Bake Squad
Sep. 17th, 2021 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleThe premise of Netflix's Bake Squad is that Christina Tosi, the founder of Milk Bar, has gathered together four bakers into a squad: Ashley is an alternative-type white single mom who is the queen of cakes, Christophe is a pastry chef from France, Gonzo is a chocolatier from Argentina, and Maya-Camille is a hard of hearing Black woman whose specialty is flavors. At the beginning of the episode, someone comes in and tells them about the person whose celebration they're planning. The bakers then have seven hours to make a dessert. At the end of that time, the person comes back and they and Christina taste and compliment all the desserts. The person then chooses one, and Christina takes a picture of the winner, the person, and the dessert with an instant camera. The winner high-fives the other three bakers, puts their picture on the bulletin board, and then gets to remake the dessert for the party. The episode ends with footage from the party.
I don't think the show is good, but I found it weirdly compelling. It's almost a parody of American decadence. It has terrible reality show lighting, Christina's intros are extremely cheesy, and the desserts are totally over the top.
I have some questions about their food safety standards. In the first episode, they're making something for a birthday party for a pair of kids that takes place in a park. The winning dessert is a chocolate dragon egg using something like a hundred pounds of chocolate (for reference, regular old chocolate bars are about three ounces) that they crack open. Of course, if you have an egg standing on end and you break it, the pieces fall outward, and onto the ground since the thing is too tall to be up on a table. In another episode, there's a fully edible ball pit, which they then (a) put a slide that has been sitting on the floor into and (b) send a baby-sized crash test dummy down the slide into see how well the balls smash.
The piece about the show I would one hundred percent read an entire longread about is the product placement. I caught the Bob's Red Mill products because I recognized the bags. There's a panel in the credits with a list of thanks to the product placement people, and that screen stays up longer than the other credit screens that speed by. Was this a complete quid pro quo - we give you products if you show that you're using our stuff - or is there actual money changing hands?
Possibly I am just the wrong kind of person to appreciate it, but the desserts themselves look more like showpieces for decoration than delicious treats. I had the same reaction to most of them that I had the first time I watched GBBO, where I just thought that it doesn't have to be that hard. I know this show is about professionals showing off their skills, but there's something about the stuff they produce that isn't really appealing to me. I think a lot about Mary Berry on GBBO saying, "Well it looks homemade," and meaning it as a criticism. I grew up baking, and my mom has talked about the fact that so often, she's found people are very impressed by homemade baked goods because so many people don't bake anymore. (Possibly this has changed in the years since GBBO became popular, but there was only one other person at my last job who occasionally brought in baked goods just because.) I guess my point is that delicious looking plain old baked goods are more appealing to me than outrageous masterpieces.
The episode I'm most fascinated by is episode 6: "Supersize Smash Cake." A woman and her daughter are there for a first-birthday cake for the woman's other daughter. They explain that a rainbow baby is a baby after a miscarraige and the baby is a double rainbow baby so the whole party is rainbow themed. The term "rainbow baby" was new to me (I googled the origins of it and it's only been around since 2008). On the one hand, that can be a lovely image. On the other hand, that's kind of a lot of pressure to put on a baby. I first thought the other daughter was eleven or twelve, but maybe she was more like fourteenish. The daughter has the vocabulary and intonation of reality TV absolutely perfect, and she does most of the talking when they're tasting the dessert options at the end. The more I think about this episode, the more I wonder if the teenager was the one who wanted to be on the show and had to have her mom with her because she was too young to do it herself.
Christophe's creation is the one that wins. Christina sources a wooden display platform for him: a sky blue base on wheels supporting an arch painted like a rainbow. It has shelves all the way up the sides that are also painted. Each stripe is slightly more than one cupcake wide, and he makes cupcakes in six different fruit flavors, one for each stripe of the rainbow, that go on the shelves. In the center of the platform under the rainbow is the smash cake part: a cake sculpted into the shape of a pot of gold with its sides covered in rainbow fondant leaving a space on the top of the cake to hold some gold coins. At the last minute, Christina tells him she thinks it needs clouds, and he quickly whips up some undyed cotton candy to drape over bits of the rainbow. In the judging process, the teenager is pleased to get to test the smashability quotient of the cake. Then we get footage of the party. They put the baby down in front of the smash cake - and she reaches out and delicately picks up one of the coins. Later we see her with a cupcake. She has cupcake and frosting around her mouth, because cupcakes are bigger than baby mouths, but she's very carefully holding the cupcake in her fingers, and it might even still be in its wrapper. I laughed both because all that worry about making a good cake for a baby to smash and then she didn't smash and because she is very much a baby after my own heart. Why would you smash something when you can eat a treat without getting your hands dirty? I told my family about this over family lunch, and my mom laughed and reminded us of the pictures of the two of us at one year old: I'm delicately picking up bites with a careful pincer grasp; my brother has smashed a handful of cake into his face.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for a show that I'm not sure I even liked that much. But I find there's so much for me to think about that I'm super tempted to nominate/request it for Yuletide. I think a story where they have to make a dessert for some sort of eldritch monster or an alien or characters from other media could be a lot of fun - and at least if it's fictional, I don't have to worry so much about their food safety standards or the excessive use of resources.
