2021-07-09 5:38:29 ¶ ●

Okay, this is a TMA/Great British Bake-Off AU that I made, inspired by a few others that I’ve seen. Since I want there to be one that goes through the whole show (and by the way, I completely understand why there aren’t any that do), I decided to write it myself. And I don’t have an AO3. So this is the first chapter. It’s about 4.6K words long so…put time aside to read it?

“Welcome, bakers, to Cake Week!” says the cohost of The Great British Bake-Off, Michael. He appears to be wearing a violently pink button-down and striped pants, but Jon can’t tell whether the stripes are blue and black or white and gold. And the pink shirt gives him a bit of a headache.

“This week, you will bake cakes for us. Wow, who would have guessed? Not me, that’s for sure. Not me.” Helen isn’t any easier to look at. She has neon green hair that appears to move more than should be physically possible from just her own movements, as well as a violently orange dress with chartreuse spirals all over it. Jon could swear the spirals are moving, though he knows that that’s simply an illusion. With certain designs that were visually unsettling enough, they will appear to pulse or ripple.

“Anyway, for the signature challenge, you will be making your own take on Swiss rolls, something that hits close to home for you in a special way,” says Michael.

“Or shall we say, your own twist!” says Helen. She starts to laugh. The sound is unsettling. Jon glances around to find his fellow contestants similarly unsettled. One woman is glaring at Helen like she wants to murder her. She has blue hair and is two inches taller than Jon, or rather, 5’4”. Helen finishes laughing, to the relief of all. “Please welcome our judges, Gertrude Robinson and Elias Bouchard!”

An elderly woman with her hair in a tight bun and her mouth in a tight smile walks in, accompanied by a tall man with dark hair. The woman looks like the kind of teacher that would give you detention for daring to ask for a bathroom break, while the man looks as though someone melded the faces of the richest forty-year-old white men into one smug face.

Gertrude, Jon knows, is the head chef at a three-star restaurant. Only once in her tenure has Michelin ever given Robinson de Luxe less than three stars (it was two stars), when she was 25 and had just become the head chef, and her response was to fire the entire cooking staff and hire all new chefs.

Elias is the top food critic in the United Kingdom. Legend has it he once left a restaurant in disgust because a single bay leaf was out of place on a dish. Whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t make Jon feel any less nervous. He reminds himself that the judges know these are regular people, good bakers or not. They will be nice.

Gertrude stares at the bakers, not smiling. Elias gives them a little wave. The wave feels so smug, Jon is irritated. The blue-haired woman’s glare is now focused on Elias. Elias seems unperturbed. Jon fixes one of his own (reportedly withering) glares on Elias.

“All right, bakers! Time to spiral into chaos! Start now!” says Helen. An odd choice of words, but probably a fair prediction of what would happen. They all had two and a half hours to make a Swiss roll. That would certainly lead to chaos.

“What are you making?” says Michael. Manuela Domínguez is a short Spanish woman with her hair in two braids further tied back into a high ponytail. She is currently pressing blackberries to get a dark-purplish jelly. Her movements are impressively brisk and methodical, and she looks at the berries with such focus that she doesn’t hear Michael at first.

“Ah!” she says when Michael waves his hand in front of her face. “Geez, don’t do that. What am I making? That’s what you’re going to ask, I assume. Yes?” Without waiting for Michael’s answer, she continues. “I’m making a dark-chocolate-blackberry filling. I’ll put blackberries on top of the roll as well.”

“Interesting combination. I’ll be interested to see how that turns out,” says Michael, chuckling to himself for some reason. Manuela doesn’t get the joke, if there is one. “Why does this cake have special meaning to you?” Manuela looks up abruptly, causing 1 extra grain of flour to fall into her measuring cup. She now has 3938 grains of flour in her cup instead of 3937, and she is glaring at Michael with eyes that seem much too dark.

