It was time again for the Christmas special of ‘Bake Off’, in which the bakingtent of the program is briefly transformed into a nativity scene and a fewoutcasts among the well-known Flemish people can fight with flour, eggs andtheir own ignorance in the kitchen.
Stephen WerbrouckSunday December 18, 202208:41
Two years ago, at the second edition, was Minister of Health MaggieDeBlock a guest, and while corona, partly due to its inadequate policy,wreaked havoc in hospitals and care centers all over the country, she happilybaked and sculpted a Christmas scene. The unfortunate timing of De Block toappear as a politician in a TV program of the lighter kind will never beequaled or surpassed, but it must be said: Petra DeSutter was a creditablesecond this year. When the episode was taped weeks ago, she couldn’t haveforeseen that, but that as a deputy prime minister in the federal governmentyou stand jolly in a comfortable tent between Christmas trees and baubleswhile refugees, even entire families, in the biting freezing cold on streetsleeping: it is of an irony so bitter that not even a kilogram of baklavasweetens them.
De Sutter did not participate as a deputy prime minister, she hastened to say,but as an ardent hobby cook and admirer of the ‘magical process’ of baking.The three other participants, who in their daily lives are usually just casualpassers-by in the kitchen and hoped for a Christmas miracle here, were nomatch for her. When everyone had to melt chocolate to make Christmas baublesin the first round, it was over Jonas Geirnaert the concept of ‘au bain-marie’ was already too ambitious, so that he then concentrated mainly ontrying to bribe the jury in an increasingly less devious way. ComedienneSerine Ayari was notable for using the word “putain” much more often thanher scales—causation cannot be ruled out—and for gagging profusely when one ofher eggs turned out to contain a fetus. While she was making vomiting noises,the presenter came Wim Opbrouck cheerfully say that ‘something like thisonly occurs in one in five thousand eggs’: we didn’t get much closer to amiracle in the episode.
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Surprisingly, the toughest competitor for Petra was Victor Verhulst ,which – as loyal viewers of ‘De Verhulstjes’ know – has an almost mysticalconnection with one of the most important ingredients in the patisserie: theegg. He eats three eggs a day, he told Ayari, which is at least a thousand ina year – which means he’s eaten at least one chicken fetus in the past fiveyears. His favorite part, however, is the egg yolk, “one of the purest andtastiest things ever, if you find that out today, you’re in.” During the firsthalf of the shooting, Viktor may have occasionally beaten an egg yolk from hiswork table, because when the four candidates were ready for their spectacle,he opted for a pastry for which you only need the egg white: macarons, whichdressed as the Verhulst family in an idyllic winter picture of a mountain.
For reasons that have never been explained, Viktor had stuffed the macaronswith salmon mousse, so we wouldn’t have been surprised if judges Rules andHerman at the tasting had begun to retch. But in the Christmas special of’Bake Off’ traditionally cosiness and mildness reign supreme: the two praisedboth the pastry and ‘the perfectly flavored filling’ without hesitation and avisibly shaken Viktor stammered that he had never received such positivecomments. We are already looking forward to the episode of ‘De Verhulstjes’ inwhich Viktor Gert instead of fried eggs, makes macarons with salmon moussefor breakfast.