Previously on Just Desserts: Morgan shattered Gidget's sugar vase. And dreams. Zac won, Gidget struggled, and my hopes were dashed like so many fragile sugar vases as the lovely Eric was eliminated. Four chefs remain. Who will be eliminated tonight?
Two points to get to before we dive in. First, as I said in the short blurb about this episode, a great deal of time is devoted to four whiny people making themselves as unpleasant as possible. That's not super-fun to revisit, so I'm going to gloss over a lot of the "Shut up!" "No, you shut up!" "You're dumb!" "Well, so's your face!" segments. Secondly, I may be a bit behind in converting the blurb to this full recap. Say, about nine months late. Want to know what the summer of 2011 is like? It's hot. Shall we?
Monday Morning Quarterback session. Gidget beats himself up for not performing well enough in the last challenge. He wants to become the first gay, San Franciscan chef to win a season in this franchise. It'd be nice if he put some of that energy into being less of a Mean Girl, but one step at a time, I guess. Morgan is sick to death of being trapped with the other chefs. I was all ready to point out that his personality is also far from sparkling, but then tried to envision what it would be like to share a household with Seth, Zac, and Gidget. I guess I'd be grumpy, too.
Quickfire Challenge. The chefs are met in the Kitchen by a towering pile of Godiva chocolate boxes and this week's guest judge, Francois Payard. He used to be Morgan's boss, which makes Morgan nervous for what is probably a dozen good reasons. Zac tries out a weak pun about Francois being "a tough cookie". Wait... I cannot believe I just gave someone shit about weak puns after the post titles I've come up with. My apologies, Zac. Gail tells the chefs that for today's Quickfire, they'll need to tell their life stories via four chocolates, one of which will need to represent a cherished moment in each chef's history - a "Golden Moment". The winning chef gets one of the chocolates tweaked and reworked by Godiva to be sold nationwide. Huh. I'm not sure "Have your work about a cherished memory redone to suit the general public, and then be given no credit for it" is a stellar prize, but the chefs seem happy, so I won't step on their joy.
Gail starts the two-hour countdown. The chefs scatter, knocking dishes all over the floor. Zac and Gidget explain to us about how truffles and bonbons are usually a time-consuming process, so trying to get them done in two hours is a big challenge. I don't doubt it. Gidget begins emulsifying his ganaches, which I'm totally going to start using as a euphemism for something, though I'm not sure what yet. Morgan works on a bittersweet ganache to symbolize his failed marriage. Won't that make a lovely Valentine's Day gift for your sweetie? Danielle works on a baseball shape/theme to symbolize the bond between her and her father. Aw, that's nice. The "Golden Moment" chocolates rely heavily on relationships, as Morgan's revolves around his son, and Gidget's around his boyfriend. Thumbs up to Gidget on that boyfriend by the way. Nicely done. Zac's combines his parents' favorite flavors, while Danielle breaks with the relationship theme to make a chocolate to symbolize the day she opened her business.
Zac takes a few moments (in smarmerview) to insult Danielle's food, personality, and looks. What a gem. And I'm sorry, but nobody who puts that amount of gel in his hair in a desperate (and futile) attempt to hide that fact that he'll be bald in five years gets to rail on someone for their looks. Morgan crabs about Zac having the piping bags under his station, where they are sitting in full view, and threatens (in smarmerview) to throw all his chocolates in the trash. Can you see why it's taken me nine months to come back to this episode? And we're not even through the Quickfire! With the possible exception of Danielle, all of these chefs are fairly wretched people. Surely, there are more people like Eric, Erika, and Tim out there, yes? Pastry chefs aren't all douchenozzles, are they? Anyway, in the final minutes, Gidget shatters one of his chocolate molds, and unsuccessfully tries to recreate it. When time runs out, he's one chocolate short.
Gail and Francois go down the line. Zac's chocolates are all about friends and family. Yeah, I would bet that numbers at about four. He has a milk chocolate truffle with wild blueberry and peanut butter. Hmm. I like all those flavors, but can't really tell if they'd work together. His best friend is represented by a green tea/lemon truffle. A white chocolate truffle with lemongrass/lime/ginger represents his other best friend. Now that sounds tasty. Francois disagrees, calling the two best friend truffles "flat". I guess that would describe anyone who'd willingly hang out with Zac. His Golden Moment truffle is the aforementioned combination of his parents' favorites: dark chocolate and pretzels.
