Shit got real on Bake Off this week. Forget American Horror Story or Scream Queens, the real horror this Halloween was found in a marquee in the English countryside. Tara Ward witnessed it all fall apart.
Tuesday’s episode of Great British Bake Off served up the stuff of nightmares: possible sabotage, irrational behaviour, and terrifying meltdowns.
Plus a giant meringue swan.
It began a typically innocent Bake Off episode, with enough camaraderie and good will to make you vomit into your Thermomix. The nine remaining bakers prepared to make a Baked Alaska, a heavenly mix of sponge, ice-cream and meringue. It looked so soft and delicious I could climb into one and sleep for a week.
But the Bake Off winds blew no good when Iain discovered his dish had been interfered with. In case you were still licking that Baked Alaska off your screen, I’ll repeat: Iain’s ice-cream HAD BEEN REMOVED FROM THE FREEZER.
Someone call Citizens Advice or Dial a Prayer, because Iain needs answers. How did this heinous crime against frozen confectionary happen? Was it an innocent mistake or an outrageous act of sabotage, a tactical masterstroke to eliminate the tall and beardy from the competition? Or was it merely a silent protest highlighting food safety issues around voluminous facial hair?
I’m not pointing chocolate ladyfingers, but pretty sure Diana’s sticky prints were all over that tin.
Iain was appalled. Diana was shocked too, but probably felt better after she looked at her own rock-solid ice-cream. Still, it’s not like Iain’s dish sat on a bench surrounded by bright lights and hot ovens in the middle of a heatwave for long. How bad can it be?
It’s thaw-ful. Welcome to hell, my friends.
In desperate times like these, we must consult the mysterious beast some people call science. If we take the freezing point depression, consider the temperature transitions and include the exothermicity factor, we can conclude the likelihood of Iain making ice-cream in ten minutes is: not a shitshow.
This was Iain’s post climate-change Baked Alaska. The ice caps had melted, the sea levels had risen, and the only thing frozen was Iain’s cold, dead heart. He responded as any irate, russet-bearded baker would, and chucked his entire bake in the bin. That’ll learn ‘em, Iain.
The Baked Alaska lay silently at the bottom of the bin, next to Iain’s dignity and his future in the competition. He collected it all and sloshed his way towards the judging table. Dead man walking, with a bin.
Luis was horrified. Martha covered her eyes. Even the marquee walls quivered, though that could have been the wind.
Chetna covered her mouth in a silent scream.
It’s tricky to stay in a baking competition when all you present is a stainless steel cake coffin. If only Iain had thought to pipe the outside with some delicious buttercream rosettes.
“I didn’t cope with the situation very well,” he admitted, ironically frozen to the spot. I’d be eating that cake out of the bin with one of Diana’s wooden spoons by now, so I reckon Iain did okay.
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The nightmare was over. Iain retreated to the safety of his own home, where nothing leaves the freezer without his express permission, and Diana’s creepy meringue swan lived to swim another day. Bloody good work, Bake Off: for every soul-destroying moment of cake-related madness, you raise us up with the inspiring vision of a malformed sugar bird. I’ve always heard swan tastes delicious, and now we know why.
The LoL Worlds Semifinals has wrapped up and it’s safe to say it’s been dramatic. Worlds correspondent Eugenia Woo summarises the action for your eyeballs. (Eugenia’s previous weekly recaps can all be read here.)
Worlds’ month-long run is slowly coming to a close – the Finals will be on the 30th of October and like many of us have predicted [spoiler] it’s going to be primetime Korean-on-Korean action. It’s going to sound like an exaggeration if you haven’t watched the games yourselves but I shit you not, this year’s Semifinals had some of the best League of Legends I’ve ever had the privilege of watching (whilst hunched over a keyboard and making sad noises into microwaveable popcorn). Time for a rollercoaster ride of the best and the most mind-boggling of the week!
The Good: While ROX ultimately lost the series 2-3, I was so incredibly proud of my boys. In fact, I was so proud that I actually cried. My friends are convinced that this is some kind of crowning achievement because my usual emotional reaction to anything is to ask myself how a normal person would act before vaguely approximating it like a malfunctioning android, but I digress. If you were watching it, you probably felt some kind of indescribable chest-tightening feeling during Game 3, which was when ROX were on top form and gave SKT the kind of hiding we’d been waiting a whole year for.
There was Kim “PraY” Jong-in hitting pretty much every single Enchanted Crystal Arrow on Ashe. There was Kang “GorillA” Beom-hyeon whipping out the unprecedented Miss Fortune support that tore apart the SKT line-up with a barrage of Bullet Times and sheer mindfuckery. The innovation and aggression from ROX was incredible to witness and it takes a hell of a lot to dethrone Faker the Demon King for one game, let alone two. That’s a compliment directed at both ROX and SKT; the mental fortitude needed to take a set to its full 5 games and to win from behind like SKT did is almost unquantifiable. If we had any doubts that Faker and Co were the #1 favourite to hoist the Summoner’s Cup, they were wiped off the face of earth by this last performance. It was the Song of Ice and Fire – ROX’s skirmishing, bloodthirsty style clashed in spectacular form with the surgical precision of SKT’s mechanically-focused plays and produced an epic that will go down in competitive League’s history.