I don't think the show is good, but I found it weirdly compelling. It's almost a parody of American decadence. It has terrible reality show lighting, Christina's intros are extremely cheesy, and the desserts are totally over the top.
I have some questions about their food safety standards. In the first episode, they're making something for a birthday party for a pair of kids that takes place in a park. The winning dessert is a chocolate dragon egg using something like a hundred pounds of chocolate (for reference, regular old chocolate bars are about three ounces) that they crack open. Of course, if you have an egg standing on end and you break it, the pieces fall outward, and onto the ground since the thing is too tall to be up on a table. In another episode, there's a fully edible ball pit, which they then (a) put a slide that has been sitting on the floor into and (b) send a baby-sized crash test dummy down the slide into see how well the balls smash.
The piece about the show I would one hundred percent read an entire longread about is the product placement. I caught the Bob's Red Mill products because I recognized the bags. There's a panel in the credits with a list of thanks to the product placement people, and that screen stays up longer than the other credit screens that speed by. Was this a complete quid pro quo - we give you products if you show that you're using our stuff - or is there actual money changing hands?
Possibly I am just the wrong kind of person to appreciate it, but the desserts themselves look more like showpieces for decoration than delicious treats. I had the same reaction to most of them that I had the first time I watched GBBO, where I just thought that it doesn't have to be that hard. I know this show is about professionals showing off their skills, but there's something about the stuff they produce that isn't really appealing to me. I think a lot about Mary Berry on GBBO saying, "Well it looks homemade," and meaning it as a criticism. I grew up baking, and my mom has talked about the fact that so often, she's found people are very impressed by homemade baked goods because so many people don't bake anymore. (Possibly this has changed in the years since GBBO became popular, but there was only one other person at my last job who occasionally brought in baked goods just because.) I guess my point is that delicious looking plain old baked goods are more appealing to me than outrageous masterpieces.
The episode I'm most fascinated by is episode 6: "Supersize Smash Cake." A woman and her daughter are there for a first-birthday cake for the woman's other daughter. They explain that a rainbow baby is a baby after a miscarraige and the baby is a double rainbow baby so the whole party is rainbow themed. The term "rainbow baby" was new to me (I googled the origins of it and it's only been around since 2008). On the one hand, that can be a lovely image. On the other hand, that's kind of a lot of pressure to put on a baby. I first thought the other daughter was eleven or twelve, but maybe she was more like fourteenish. The daughter has the vocabulary and intonation of reality TV absolutely perfect, and she does most of the talking when they're tasting the dessert options at the end. The more I think about this episode, the more I wonder if the teenager was the one who wanted to be on the show and had to have her mom with her because she was too young to do it herself.
Christophe's creation is the one that wins. Christina sources a wooden display platform for him: a sky blue base on wheels supporting an arch painted like a rainbow. It has shelves all the way up the sides that are also painted. Each stripe is slightly more than one cupcake wide, and he makes cupcakes in six different fruit flavors, one for each stripe of the rainbow, that go on the shelves. In the center of the platform under the rainbow is the smash cake part: a cake sculpted into the shape of a pot of gold with its sides covered in rainbow fondant leaving a space on the top of the cake to hold some gold coins. At the last minute, Christina tells him she thinks it needs clouds, and he quickly whips up some undyed cotton candy to drape over bits of the rainbow. In the judging process, the teenager is pleased to get to test the smashability quotient of the cake. Then we get footage of the party. They put the baby down in front of the smash cake - and she reaches out and delicately picks up one of the coins. Later we see her with a cupcake. She has cupcake and frosting around her mouth, because cupcakes are bigger than baby mouths, but she's very carefully holding the cupcake in her fingers, and it might even still be in its wrapper. I laughed both because all that worry about making a good cake for a baby to smash and then she didn't smash and because she is very much a baby after my own heart. Why would you smash something when you can eat a treat without getting your hands dirty? I told my family about this over family lunch, and my mom laughed and reminded us of the pictures of the two of us at one year old: I'm delicately picking up bites with a careful pincer grasp; my brother has smashed a handful of cake into his face.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for a show that I'm not sure I even liked that much. But I find there's so much for me to think about that I'm super tempted to nominate/request it for Yuletide. I think a story where they have to make a dessert for some sort of eldritch monster or an alien or characters from other media could be a lot of fun - and at least if it's fictional, I don't have to worry so much about their food safety standards or the excessive use of resources.