Heel Holland Bakt talk #8: everyone is running on empty (especially the judges)
No one said judging Heel Holland Bakt would be easy. Booking four high teas in one afternoon, with 24 different bites for 12 people—Janny and Robèrt, you try beating that. Respect!
Who saw Pauline being sent home this week? Janny’s harsh words about the tinned mandarins on her orange slof may already have been a warning sign: according to Mrs Van der Heijden, that tastes rather metallic. Robèrt had some strong criticism of a creative element in her showstopper: ‘When I get a high tea, I’d like it to be finished. Not that I still have to put all sorts of things together myself.’ And in hindsight, his feedback on her slof pastry was telling too: it needs to be shorter and baked at a higher temperature in the oven, because: ‘we’re bakers, not dryers’. From the desperate banging of the bonbon mould on the edge of the counter and her exclamation ‘Goodness gracious’, you could tell that Pauline also felt she wasn’t doing so well in the competition.
Chaos everywhere
Janny and Robèrt notice that baking for eight weeks in a row in a tent in miserable weather conditions takes a heavy toll on the contestants. ‘I think everyone is running on empty,’ they say to each other halfway through the episode. And then cheerfully: ‘Coffee?’ And off they go, calmly having a cup of coffee in the judges’ tent while the four remaining amateur bakers toil on in the tent. Esther especially had a hard time: coming down with a nasty cold (not Corona, surely?) and then having to produce edible fondant too—that’s no small feat. ‘It’s chaos here, chaos there, chaos everywhere,’ she says, describing both her mental state and her workbench after a challenge. No wonder her bakes are a little lacklustre—try putting together a cheerful high tea with a bad case of the flu.
The button gives her an adrenaline rush
Anouk is also beside herself with nerves. Emotional eating? She doesn’t do that—she just loses weight. ‘I do eat well, honestly, but it must be the adrenaline,’ she shares as her diet tip while rolling, kneading and decorating. ‘And you can see it here, in my face. Unfortunately, nothing is coming off my bum.’ And even after the high tea challenge, Anouk, being the perfectionist she is, mainly sees everything that went wrong. But plenty goes right, which is why she receives her third master baker button of the series in this episode.
Mysterious croissants
Jeanette tries to turn three carrot cakes that come out of a cake tin looking more like granola into a nice cake after all. It isn’t easy, as the judges also see. ‘It’s more an attack on the monarchy than a royal orange cake,’ Janny sums up the mountain of misery. ‘We’re being pretty strict, aren’t we?’ she says later while judging the technical challenge, featuring mysterious heart-shaped croissants filled with something from a piping bag. Keep that sharp eye, judges, because next week we’ll already be watching the final!
Highlight
At last, an answer to the question: who does the washing-up at Heel Holland Bakt? It turns out to be a hunched-over young man, with a mobile phone in his overflowing hands and a headset on. Anouk would happily take him home once filming is over.
Highlight
Did I understand that Limburgish correctly? Pauline says: oops, I put raspberry mousse on the choux buns where the chicken mousse was supposed to go. Bon appétit!
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