Masterchef Recap: Have Your Cake
It’s a grim day for the amateurs, except for the ones who aren’t cooking: they’re feeling giddy with delight as they get to watch others tortured by their own inadequacies. Being on the balcony during a pressure test must be a lot like being in heaven looking down on sinners in hell: witnessing their torment really makes your own virtue feel worthwhile.
Anyway, Matt the Amateur, Mimi and Trent are up against it tonight, on the chopping block, fighting for their lives — not literally, although maybe literally because really, if you don’t win Masterchef, what point does life have? I wouldn’t want to go on living, even if I did have a line of sauces.
“Today I’m going up against two of the most amazing cooks,” says Mimi, because everyone on the show is contractually obliged to call every other person on the show “an amazing cook”. Mimi hopes the test will be a dessert, because Trent and Matt the Amateur are good at savoury things and she is severely limited. Just say what you mean Mimi: you hope it’ll be a parfait, don’t you?
DON’T YOU?
Matt the Amateur can feel his heart in his throat as he enters the kitchen, and is immediately medivaced out. When he returns, Matt the judge tells the contestants that this is the hardest pressure test they’ve ever faced and that the guest chef has worked in enough fancy expensive kitchens to become a complete sadist. Yes, it’s Christie Tanya, the legendary patissier who some people know. And she has prepared a glass dome full of smoke, which let’s face it is tough to cook. “It doesn’t even look like food, it looks like a piece of art on the table,” says Trent, though to be fair he hasn’t actually seen it yet — the actual dish is under the dome, and the smoke.
The dish is called the Mystique, in honour of the X-Men villain who invented it. It’s hard to describe, but it’s kind of like what you’d get if a chocolate cake had a baby with a spider, and then that baby grew up to be an incredibly pretentious pastry chef.
Inside the cake is what admittedly looks like an insane arrangement of unconsciousness-inducing layers of chocolate and caramel and fruit and god only knows what else. It actually kind of looks like a really long thick Mars bar, but what’s wrong with that? Nothing, that’s what.
The really tricky thing will be the weird chocolate sea urchin sitting on top of the cake, which will require that most awkward yet pointless of cooking techniques: tempering chocolate. How many promising careers have been cut short on this show, when someone tried to temper chocolate, failed, and wandered disconsolately into the desert?
Mimi is of the opinion that this will be a challenge for all of them, and it’s hard to fault her logic. Matt the Amateur is extremely nervous because this cake leaves very little scope for slow-roasted quail. Trent’s strategy is to read the recipe and then do the things that the recipe says to do. Will it pay off?
The amateurs begin cooking, and it becomes very clear that this recipe is incredibly complicated and confusing and annoying. Matt the Amateur stuffs up straight away with the task of making marshmallow, and I say this is fine, because marshmallow is not the sort of thing a normal person should know how to make. Marshmallows are things you buy in bags. It’s unfair to expect a human to make them. Anyway, M the A’s marshmallow is no good because he can’t dissolve his gelatin. He feels bad about this, but honestly it happens to all men at one time or another. He’s whisking it like mad, and we’ve all been there. The gelatin dissolves! Another minor and uninteresting crisis successfully and uninterestingly managed.
Meanwhile Mimi is busy with her passionfruit curd, which is an important element of the dish for reasons that she explains but that nobody cares about. It’s in the recipe, we get it: we don’t need your rationale.
For his part, Matt the Amateur realises he’s made a terrible mistake with his passionfruit curd. It’s too thin. He tries to encourage it to eat something. “I’m having an absolute shocker,” M the A admits, staring into the abyss and finding a runny urine-like liquid staring back.
“How you going Trent?” asks George, shoving his face in where it’s not wanted.
“Good,” says Trent, trying to convey through tone that he wants George to fuck off.
“You don’t want to go home,” says George in case Trent hadn’t noticed.
“No.”
“Well come on!” urges George.
“I’m trying to but you won’t LEAVE ME ALONE YOU PRICK!” Trent should’ve said, but doesn’t.
Back the Misadventures of Matt the Amateur, and he’s discovered that he was supposed to melt the chocolate separately to the cream instead of chucking it in together. M the A gradually starts to adjust to the fact that he is just not made for this life.
With his confidence shaken, there is only one way forward: a montage of happy times at home. We see Matt the Amateur rolling out dough at home, and sitting on the grass gazing at the sunset, and that’s all he needs to attack the task with renewed vigour. Not only is his confidence back, he is now quite aggravatingly arrogant, promising us that he “wants it” more than anyone else does. Tell us more about your unique urges, Matthew.
Meanwhile Mimi says she wants to follow the recipe as closely as possible. Which should mean, like, exactly, right? I mean nobody’s coming in threatening to punch her if she doesn’t alter the recipe, so “as closely as possible” should mean “exactly”. I feel like she’s trying to find a loophole.
George comes by to ask Mimi where she’s at. Like most people who are asked this by George, where she is at is trying to do a difficult job while a gormless twat pesters her with dumb questions. “Don’t lose focus,” says George, while quite purposefully trying to distract her.
Trent hits a snag when his brownie comes out of the oven uncooked. That’s not a euphemism, that really happened. Elena advises him to put it back in the oven for a bit, which is what he was doing anyway, but Elena is really keen on giving advice tonight. She seems to kind of resent the fact she doesn’t get to show off her cooking so she’s shoving her oar in at every opportunity. The balcony doth make judgmental knobends of us all.
