazy, like one of them only cooks roadkill and another one roasts all of her dishes over a drum full of burning monkeys.
The first round of elimination is Cake Identification, a challenge which involves identifying cakes, much like a police lineup, except the consequences here are far more serious than life in prison: those who fail to correctly identify a cake face life outside the food industry.
Matt the Amateur is first to identify a cake. He can see what looks like a lamington, but who can be sure of anything in these dark deceptive days? He cuts the seeming lamington open, and it still looks like a lamington. It tastes like a lamington. It smells like a lamington. There seems to be a decent chance that it is a lamington. All viewers are hoping it actually turns out to be a South Austrian SchmenkelKuche, but sadly it is just a lamington, and Matt the Amateur lives to fight another cake.
Next up is “Brett”, the airline pilot with a heart of gold. He sees a cake he knows, but thinks nobody else knows. How does he know nobody else knows? Who knows? Maybe it’s an obscure aeroplane cake that only pilots get to eat. He decides to keep the aerocake in reserve, and instead chooses the Swiss roll, which turns out to be a Swiss roll.
Next up is amateur chef and Asterix supporting character Con, who picks a nasty spiky-looking cake that is a carrot cake, a kind of cake that tastes better than you expect but still shouldn’t probably exist because it’s made from carrots.
Con’s successful carrot-naming is followed by Elise, who chooses the black forest cake in tribute to her childhood in a Bavarian wolf pack. Then Charlie picks cheesecake and this task starts seeming really easy. Mimi picks the orange and poppyseed cake and immediately fails her drug test. Matt the Amateur picks a sponge cake. Brett picks a mud cake. The cakes fly by with increasing speed. Con picks an “opera cake”, a kind of cake that if cut in the right place, sings about its pain. Elise picks an angel cake, a cake which has died with a clear conscience.
Here things get tougher, which you can tell because the synths on the soundtrack get very doom-laden and everything slows down. Charlie has chosen a strange brown and yellow cake that he thinks is a fruitcake, and quickly realises that he has been a damn fool. He says, “fruitcake”, and it is a cake with fruit in it so I say he should get the points, but apparently technically it is a “simnel cake”, a weird Christian fundamentalist cake that was invented to force us to reflect on the nature of sin. And fittingly enough Charlie must now reflect on the greatest sin of all: not knowing enough about cakes.
Mimi steps up and confidently identifies something called a “Paris Brest”, which I think they just made up tonight. Doesn’t sound like a real thing. Then again neither does an “opera cake”. This whole thing is a farce. I object.
It’s Matt the Amateur’s turn. He is fixated on the little chocolates on top. “That’s telling me, truffles,” he says, a disturbing insight into his descent into madness — cakes are now talking to him. He thinks it’s a truffle cake, which might not be a real thing anyway, but it doesn’t matter much because as soon as he cuts into it he knows he was wrong. He has no idea. The sight of a fit young man staring blankly at a cake is a sobering and hilarious thing.
“Even my palms are sweaty,” Gary says, oversharingly, as he watches Matt the Amateur’s panicked face. Matt the Amateur says, “chocolate truffle cake” even though he knows how dumb it makes him sound. He’s wrong obviously — it’s actually a Dobos Torte, a cake which was originally a villain on Doctor Who.
“Standing next to Charlie is a position I don’t want to be in,” says Matt the Amateur, confirming the rumours about Charlie’s personal hygiene that have been circulating since day one.
Next is Brett again, taking his special pilot’s cake, cutting into it, and suddenly being gripped by doubt. Is this a pilot cake, or is it some kind of weird boat cake that has nothing to do with planes? Or even, strangely enough, a train cake? “I think it’s moon cake,” he says, sounding like a complete lunatic to me, bearing in mind I know nothing about cakes.
Against all odds and human decency, Brett is correct — it is a moon cake and his membership in the secret pilot’s society has paid off.
Up steps Con, who has nothing to lose because it’s ridiculous he’s even still on the show. He thinks he’s picked a continental cake, although to me it looks like a Streets Vienetta. He sticks to his continental cake guns, hoping against hope that the cake did not come from an island. Tragically, though, it did — in fact it came from Iceland, and so presumably contains fish. Nigella calls it a “veenatarta” or something like that. Sounds a lot like Vienetta actually. Maybe I was right.
So Con goes through into sudden death and says how much he hates having to cook against Matt the Amateur and Charlie, whose company is deeply objectionable to him. The three boys must bake a cake. Any kind of cake. It’s freestyle cakery, reminiscent of the film Eight Mile.