“Why do you care—I mean,” she says, taking a breath and plucking out a grain of flour with tweezers, “this is a cake I’d always make for the people at my church, the People’s Church of the—” The rest is bleeped out, but if you watch her mouth closely, Manuela appears to say the vine ghost or something like that. Michael nods. Manuela continues measuring ingredients with mathematical precision as Michael walks away. She doesn’t think she likes Michael very much.

“Hello, there!” says an old man gleefully. He is smiling widely at the prospect of baking and is wearing a sky-blue button-down shirt and khakis. Simon Fairchild is shooting compressed air into his dough as Helen walks up.

“Hello!” says Helen, also smiling. Simon’s happiness is contagious, apparently. “What are you making?”

“Well, I’m making a blueberry Swiss roll with white chocolate chips on top. You see, my family loves skydiving and anything having to do with the sky. It’s been that way for hundreds of years! This cake is an ancient family recipe. Of course, the compressed air was only added in the 19th century, and the actual recipe is for a standard cake, not a roll, but the blueberries and chocolate chips are the same. The blue is for the sky, and the white is for clouds, if you couldn’t tell.” Simon throws blueberries into his batter with reckless abandon.

“It looks like you’re having fun, and that’s what matters, I suppose. Just don’t forget to impress the judges as well as yourself.”

“Duly noted, Helen. Duly noted.” He nods.

“Agnes. What are you making?” Gertrude’s voice surprises Agnes, as she sounds vaguely upset by Agnes’s stirring. Since she’s doing it with oven mitts on, this seems reasonable, so she shrugs it off.

Agnes Montague looks either eighteen or seventy depending on which way you look at her. She has long red hair and is wearing a maroon shirt and blue pants that look like they’re made of asbestos.

“I’m making a cake with salsa inside that will be flambéed.” She says this very quietly, so that the cameraman has to lean quite far in to pick her voice up. Gertrude almost looks surprised.

“Huh. Interesting. A gutsy move for sure,” she says. Agnes nodded.

“Yeah, my uncle Arthur really likes spicy cake. I make it for him on his birthday, since I’m the only one he knows who can get the flambé right.” Gertrude nods and walks away.

Later, Agnes will take her cake out of the oven and wave her hand over it, a flambé somehow…appearing there.

The blue-haired woman from before chops up some strawberries, her knife flying across the cutting board. Elias walks up to her, and when she sees him, she nearly stabs him.

“My, Melanie. You had best be careful there. Wouldn’t want to stab one of the judges, would you?” His voice is calm and very smug, as usual. Melanie King glares at him.

“No. No, I wouldn’t. I’m making a strawberry Swiss roll with pecans on top. My gran used to make it all the time. I got her recipe. Now I make it all the time, since she died.”

“Okay, then. Good to know. I’m excited to see how it will taste. It’s a bit unoriginal, so it has to be especially good.”

“Good to know,” repeats Melanie with absolutely no inflection in her voice. She goes back to chopping strawberries at blinding speed.

“You have ten minutes left, bakers! Put the finishing touches on your rolls, make sure those spirals are excellent, and your rolls will be better than Swiss chocolate!” says Helen. The bakers collectively start to move faster. “Get it? Because they’re Swiss rolls? Never mind.” No one responds, not even Michael, who is currently stealing marshmallows from someone’s table.

Once everyone’s cakes are ready, Gertrude and Elias come around to try them.

“Annabelle, that is a gorgeous design, but your filling tastes oddly…dusty. Not the best flavors,” says Elias. “Perfect spiral, though.” Annabelle’s cake is decorated with icing in the shape of webs in intricate patterns. There are cobwebs in the filling. Annabelle eyes the judges with a blank expression on her face.

“Mmm. Do you know, Agnes, that wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. You may have something here with your spicy, flambéed cake,” says Gertrude. Agnes beams.

“Well, you have a fabulous spiral here. And…ah, yes, the taste is very good. I like the orange-chocolate filling very much, actually. Well done,” says Elias. Jon nods and mutters his thanks, eyes fixed on his cake. He has managed to spiral his cake with five layers instead of the more-doable four.