Gary comes by and asks Trent for a look at his brownie, which is funny if you’re immature. Christie and Gary look at his brownie and declare it utterly screwed. Trent’s brownie, as had been rumoured for years, is too thick. This is as a result of Trent not reading the recipe properly. In fact pretty much every problem everyone runs into in these tests is a result of not reading the recipe properly. These people are idiots.
“It’s just a cake with a hole in the middle!” calls George, apparently describing his own face, as time ticks away and Mimi tries to assemble her cake. This is a complex process a lot like trying to get a new Barbie out of the packaging on Christmas morning. Mimi thinks her cake looks all right. Christie says it doesn’t. She hasn’t put her brownie in — the recipe strikes again.
The word “brownie” is getting said so often it’s starting to freak me out. “Demould the brownie”. “My brownie’s too warm.” “Trent takes his brownies out”. It’s the kind of thing you can’t help but giggle at, especially when the actual processes are so dull. Who knew making a cake could be so boring? Putting things in moulds, and taking them out of moulds, and putting them in mousse, and putting them in freezers, and just sitting around waiting for stuff. You can tell it’s boring because the music has taken on an air of desperation. You can almost hear the producers haranguing the soundtrack guy. “More drama! We’ve got nothing here, we need the music to sell it!”
Trent’s brownie looks like complete garbage, but then maybe it’s supposed to be like that. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t read the recipe, much like everyone involved in this challenge.
Everyone is now putting blue stuff in moulds. Don’t know why. Don’t think it matters.
“What’s the next element, Trent?” asks Elena, like he’s there to keep her up to speed. Hush now, Elena.
Anyway, it is now time for the chocolate tempering, a task so incredibly difficult with such incredibly unimpressive results. Everyone makes their silly little fancy chocolate thingies that add nothing to the dish at all. Then it is time to peel the moulds off their cakes. Mimi’s cake is smooth and beautiful. Matt the Amateur’s cake is smooth and beautiful.
Trent’s cake is a nightmare. It’s the Elephant Man of cakes. It cries out for a quick and merciful death. It’s all rough and uneven and not set and kind of looks like he’s baked a wig into the cake. Trent is royally screwed and I don’t even know if it matters what happens from now on. I mean, I know it doesn’t matter what happens from now on. Or what’s been happening since the series started. I mean even by the show’s standards it probably doesn’t matter.
Mimi begins banging her blue things out of their moulds, one of the many ways that capitalism keeps us from fighting for social change. Everyone bangs out their blue things, and their brown things, and puts it all together to form the bizarre edible spaceship that Christie has demanded they create.
Tasting time. First is Trent, who is disappointed with how his cake looks. Christie tells him not to be disappointed, as she used to be rubbish at making cakes too. George asks him how many other sparkies would be able to make a cake like this. Trent doesn’t know: he didn’t expect to be asked such a stupid question. The answer of course is that no other sparkies would be able to make a cake like this, nor would any other sparkie be dumb enough to try.
Trent’s cake has too much marshmallow and not enough passionfruit. Gary thinks he’s in trouble, and when Gary says you’re in trouble, you’re really in trouble, given all the judges have strict instructions to make every contest look closer than it really is.
Mimi serves her cake. “How do you feel?” asks Gary, first with the totally irrelevant questions. Who cares how she feels: this is a place of SCIENCE. The judges don’t talk to Mimi for very long because for some reason nobody can ever think of anything to say when Mimi is around.
Mimi didn’t manage to get her blue dome out, but luckily that was the trick element that Christie only put in the dish as a joke. Everything else is great and as Mars bar-y as you could hope for. Clearly Mimi is better than Trent. George says he is “holding himself back” from eating the whole thing, and it’s really a bit nauseating to hear this.
Here comes Matt the Amateur, who managed to complete his blue dome but not his brown dome, and is worried about his passionfruit curd, a sentence he never expected to be involved in. “It wasn’t just a cooking experience today, it was a life experience,” says M the A, but he’s pretty wrong: it was a cooking experience. You could tell by all the ovens and stuff.
The judges cut open Matt the Amateur’s cake. Christie looks like she’s about to cry. The runny curd has hit her hard: she thought she had become inured to this kind of trauma, but it never gets any easier, does it. “There’s no doubt there are mistakes on there,” says Gary, pointing particularly to the inclusion of a layer of ham in the cake, which was not in the recipe at all.
It’s all very tense as we come to judgment, but surely Trent is completely screwed isn’t he?
Yeah he is. He was hopeless. Back to the lightbulbs, sparky. “Oh Trent, we’re going to miss you,” says Matt, but has no compelling argument as to why. And the competition will be over in a few days, he can go visit Trent whenever he likes. He refers to Trent as one of the “world’s true gentlemen”, so we’re really just padding out the running time now.
“You’ve proven to the world you’re in the top six of Masterchef,” says Christie, with technical accuracy. It’s not really her business to be saying this, she’s a guest judge, she needs to stick to cake commentary.
“It’s been one of the best experiences of my life,” says Trent as he leaves, making sure to emphasies it’s only ONE of them. The postscript tell us he is writing an e-cookbook, which…I mean, OK, I guess…and he plans to open a cafe next year, but anyone can say that can’t they.
Anyway.
Tune in tomorrow when the final five will cry into their saucepans.
In life as in Masterchef, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Don’t be doomed: buy Error Australis today.