The WTF: The award for Coach of the Year should go to Kim “kkOma” Jung-gyun, the coach for SKT for delivering the most WTF moment of the entire tournament so far – putting substitute jungler Bae “bengi” Seoung-ung on a champion that he’d never played in any competitive match ever to claw the team back to victory. While post-Semis interviews revealed that it had actually been a blunder (SKT was forced to make the best of a bad situation by taking Nidalee away from ROX’s jungler), what looked like a mistake turned into an incredible two games and ultimately a well-deserved win.
It’s rare that you get two WTF moments out of a single set of matches at this level but if we thought that Worlds was an ocean of safe meta picks, GorillA’s ADC support pick proved us all wrong. Tons of damage + a slow to help PraY set up those 100% accurate ults = a killer combination. While we can all look back on that moment now and think “This is the logical counter to that annoying Zyra pick everyone’s been playing,” SKT took a whole two games to wrap their heads around ROX’s innovation and they very nearly fell as a result. We’ve gotta give props to GorillA for picking something that was even more outlandish than ANX’s support Brand pick during Groups and making it work.
Finals Prediction: Fans and pros alike have said that this series was the true Finals match, and it’s obvious why. We may not ever see these two teams in such form ever again, and these matches were the gift that kept on giving. However, Samsung Galaxy is one quality team who have played their asses off to get here and if SKT has learned anything from this clash with ROX, it’s that even champions bleed.
H2K Gaming v Samsung Galaxy
The Good: One of the best things to come out of this series besides the dominating performance by Samsung has been the fact that people are finally recognising the immense talent and skill of their jungler, Kang “Ambition” Chan-yong. While a lot of my focus last week was on their midlaner, Lee “Crown” Min-ho, and I rambled on and on about how instead of banning his Viktor, H2K should just have Crown himself removed from the tournament, it’s going to be a bit different today. I admit, I was one of the foolish few who underestimated Ambition’s contribution to his team’s success at Worlds. Even after his brilliant Skarner play which had everyone up in arms, I turned a blind eye. Not anymore. He was recognised as the Player of the Series, and rightly so: there wasn’t a single thing happening on the Rift during these matches that Ambition wasn’t a part of. I think psychics are a load of bullshit but he came close – Samsung played a million steps ahead of H2K during the series and part of that was from the impeccable vision control and pressure exerted by their constantly-roaming jungler. Sure, Crown’s KDA made him the superstar, but Ambition was the real puppet master and no one could break free of his grasp.
(c) Inven
The WTF: I felt at least a little bad during the Quarterfinals when I gently tore into Cloud 9 for having rolled over and died as soon as they caught a glimpse of SKT, and I’ll admit, my hopes weren’t that high for H2K. However, my WTF moment isn’t about how they underperformed, or how they had a shitty draft that they refused to change, or even how their star ADC Konstantinos “FORG1VEN” Tzortziou wasn’t given the support that he needed to help them take a game off Samsung. What shocked me the most was how well Marcin “Jankos” Jankowski played despite the fact that they were probably doomed from the get-go. To employ common caster vernacular, the H2K jungler played outta his damn mind. While the team got off to a great start that soon devolved into a one-of-a-kind European league clown fiesta, the one constant was Jankos’ great performance. It’s hard to go up against one of Korea’s most experienced competitive junglers, and I’ve already waxed lyrical about Ambition’s ridiculous ability to be everyone at once on the map to deliver kills right into the waiting hands of his teammates. To see Jankos hold his own against a titan like that was inspirational, and it bodes well for the future of the EU scene if they can cultivate players of his calibre. It’s hard to stare death (aka Crown) in the face and to not give up instantly, but Jankos nearly broke his back trying to carry his team to the Summoner’s Cup and we’re all assholes if we don’t acknowledge his bloody hard work.
Finals Prediction
I’ve already made it clear that I think SKT is going to end up taking the Summoner’s Cup home yet again, but Samsung have gone from strength to strength in this tournament and it’d be disrespectful to not consider them competition. While I don’t know if they’re going to be able to take two games off SKT like ROX did, mainly because of their performance during the last LCK split and the fact that their team has come this far almost out of nowhere, I’ll be lying if I said that a part of me wasn’t rooting for the underdog this time.
Disclaimer
My recap of the Finals is probably going to be mostly reaction .gifs because a) Inven is a force to be reckoned with and b) the memes about Samsung Galaxy’s jungler are dominating all commentary about the tournament right now. If you have a favourite pic, a sick burn, or a winning prediction that you want to share, tweet me @ginnywoes on the 30th from noon onwards to have your say!
Mates, this Worlds coverage has been brought to you with the help and support of our other mates Bigpipe Broadband.