“Jane, I’m…frankly disappointed. Your Swiss roll is quite cracked and look here: the white chocolate is oozing out of the roll. The flavors, though, are all right. Nice balance between the honey and tart blueberries.” Jane nods. She looks a little sad. A bee lands on her ear and seems to whisper words of comfort to her, after which she looks less sad. The bee had given her the fresh honey.

It goes on like this. Manuela’s cake is very precise, and the flavors come out exactly how they’re supposed to. It’s almost too perfect. Melanie’s cake is a little dry, but the strawberries help make the cake quite pleasant to eat anyway. She rolled her cake a little too tightly, and the strawberries ooze out and look like blood. Melanie is oddly pleased by this. The judges are not.

“Elias, Gertrude,” Helen says, once they’re away from the bakers, who are taking a lunch break, “who is looking good and who is looking bad after the very first cake?”

“Well,” says Elias, “I thought that Jon’s cake was exquisite, and so was Manuela’s, if a bit too perfect. Basira’s cake was also very well done.”

“Agreed. I also liked Agnes’s cake, although more for the risk she took than the taste of it. I think that Melanie’s roll was a bit rushed and overcooked. Simon’s roll was falling to pieces, but it was very light and airy. I suppose that is to be expected when he put compressed air into his cake. I think it’s a bit too soon to tell who is doing poorly or well so far, though,” says Gertrude.

“Welcome back! I hope you all had a good lunch, and that there were no sudden twists, bends, or curves in your time spent eating. Oh, who am I kidding? I like a good twist!” says Helen, rather cryptically. Jon wishes she would get to the point. He doesn’t like surprises, twists, or even bendy roads.

“Anyway, for the technical challenge, you will be following a recipe of Gertrude’s very own making.” Gertrude nods like a wise turtle. Jon can’t get the image out of his head and has to bite his lip to keep from smiling. “You will be making a cherry cake from a quite minimal recipe,” continues Michael. That seemed contradictory to baking, which required a certain precision and exactitude or else the baked good in question would be a disaster. It was right up Jon’s alley.

Baking, at least. Not this challenge, or so it seemed.

“In a good cherry cake, we are looking for an even distribution of cherries. They should not fall to the bottom,” says Gertrude.

“Yes, and the icing should drizzle down beautifully,” says Elias.

“Well, bakers, you heard them. You have two hours. Start now!” Helen waves her hands towards the bakers, which seem to undulate hypnotically.

Jon Sims stares at his recipe, baffled. The recipe simply says, “Prepare dough by adding flour, sugar, eggs, and water in a bowl and mixing. Prepare cherries. Mix dough, beating well. Add cherries, leaving five for decoration. Bake at 450 degrees. Apply icing.” There is no baking time and no amounts of anything.

“Hey, Jon! Are you doing okay over here?” asks Helen. Jon shakes his head slowly.

“This recipe is minimal to an extreme, Helen. How am I supposed to bake with these directions?”

“Well, that’s the twist, isn’t it? Just make sure the cake doesn’t spiral out of control!” Helen laughs, giving Jon a headache, and leaves Jon to his fate. He sighs and adds flour to the mixing bowl.

Annabelle Cane ponders her recipe. She briefly wonders if she could somehow get one of the judges to—no, she promised herself she was going to win this baking contest without cheating. It’s good practice. For what, she wonders, as this thought comes to her.

She does, however, whack her stirring spoon on her bowl a bit too loudly so that her table partner, Jane, gets distracted. When Jane looks back at her own bowl, she dumps all the cherries in and starts to mix, instead of putting five aside until the end.

It isn’t cheating if it could have happened anyway, is it? No, it’s merely just…guiding Jane along. Pushing her along a silken thread to disaster, if you will.

“All right, bakers! Time to finish decorating and start gyrating,” says Michael, trying to get in on the twisty puns. Jane starts spinning around slowly and confusedly until Annabelle whispers something to her.

The judges come around to taste each cake and test their cherry distribution.

“Well, Jon, this is disappointing. Your cake is burnt, your cherries have sunk, and your icing is too thick. It is, however, edible. Good for you.” Jon nods, resisting glaring or making puppy dog eyes at Elias. He knew this would be his Achilles heel, to put it grandly.

