- The bakers turn their attention to pies. For their first task, they must master a perfect Wellington. When they have recovered, it is straight into a fiendishly difficult technical challenge - hand-raised pies. None of the bakers have used a pastry dolly before and it proves the downfall of many. With several bakers in the danger zone, everything rests on the showstopper challenge - American pies. Who will be this week's star-spangled baker and who will be leaving the bake-off?—Anonymous
- It's the halfway point for this season's competition, and for the second time for this group of bakers, they will have to contend with avoiding the dreaded soggy bottom in dealing with pies this week. They will each be making a classic for their signature challenge, a Wellington, and beyond the stipulations of length and their filling needing to be completely encased with pastry, they are free to make any type of Wellington they want, and not just the traditional beef. In light of this challenge, Mel goes into London to learn about the lost tradition of the Cockney eel pie, which rose out of eels once being the only fish that could survive the polluted Thames and thus cheap and easily sourced. Most will be out of their element in being asked to make two hand raised chicken, bacon and apricot pies apiece for the technical challenge, the hand raising referring to the relatively lost art of the hot water crust pastry raised by hand around around a wooden dolly, which is then extracted after being chilled so that the filling can be placed in the resulting pastry cavity, with the sides of the resulting pies exposed during baking to allow them to crisp. The bakers will not know how their pies have turned out until day two when the judging will happen as the flavored gelatin added immediately after baking must be allowed to set in the refrigerator overnight. And they will proverbially be heading west across the Atlantic for the showstopper, where each will be making a family-sized single crust sweet pie in the American tradition which may be difficult for them only in that, in the words of one baker, they are "disgusting" in being cloying sweet to the British palate, that sentiment echoed by one judge.—Huggo
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