Danielle's first truffle symbolizes family vacations to Hawaii, incorporating pineapple and coconut. DRINK! A niece's birthday is symbolized by milk chocolate with a roasted banana filling. Yes, please. That'll do nicely for Limecrete's Pick of the Week. The baseball truffle uses caramel corn and peanuts. And the Golden Moment chocolate is a Rocky Road, with almond, marshmallow, and nougat. Morgan's box of chocolates is far and away the most beautiful, visually. His decision to go to culinary school is represented by a passion fruit and milk chocolate bonbon. His marriage is an acai rose-water jelly on top of bittersweet chocolate ganache. His Top Chef experience is represented by a mendiant with a Rocher filling. Oh, if they're symbolic of him on Top Chef, it must be made of condescension with a creamy, arrogance filling. Oh, I guess not. His "Golden Moment" is the birth of his son, represented by a green tea with a white chocolate/butter ganache.
Gidget, as mentioned, only has three chocolates. Presenting less than the required amount isn't "helping [his] ego," which as we all know, is the at the center of everything Gidget says, thinks, or does. His move from Turkey to America is symbolized by a dark chocolate ganache with apricot pates de fruits (essentially a gummy, candied fruit). His Buddhism (Side note: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I didn't realize Buddhists generally walked around acting like the embodiment of every high school cheerleader cliche out there) is represented by coconut milk and chai tea. His "Golden Moment" chocolate to symbolize his boyfriend is an almond praline with caramelized honey ganache.
Results. Naturally, Gidget falls to the bottom for not completing the challenge. Fellow Plastic Zac soon joins him there, as all of his chocolates were overly sweet, and there was no balance. Now, to the top two. Danielle had interesting ideas, and interesting flavors to go with them. Morgan's chocolates were extremely beautiful, even if the green tea one was too sweet for Francois' tastes. Even with that working against him, Morgan wins the challenge. He's curiously blase about his win, which Danielle notes. Maybe he's stewing over the fact that his son-inspired candy was the least successful. Anyhow, Francois selects the mendient chocolate as the one to be sold nationally, opting to sprinkle a little salt on top to finish it.
Elimination Challenge. A sweet old man named Ben shuffles in, and explains to the chefs that he and his wife will soon be celebrating their 61st anniversary. Gail tells them that they'll each be making an anniversary cake for the happy couple, which will be judged on appearance, and of course, flavor. The cake, that is. Not the couple. Ben relays as naughty a meeting story as sixty-three years ago gets, saying that he met his wife at a beach party and went swimming with her. Ooh, saucy! I'll bet he even saw her ankles! Naughty minx. They were married two years later. Aw. The chefs head off for thirty minutes of shopping with a $200 budget. Danielle complains about Morgan's overconfidence, and not without reason.
Back in the Kitchen, the chefs have ten hours of prep time, and will have two hours tomorrow to finish up. Zac is nervous, not only because getting a spot in the final three rests on this challenge (understandable), but because this isn't his type of challenge (not understandable). I mean, come on. "I'm going to totally PWN this dessert competition! As long as they don't ask me to make a basic cake!" I still don't understand how someone who made an almost wearable dress out of chocolate gets completely stymied by something almost any of us could do with a week's practice and a decent stand mixer. Gail enters, and tells the chefs they get to spend some time with Ben and his wife to glean some inspiration. And who does Ben's wife turn out to be? Sylvia Weinstock. Ooh, this will add some pressure. Good challenge idea. Sylvia offers some history to help the chefs out, such as the colors of her wedding dress and bouquet, the time she and Ben spent smooching under a piano (heh), and the flavors they prefer. Much like me, she's a lemon baby.
Once Ben and Sylvia leave, the chefs begin their prep in earnest. Morgan crabs about Zac, who earlier crabbed about Danielle, who earlier crabbed about Morgan, who was earlier crabbed about by Gidget. In case you've forgotten, the theme of this episode is deep, loving, respectful relationships. Danielle makes a gray icing to represent Sylvia's gray wedding dress, and hopes to incorporate pink flowers as well. Zac wants to cement two cakes together with passion fruit ice cream. He and Gidget share some Plastic gossip, before Johnny stops by to Ptimewaste. Zac promises to tone down his normal level of campy kitsch for this cake, while Morgan hopes to have learned a lesson from Sylvia's critiques of his wedding cake. Johnny worries that Gidget's cake will be too fussy and complicated, and that Danielle has to rise above her normal fair-to-middling challenge placement to earn a spot in the finale.