“Martin, this is quite good,” says Gertrude. “The sponge is golden-brown. However, the icing is a bit runny. Overall, quite good, though.” Martin smiles, pleased. He’s never iced a cake before. Frosted, yes. Iced, no. It’s an important distinction.

“Manuela, I am frankly a little appalled. There are no cherries in this cake—” Elias stops, a bite of cake in his mouth, shocked. “Yet it somehow tastes like cherries?” Manuela nods, smug. Little did Elias know that she had cut the cherries to molecular size before putting them in the dough, so that it was if the very cake itself was cherry-flavored. “I don’t know whether to declare you winner of the entire contest or eliminate you for this. Well. I suppose I will have to do neither.” Manuela half-curtseys.

“Daisy, hello. These cherries seem to have lost structure. Look,” says Gertrude, holding up a slice of cake with a red splatter inside. Melanie reaches over from her table to high-five Daisy, whispering “bloody cake buddies!” Gertrude looks like she does not know what to say about that. Frankly, neither does Daisy, who awkwardly high-fives her while Basira, her table partner, laughs. “Yes. Well. The cake is a bit dry, as well. All in all, though, the cake is structurally and compositionally sound.”

The judges continue tasting cakes. Gertrude and Elias stake their claims on some of them, and Helen and Michael sneak away the rest. After all, it’s good food. Even Jon’s cherry cake.

Annabelle’s cake is quite good. Her cherries have dispersed in an oddly weblike pattern, and her icing is also in the shape of a web. Jane did not have cherries on the top of her cake, which made Gertrude look disapprovingly down the bridge of her nose at her.

Later, the bakers have left for the day. Helen walks over to Gertrude and asks her for the ‘gossip’, namely, who they think is top of the pack on the first day and who is not doing so well.

“Well…I think that Jane hasn’t done very well so far. First, she didn’t roll her roll well, then she forgot her decorative cherries. Simon’s cherry dispersion was lacking.

“Agnes, though, was very good, as well as Annabelle. That goes for both challenges.”

“I thought that Jon did very well on the first challenge and very badly on the second challenge. It was quite interesting, in fact. Manuela is also doing stunning work so far, somehow making the cake itself cherry-flavored. However, we didn’t say to do that, I will note. I quite agree with you about Jane, Gertrude. She seems likely to be eliminated, even.”

“Well, now, we will just have to wait and see.”

The next day, Jon got up bright and early for a full day of baking. To be fair, though, it was only a morning, with the rest of the day being a break to eat what they would bake that morning and chat with the other bakers.

Jon was not looking forward to the social element of the afternoon. He didn’t even know if he liked any of the other contestants. True, they mostly seemed kind enough, but still.

He supposed it had to happen, though.

“Hello, bakers! Good morning, and welcome to the second day of Cake Week!” says Michael. Ten bakers stand sleepily at their stations. “This week, we find out who will be eliminated, and who will be Star Baker!”

“Yes, we will. Yes, we will. Yes…sorry, I’m a bit sleepy today. I had too much coffee!” Helen laughs. Jon thinks she is making even less sense than usual. “You will stop the show this week, because this challenge is the showstopper!” Yes, she truly is making less sense than usual. “You have to make any traditional British cake—but here’s the twist,” and here she laughs yet again, “they have to be miniature and in trigintasexplicate!” Jon’s Latin is rusty, but he is pretty sure that that means they have to make 36 cupcakes. “You must make thirty-six identical cupcakes. Exactly the same. And you have two hours to do so. Go, bakers, go!” The bakers ran around in vague panic. Jon managed to contain his panic to the inside, but thirty-six cupcakes was a lot of them. It needed planning…

Martin Blackwood hurriedly heaves bags of flour over his shoulders, carrying them to different tables. There were a lot of short people here (Jon, Manuela, Agnes, Jane, and others), so he was helping them out. So is Daisy, who is (quite impressively) carrying two bags of flour per shoulder.

