Masterchef Recap: Satan Laughing Spreads His Wings

It’s Sweet Week, and tonight four amateurs are foxes on the run, fighting to save their place in the competition and with only one option left: everyone attack.

Tonight, Katherine Sabbath, the cake queen who refuses to work on Sundays, arrives to challenge the losers with that most terrifying of dishes: a pink cake.

At the Masterchef house Jess is upset that having spent the last few months droning constantly on about how great she is at desserts and how it sucks whenever she has to do another dessert, she entered Sweet Week and immediately fucked up royally. Though to be fair, she was partnered with Gina, whose facial expression suggests she’s never eaten a dessert in her life.

First the formalities: Sashi is asked whether he will use his immunity pin, and Sashi reveals to widespread shock that he is not a moron, and therefore gets to sit the elimination out.

Matt introduces guest chef Sabbath, who he describes as “an Instacake pop star”, because in this timeslot he can’t say “cockspank”, and she walks in looking like a Photoshopped pixie. Everyone is delighted to see the woman who famously invented the concept of taking photographs of cakes. Jess reveals that she once messaged Sabbath on Instagram and that Sabbath messaged her back, and everyone mutters under their breath about what a starfucker Jess is.

Sabbath reveals her challenge: recreate her birthday cake. Her birthday cake is amazing: not only is it pink and white, but it’s also round. The amateurs talk breathlessly about how amazing it is to see a round pink cake. Gina has never seen anything so astonishing. In fact Gina has never seen a cake. The hardest part of the cake is the tempered white chocolate shards — the winner of the challenge will be the amateur who is smart enough to not bother with the tempered white chocolate shards and just make the fucking cake.

Sabbath cuts open the birthday cake and reveals that it doesn’t just look like a cake on the outside — on the inside it is also a cake. “It’s a mouthful of sunshine,” says Jess, her face melting from the intense heat of the ball of flaming hydrogen that she has just ingested. Sarah makes a funny joke about the task being a “piece of cake” that makes everyone hate her even more than they did already.

Gina declares that she needs to focus, but then she’s needed to focus every day of the competition so far without yet managing it. Meanwhile Sarah has her eightieth flashback of the series, remembering her son Elvis and how she was too lazy to make him a birthday cake or give him a less embarrassing name. Sarah seems to have taken over Chloe’s mantle as the amateur who is constantly up for elimination, Chloe having cleverly attached herself to Kristen, who knows how to put together a croquembouche, while Sarah was stuck with Sashi, who delights in fucking up profiteroles and then whipping out an immunity pin to leave his partner stranded.

Gina’s peaks are stiff, and they’re not the only ones, as she makes a mountain of butter and prays that the judges will enjoy eating a huge mound of butter so much they won’t notice it’s not a cake.

Sarah remembers how tall Katherine’s cake looked. “Perhaps I should make it look like that,” she muses while reading the recipe, devastated to find the cake is not a carrot cake.

Katherine Sabbath foresees issues with the butter, but nobody should trust the foresight of a woman who wears earrings like that. She peers with concern at Sarah’s mixture, causing her head to explode in flames.

“Gina, how are you going?” Sabbath asks. Gina replies partially with words, but mainly with a weary, exasperated demeanour suggestive of a woman looking for an ocean to walk into. “How many cakes have you made before?” asks Matt. Gina lies and says that she has made cakes before.

Jess reveals that she recently made a cake for her mother, inspired by Katherine Sabbath. What a little suck-up she is.

On the balcony the safe people who were good at cooking yesterday laugh about Sarah’s stupid pink icing. I don’t know why they do this, Sabbath was pretty clear that the cake is supposed to be pink.

Gina has forgotten about her freeze-dried raspberries, an oversight which any ethical observer will find unforgivable. Kristen observes that she’s thrown all her raspberries into the pink icing, which is wrong according to some interpretations, including the interpretations of people who have read the recipe and/or looked at the cake they’re supposed to be recreating.

Meanwhile Sarah remembers Katherine’s sponge tasting buttery, and so cunningly decides to put butter in it. I don’t know why it’s necessary to remember how it tastes to do this: she’s got a fucking recipe, just read it. Meanwhile Jess has dropped yolk into her cake mixture, which Christians will recognise as a violation of the laws of Leviticus. Jess can’t believe that one little egg yolk could send her home: she expected there to be at least three egg yolks teaming up.

Hope springs eternal for Jess, however, as Sarah dumps her sugar into her flour to signal her utter disdain for life in general.

Gina’s cake is in the oven, if you get my drift. She therefore moves on to tempering her chocolate, a very difficult task that produces results far less impressive than you’d expect for all the effort involved. Jess confides in Katherine that usually when tempering chocolate she uses compound chocolate to make it easier. “No judgment here,” says Katherine, but you can tell she thinks Jess is scum.