Con’s strength is not cakes. In fact nobody knows what Con’s strength is, it’s an ongoing search. He decides to keep his cake simple, and appeal directly to the heartstrings with a misty backstory montage. “I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to be here,” he says, and then immediately contradicts himself with, “I’ve put my wedding on hold.” Postponing a wedding isn’t a sacrifice, Con, it’s a diary edit. He’s also quit his job, but since that’s what everyone does on this show, and since everyone who goes on this show hates their job anyway, I don’t think that counts as a sacrifice either. If Con wants to go all the way, he has to find a sick kid or a dead grandparent fast.
“Bake us a cake that keeps you safe,” cries George, apparently thinking of some kind of bomb shelter made from sponge.
Con is in trouble. His poundcake is behind time, and he must ratchet up the oven temperature to bake it faster. He turns it up to 200, and Nigella wanders over to tell him you can’t bake a poundcake at that temperature, as Sammy Hagar knew. Con stares at Nigella uncomprehendingly, as you might stare at a giant magical snail that pops out of a kettle and starts reciting medieval French poetry at you. He has literally no idea what’s going on: all he knows is that he’s about to cry. But he remains determined for some reason. “If it’s the last thing I do in this kitchen, I will make a cake,” he says. Sadly, it’s far more likely that the last thing he does in this kitchen is lie on the floor screaming and banging his head against the oven door.
Meanwhile Matt the Amateur is making an onion jam, because he has utterly misunderstood the concept of “a cake”.
Con is grating a lemon, less as part of a culinary plan than out of a desperate desire to find some kind of structure in his life. He checks the oven, desperately hoping that his poundcake is “doing something”. And it is doing something — it is failing to be good enough.
Matt the Amateur tastes his gross marmalade and is pleased with it because he is a maniac. Meanwhile Charlie is stressing out about getting his sponge perfect, which is just worrying unnecessarily because one of his competitors considers it an achievement to get through a challenge with his eyebrows intact, and the other one is putting onions into a cake.
We break for some ads, which include an iPhone ad revolving around the theme of onions, which I find deeply, deeply suspicious. Is the onion fix in? There’s also an ad for The Living Room, which this week guest stars Nigella, who gets driven around town while she wonders how the hell she ended up on The Living Room.
Out of the Living Room and back to the kitchen, where Charlie is nervous about his cake’s dryness. No point worrying about that though, as “this is all I’ve got,” he says — and you sense he’s not just just talking about the elimination challenge: I think Charlie literally only has cake in his life.
Con takes his pointless poundcake out of the oven and fears it looks a little dense, but it turns out he was just looking at his reflection in the benchtop. Meanwhile Charlie has overwhipped his cream, but then Mary Berry always says the best bakers are sadists.
Time’s up, and what is possibly Masterchef history’s saddest, most inept elimination challenge comes to an end. The men hug with a sense of weary resignation, knowing that whoever wins and loses today, they are all hopeless.
Matt the Amateur brings in his terrible cake. “To me that’s exactly what a home cake should be,” says Nigella, the liar’s light shining in her eyes. George takes his jacket off to cut the cake, in a weird moment of failed eroticism. The judges hoe in. “That is so absolutely delicious,” says Gary, and all the judges agree, and look frankly I just do not believe them. I saw him make that cake, and there is no way that cake tastes good. Masterchef has become a sham. All is lies and wretchedness.
“My concern with my cake is the actual cake,” says Con, cannily putting his finger on the nub of his problem. He brings in his dumb mess of a cake. “Why are you here?” George asks. “I’m here to change Con,” says Con, apparently wanting to change himself into the kind of twat who refers to themselves in the third person. Thankfully he leaves the room, allowing the judge to stuff their faces once more.
“It looks heavy,” says Gary of Con’s cake, but on the upside, it looks lighter on one side than the other, testament to Con’s rather extraordinary ability to screw things up in ways others would never dream of. As Con feared, the worst part of his cake is the cake. “This is why I don’t eat some cakes,” says Matt, who goes through life terrified of every cake he sees in case it was made by Con.
In comes Charlie with what he admits is “not a typical sponge” — it’s closer to a Chux wipe. Matt’s concern is that it hasn’t risen at all, it’s an impotent cake. Nigella thinks it’s not a perfect cake, but she doesn’t find it offensive — on a night like this, “not offensive” is the best we can hope for really. The judges all agree that Matt the Amateur’s cake that they’re all pretending was edible is definitely the winner, making Matt the Amateur clearly the best of the competition’s three worst people.
Time to judge, and Nigella confesses that she is “always very grateful to be fed”, which is a terrible attitude for a judge of cooking competition to have. “You each had a very different take,” she tells the competitors, referring to the variety of ways they found to violate good taste. Then Matt takes over and explains that in deciding who wins this competition in which people try to make the best cake, the result is going to come down to how good the cakes that they made are. This may be a controversial criterion, as usually great weight is placed on poise and musical ability as well.
Anyway Con loses because duh, obviously.
We then move immediately on to the Masterclass, or in other words we change the channel.
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