As he brings a bag to Jon’s table, he gets a close look at the man and is irritated that they’d expected people to get their own flour bags. Jon is 5 foot 2 and about as skinny as a lamppost (almost literally). A cane lies by his table, and Martin wonders if the odd pockmark scars that littered his forearms extend to his legs too. Jon smiles slightly and mutters a thank-you, fingers fumbling at the knots. Martin nods.

Martin doesn’t know what to do about his own cakes. How will he make 36 individual cakes so fast? Tears start to his eyes.

Melanie, his table partner, turns to him with concern. Or maybe it’s pity. Probably pity. He isn’t supposed to be crying about this. He’s a baker. He knows how to bake!

“Hey,” says Melanie, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “It’s all right to cry. This is hard. That’s sort of the point, right? They throw you into the deep end with these challenges. But look: they don’t expect perfection. They expect your best. That’s all you can give.

“I’ll help you, if you want. We can work on all, uh, 72 of our cakes together. Does that sound good?” Martin doesn’t want to accept the offer. He doesn’t need the help.

Except he does. So he nods, and they work together.

“Thank you,” he says to Melanie later. “Didn’t expect you to be quite so…”

“Caring?” she says drily.

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t tell anyone else.”

“I won’t,” says Martin, smiling.

“Hello, Jane. What are you making for us today?” says Elias, walking up to Jane. Jane Prentiss blinks, surprised. She is a small woman with dark brown hair and chicken pox scars all over her body. Isn’t she too young for chicken pox?

“Oh, um. I’m making almond and raspberry sponge cakes. They will be very good, I think. Or at least, that’s what the bees tell me,” she says, smiling. A bee hovers around her hair and lands on her nose. “Yes, I know, I’ll hurry up,” Jane says, apparently to the bee. Elias slowly backs away as Jane and the bee express their love for each other. Tomorrow, they will go on a picnic in a beehive. Then, Jane will take the bee to the waterpark.

“Hi, Daisy,” says Helen. Daisy Tonner is a large, muscular woman with blond hair. She levels a stare at Helen that only four people at this contest could withstand. Apparently, Helen is one of those four. (Elias, Melanie, and Basira are the other three. Jon can give as good as he gets stare-wise, Daisy’s found, but he wilts at the prospect of Daisy’s glare.)

Helen simply looks back in blithe cheeriness.

“Oh, right,” says Daisy. “Hi. Um, I’m making Genoise sponge cakes with blueberries and orange curd. It’s my mom’s favorite type of cake, and she showed me how to make it very fast.”

“That sounds great! Bye!” Although Helen does not seem fazed by Daisy’s glare, it cannot be said that Daisy radiates hospitality, so she leaves quickly.

“Hello, Basira. How are you today?” says Gertrude. Basira Hussain looks up from underneath her hijab, which is red with daisies all over it. She is a Middle Eastern woman and is wearing a light blue sweater and blue jeans, despite the day’s warmth.

“Hello. I’m good, thank you. How are you?” she says. Gertrude looks as though she didn’t expect to be asked that in return.

“Oh, I, I expect I’m good. Thank you. Can you tell me what you’re making?”

“Two things. A thyme and lemon drizzle cake and sure I don’t panic.” Gertrude smiles a little at the joke. “I just have to keep going steady, or else I’m not going to do well. Seems like a crazy challenge to do on the first week.”

“Yes, well, maybe this will make the next challenges seem easier in comparison.”

“Hey, that’s the spirit!” says Basira, smiling.

“Bakers, it’s time to do something crazy: stop baking!” says Michael.

“Gasp,” says Helen, “what a twist. Who would’ve guessed it? Not me, that’s for sure. Not me.”

“You said that yesterday,” says Michael.

“I did? How silly of me. Or rather, how quirky. How twisty, so to speak. How…spirally. Like a shell!” Maybe Helen really had had too much coffee, Jon pondered. Her jokes were bad before, but now they were awful.