Meanwhile Gina has forgotten to put her timer on and doesn’t know how long the cake needs to be in the oven, so I don’t know why we’re bothering to continue with this farce.

Sarah has been dreading the white chocolate from the start. White chocolate killed her parents, and the idea of working together with white chocolate against a common enemy revolts her. Yet by the end, perhaps both Sarah and the white chocolate will have learnt a few things about tolerance and friendship.

“I think Sarah just needs to remain focused and use her intuition,” says Ben, quite wrongly: what Sarah needs to do is temper chocolate and not fuck up.

George takes a moment to mock Jess’s filthy apron. Jess laughs good-naturedly despite her broken heart.

Gina looks deeply depressed. She doesn’t know whether her cakes are cooked or not, but she needs to get them out, if you follow me. Having gotten them out, her heart sinks, as do her cakes. “They probably should’ve stayed in the oven a little bit longer,” she says to an audience that already knew that. Katherine Sabbath gives her an unconvincing word of encouragement before moving on to pal around with Jess, someone who actually has a chance of making a good cake.

Gina refuses to give up, despite the obvious advisability of such a course of action. “It won’t look like her cake, but it’s all about flavours,” Gina bravely stammers, even though quite obviously it’s not all about flavours. Today’s challenge is set by a famous cake decorator, clearly the challenge is all about decorating a cake. Any idiot can do flavours: only a select few can make a pink cake apparently.

“Thirty minutes, lets go!” yells George, ruining the moment we were having of joy that he wasn’t talking. Sarah needs to start putting her stripes on. She confesses to Katherine that her dad’s a potter but that she is very bad at pottery. Katherine smiles and nods, too polite to tell her how much she doesn’t care.

Up on the balcony, Hoda and Ben have a conversation. It is of no consequence.

Jess keeps smudging the colours. Everyone on the balcony starts yelling at her to stop fussing with her cake. Katherine tells her it’s time to step away from the cake. “Oh my god!” cry the balcony people, as Jess ignores all pleas to stop obsessively touching the cake and keeps on obsessively touching the cake for several hours.

Gina has iced her cake, calling it “my Italian version of a cake”, which is a hell of a slur against the nation of Italy. It’s time to move on to her white chocolate shards and ruin those as well.

With only thirty seconds to go, everyone is finished, so the editor splices in footage of them rushing around earlier on to make it seem as if everyone isn’t finished. As time runs out, the three losers hug each other to fulfil contractual obligations. Jess is worried about her little bubbles. Sarah can’t believe she made a cake. Gina is slightly disappointed with the fact her cake looks like it has smallpox.

In the judging room, Katherine says she gives the amateurs full credit for their tenacity, which is a pretty grim sign for them all. Sarah brings in her cake. “Fingers crossed,” says George, hoping desperately that Gina will go home. Katherine says it’s a remarkable effort, not quite believing that she’s actually convinced people to bother recreating her dumb cake.

The judges taste Sarah’s cake as if taste even matters, and it turns out Sarah’s cake is fine. Katherine admits that even in her cooking she finds there is room to improve, which is mighty generous of her.

Gina brings her diseased cake in. “I know it doesn’t look perfect, but I’m hoping I’ve nailed the flavours,” she says, like an Olympic diver who hit her head on the springboard and floated bleeding in the water for five minutes, but still hopes she might win a medal for neatness of bathing cap.

Katherine likes how Gina has shown artistic licence by making her cake look ugly and awful. Gary notes that Gina’s cake contains raw cake mixture. At least the flavours are all there, within this hideous aberration.

In comes Jess with her cake, putting it on the table and tearing herself away from it like it’s Sophie’s Choice. George tells her she needs to stop doubting herself, as everyone knows it’s Gina who has lost today. Jess’s cake looks quite a lot like the Sabbath cake and is basically fine. However, she didn’t temper her chocolate, forcing the judges to act like the kind of wankers who care about that kind of thing.

Time for the good news to be delivered to everyone who isn’t Gina. Gary thanks Katherine for coming in, slightly sarcastically it seems. “It wasn’t an easy challenge,” lies Katherine. “The cakes were delicious,” she lies again. The judges pad frantically, but sooner or later the nub has to be arrived at: Gina is terrible at cakes and must be cast into the outer darkness. George says she’s going home because her sponge was undercooked, but everyone understands that she’s going home because of all the other things she fucked up as well.

Gina declares that she feels “blessed”, which demonstrates how low her bar for blessing is set. The epilogue informs us that since being taken away in the mysterious black car she has worked for Rick Stein and talked with other nonnas, planning her revenge.

Tune in tomorrow, when you could hear a pin drop.

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