Zac completes his bottom layer, and to his credit, realizes that it does not look good. It's an odd shade of blue, and what appears to be an attempt at stripes has gone all wonky and uneven. He sighs that he'll just have to go for broke on the other sections of the cake. A stupid spat breaks out when Morgan hoards the piping bags (well, sort of -- again, they're in full view under his station), and explains that he's just getting Zac back for hoarding them earlier, because he is nine. It's actually Danielle who takes him to task for it, and although she's got at least a dozen valid points to attack him on, she just settles for sneering at him and telling him to shut up. Happy anniversary, Ben and Sylvia!
Time winds down, and the chefs store their cakes for transport. The next day, they're driven out to a mansion's backyard where the party has been set up. As mentioned, they've got two hours to finish their cakes, and Morgan brags that he only needs a quarter of that, settling down for a nice, quiet think about how awesome he is afterwards. Gidget snarks in interview that maybe Morgan should be checking his cake over for areas of improvement, because it looks awfully simple, and for once, I'm with him. It's pretty basic. Zac realizes that he's incapable of making something classy and restrained, and decides to just go full Valley of the Dolls all over his cake. Out comes the disco dust, and he turns what started out as an ugly cake into a SPECTACULARLY ugly cake.
The party begins, and the cakes are presented. Gail leads the judges, hosts, and the couple of the hour down the line. Morgan's cake is a simple, circular, white tiered cake with some piping and a piano on top. The top tier is lemon and raspberry panna cotta, and the bottom is a dark chocolate sponge cake with ganache. Tasting. Everyone has positive things to report. Sylvia enjoyed both tiers, and his presentation is lauded. Danielle's cake is battleship gray accented with pink roses, and is accented with decoration to emulate piano keys. It's finished off with Ben and Sylvia's monogram in gold lettering. The cake itself is chocolate, with sour cherry compote and Greek yogurt ice cream. Spew. The judges disagree. They love the flavor, even if they find the gray icing a bit odd. Zac's cake... What to say about Zac's cake... Well, they say a picture's worth a thousand words, but in this case, I'd say we could squeeze out about double that:
This tower of shit would be out of place at a kid's birthday party, nevermind an anniversary party attended by actual adults. The lady who runs Cakewrecks would look and this and say "That's it. The blog can end now. We have a winner." I mean, listen. I know the challenges are tough, the time constraints are a killer, and by this point in the competition, everyone has gone stark raving mad (except Seth, whose starting point was stark raving mad). But I'm hard pressed to look at that thing and think of how Zac could have fucked it up more. He makes up some twaddle about how the blue icing symbolizes the water, and the black and white circles, a piano. The judges do their best not to double over in hysterical laughter right there at the table.
I suppose I should mention what the cake is made of, though it hardly seems to matter. The top tier is dark chocolate and fresh raspberry, while the bottom tier is lemon sponge cake with raspberry jam. That actually sounds fairly good, though I'm not sure I'd enjoy the passion fruit ice cream cementing the layers together. Tasting. The judges naturally hate the presentation, but find some nice things to say about some of the flavor components, though Francois notes a nasty aftertaste of burnt cocoa powder. By contrast, Gidget's cake appears quite lovely. It's a pleasant shade of pale yellow, with piano keys on the side, and a vibrant pink flower decoration on top. The top layer is almond cake with chocolate mousse. The bottom layer is sponge cake with lemon cream. That all sounds great. Unfortunately, as Gidget cuts into the cake to serve the judges a slice, it kind of disintegrates. Tasting. It turns out that the subtitles have woefully under-described the cake, and Gidget has thrown all sorts of bells and whistles into the mix that compete and fight each other. The judges aren't too pleased with it, finding it a bit of an overcomplicated mess.
The party winds down, and the chefs taste each others' cakes. Gidget compliments Danielle's. Danielle interviews that she feels pretty good about this challenge, and is grateful that they're judged anew each episode, because no matter how close she's come to elimination before, as long as she hasn't made the ugliest cake the judges have ever seen this time around (I'll leave you to intuit the image they flash on the screen at this point), she should be safe. Zac interviews that he knows he didn't put out a good product, but thinks he should get to the finale over Morgan anyway, based on pure gumption and risk-taking. In other words, we're already back to the remarkable attitude I mentioned in the last episode: "I really messed up, but feel that there should be zero consequence." I'm continually gobsmacked by this theory that taking a risk should automatically carry with it the reward for the risk being successful. That's not really what a risk is. Sometimes you achieve something great. And sometimes you make the ugliest cake in history. Life isn't the second-grade science fair, kids. You don't get a blue ribbon just for participating.