Of course, Jon thought wryly, it would be quite a twist to find out that the previous day’s jokes had been less genuine than these, and she had had too much coffee then and not today.

The judges taste the cakes.

“Agnes, I do think you made these a bit too tall. Otherwise, they all came out nicely and are well-decorated.” Agnes nods thoughtfully at Elias’s judgement. The cakes are each a foot tall, so Elias is understating their height. Agnes doesn’t mention it.

“Daisy, perhaps you glared at these a bit too hard, since they’re oddly flat.” Daisy does not look like she appreciates Gertrude’s joke. “The baking is also a bit uneven, but the presentation is beautiful. Very well-done there.”

“Simon, I believe there is more air than cake in these cakes, but the blueberry topping is quite good. This is passable,” says Elias. Simon smiles like Elias had said his cake was perfect. Elias does not contradict that idea.

“Martin, the baking is well-done, but the presentation is sloppy. Perhaps you ran out of time?” Martin nods. Gertrude smiles, to reassure him. “It still looks adequate, don’t worry.”

The judges continue. Melanie’s cake frosting is horrendous, red frosting everywhere. She seems to have a knack for terrible presentation. Jane’s cakes are perfectly identical, to the judges’ well-hidden surprise, but the cake is too chewy, as if undercooked. Basira’s cake is very middle-of-the-road, nothing showstopping, as it were, but not bad at all.

“Well, bakers, you have performed so well in Cake Week! Fabulous family traditions, chewy cherry cakes, and showstopping showstoppers galore have been made,” says Michael.

“But now,” continues Helen, “one of you has to leave and one of you will be named Star Baker! It’s that time of the week—the very end. Although, of course, you will be invited to stay for an afternoon of eating cake and chatting with your fellow bakers.

“Judges, what say you? Who will be Star Baker this week?”

“All of you have done admirably, producing stunning and delicious cakes in all three challenges this week. But there is one of you that has outperformed the rest. Someone who really stepped up to the challenge. Someone who crafted weblike masterpieces.

“Annabelle, you are our Star Baker. Congratulations!” Elias hugs Annabelle first, and then she hugs the rest of the bakers. Jon shudders. He does not like spiders. Ever since he read that awful book when he was eight, he’s had nightmares of spiders eating him alive.

Annabelle smirks a little when she’s announced as Star Baker. It disappears when she finds out who got eliminated.

It’s Jane. Annabelle can’t help but feel a little sad, like maybe she shouldn’t have sabotaged someone who was already doing poorly.

Oh, well. It was how she’d always lived, and she isn’t going to change now. She does hug Jane, though, and whispers to her that she hoped she had a good date with her bee. Jane smiles gratefully. She doesn’t seem too fazed or surprised by her loss.

Granted, neither was Annabelle, although Simon and Melanie also did somewhat badly. What is up with Simon’s obsession with airy cake and Melanie’s blood-resembling presentations? She shakes her head as she munches on one of her cupcakes. All together, their frosting forms a web design. She can admit it: she loves spidery aesthetics.

“All right, congratulations, bakers, on completing a wild and cakey week! Take a break, eat some cake, eat your lunch, make friends, lose friends, murder friends—” Helen stops short and excuses herself. She does not come back, but an extremely loud creak can be heard from afar, like that of an old door opening.

The bakers leave, but Michael still stands there, smiling. He has a piece of paper in his hands, and he reads from it.

“We’d like to thank our sponsors, the Lukas family. Have you ever wanted to be alone? Away from the madding crowd? Well, now you can! Buy a portable LukasFog fog machine, and you can enter a world of fog and mist where you are the only inhabitant. Side effects may include social anxiety, depression, and a crippling terror of being alone.

“We’d also like to thank our editor, Miss Sasha James, and our producer, Mr. Tim Stoker. And a big thanks goes to Mrs. Georgie Barker, the wife of one of our contestants, for letting us use this haunted piece of land for our show.

“And the biggest thanks go to viewers like you. Remember, the Eye is always watching. And it wants your thanks. And your fear!” Michael smiles directly into the camera after he says that.