Interstitial. Morgan tells us that he's always the last chef to leave the apartment in the morning. Fascinating. Do they really think these little scenes stop people from blowing by with their DVRs? Hell, what do I know? Maybe they do.
Judges' Table. In the fret 'n sweat, Morgan makes a tortured analogy about how the Top Chef experience is like climbing a mountain. The chefs share a brief moment of commiseration before going out to face the judges. Zac's arms are already crossed defensively. Gail reminds us that the challenge winner will receive $15,000 and a guaranteed spot in the finale. Not bad for a layer cake. Danielle's cake was imaginative, and had spot-on flavor. The worst thing they can find to say about it was that the gray icing was an odd choice. Gidget wanted to tell a story with his cake, but in adding so much detail, he made it overcomplicated. His flavored buttercream was nice, though, as was his elegant presentation.
Morgan's presentation was classically simple, though Francois thinks the panna cotta needed some acidity, Hubert thinks the chocolate layer was a bit dry, and Johnny says his shell border was uneven. Man, they are just killing him on the details. Zac admits to struggling with this challenge, saying that "Sylvia is a force to be reckoned with." I guess it's her fault that his cake looked like Beach Blanket Bingo exploded all over it. Hubert did like that the cake was moist, but that's about all the praise it gets. Zac, perhaps having realized that "I should be rewarded for taking a risk that didn't work out," isn't enough of an argument, reaches for the only thing he can think of to save himself, and sinks to an even weirder and more off-putting defense.
See if you can follow this one: Zac feels that because he is more emotional and effusive, he deserves a spot in the finale more than Morgan does. You see, because Morgan doesn't fall all over himself weeping and rending his clothing every time he wins a challenge, that must mean he doesn't care about the competition, and thus, should be eliminated. Morgan, his voice shaking with fury, responds with both barrels. He says it's not in his character to jump up and down and flail around singing showtunes like a little girl when he's happy or excited. That statement can certainly be read as an upsettingly homophobic attack, and while I'm trying to get offended on Zac's behalf, I just can't get there. If Morgan had said the same thing out of the blue, I'd be apoplectic, but Zac had that coming. He just impugned Morgan's character in an effort to distract from his own shitty work, and to me, that's a bigger character flaw than shining a spotlight on a bully's biggest insecurity. Sorry to all my homo brethren for that, but being oppressed doesn't give us the right to be raging assholes for no reason.
Gail nods and somewhat hilariously squeaks out "Okay..." before dismissing the chefs. Back in the Kitchen, Zac decides to cover himself in even more glory by sheepishly telling Morgan that attacking his character was "personality, not personal". Dude, if you're going to be such a nasty person, you may as well own it. Stop trying to pretend like your vicious attack was just a show for the judges, and lets-all-go-grab-a-cup-of-coffee-and-laugh-about-it. Morgan says it better than I could in interview: "Yeah, it is personality. And yours sucks. Go buy a new one." Deliberations. Zac's presentation sucked, and the flavor didn't do much to save it. Morgan's cake was a bit too simple and bland, though it was appropriate to the occasion. Danielle's cake was great, though the judges harp on the icing color again. Gidget's cake was lovely on the outside and a convoluted mess on the inside. The judges reach a decision.
Elimination. Johnny congratulates all four of the chefs, and pretends that they're wonderful people who make him proud to be a pastry chef. Really? They generally strike me as egocentric children who make me want to run away screaming. Francois gets to announce the challenge winner, who turns out to be... Danielle. Despite their earlier carping, Morgan immediately reaches out to give her a hug. Zac and Gidget applaud her. In an eerie callback to Morgan's tirade about jumping up and down like a girl, she...jumps up and down. She's ecstatic with her win and her spot in the finale. After she's dismissed, the judges address the other chefs. Morgan played it safe, Zac put too much of his own personality into his cake (heh), and Gidget needs restraint. We go over to Gail for the chop. Zac. Your dessert just didn't measure up. Please pack your tools and go. Whee!
Final interview. Zac isn't surprised by his elimination, though he makes sure to sneak in a crack about Morgan's rubbery cake. He tells us that he can't wait to see what comes after this in his career. Hey, as long as whatever he does next isn't on my television screen, I wish him all the best. As it is, after that cake and that "professionalism", this elimination is so satisfying, I may need to take up smoking.
Overall Grade: C+
1 comment:
I'm just not sure that Top Chef "just desserts" will stick around. I'm sure they are good chefs and maybe its the time constrains but it just seems so weak! Maybe Top Chef in general has hit its peak?
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