I'm more worried for Mimi, and us being stuck with Princess Parfait. You really should check your ingredients before you start to cook and they don't look impressed. Chances are Elise's will taste better.

An undercooked brownie is a far worse crime than an unbalanced sauce

Particularly when all you have cooked is dessert after dessert

What I don't get is why Elise didn't serve the edge pieces as cubes of brownie - they were more cooked and could have been trimmed to make a viable serving.

Oh yes, I think Harry must be safe, at least most of his tasted good, which Mimi's apparently didn't. None of them have covered themselves in glory, though.

I was thinking the same sort of thing - couldn't she have cut some off the top or bottom? I think she was so wedded to the idea of a 'high' presentation she couldn't think her way out of trouble.

It wasn't even that high.

But I think she is safe

So you can be a bad cook as long as the chocolate tastes good....

Seemed a bit rich to call Harry's idea a bit "week three" when Elise has been chucking up the same mousses/icecreams etc. forever. I didn't see the audition episodes so was staggered to see she actually did savoury for it. By choice?

Mimi had a bit of a howler as well though, building an entire dish around a specific kind of cheese that she then realises she doesn't actually have? Whoops...

I am not convinced that chocolate chilli sauce goes with crispy pancetta and fig. But smoked ricotta really doesn't.

But is poor judgement of flavour balance really worse than a brownie that oozes from the pan??

Bad cooking should be punished

My recording wigged out before they'd even finished cooking. Who went home? I'm guessing it was Mimi.

Well, there are chocolate desserts such as fondants that are technically undercooked and ooze. They taste good, so maybe that's why she got away with it.

I was very disappointed to lose my favourite contestant Mimi like that. Such a silly mistake. She must have been kicking herself.

So the next episode is a stand-alone masterclass. It's been a while since that's happened. (It was the same in Aus.)

Finals week doesn't include the final? Hmmm.
(Sorry - first time I've watched this from the beginning.)


If Harry had pressure cooked his bisque ingredients, would that have given it more flavour?

Mimi was silly.

Elise was lucky.

Harry might have been better not to have called it a bisque...

I would have been tempted to run up a chicken stock at the same time - that would have reduced in time and could have added a strong meaty background to the dish

mimi's dish just looked really confused to me

obviously we aren't tasting it but a chili/chocolate sauce with fig ice cream, crispy bacon and smoked ricotta just sounds all sorts of wrong

Any chance of the judges pulling Elise up on the fact that 90% of the time she only does Desserts? At least Matt and Elena for example try to come out of their comfort zones and give it a go, for me either of them is the worthy winner as they are more versatile than Elise. I get that she loves Desserts and it is her dream but its getting a bit annoying now to see her do the same thing every challenge and or force a way to get a dessert dish of some sort.

Perhaps they should consider a Dessert Only Spin off because the reliance of some contestants on doing desserts has been far too OTT and I feel in years gone by the Judges would have been arguably stricter in the sense that they would ask for more versatility. I know we had Reynold last year but he at least attempted to do savoury as well, likes of Elise, as I have said, is just so blatant with it. Still, least we know that when she is back in the real world that whatever she does, if she opens somewhere, it will likely be the worlds first parfait only Café!!

If they haven't done it by now I can't see them doing it at all.

This is the first year that desserts have been so prominent, I think - usually there are a handful of dessert divas, most of whom get booted out quickly, and only a small percentage of mystery boxes, invention tests and pressure tests that feature dessert. I don't see that it can be a coincidence, it must have been an editorial decision to focus more on desserts this year, and I think it reflects an increase in interest in the industry itself. Pastry chefs anyone had heard of used to be very thin on the ground, now most of us recognise half a dozen or more and it's not a poor relations any more. I just hope it has gone down as badly everywhere else as it has on here - like the year they decided to stuff the show with really bad cooks because they thought people were tired of seeing really bad ones - and go back to a more balanced show next year.

Night off for me. I'm not interested in master classes, I'm never going to want to cook restaurant quality food or plate my supper up on a smear. And especially when it's more than likely they'll do the usual cringy 'contestants imitating the judges' schtick.

So where was their dessert food dream when they auditioned?


Judges have created this situation and the contestants are just following the easiest path.


Probably because at the auditions they thought they had to cook an actual impressive dish. By finals week they know they needn't risk cooking savoury because dessert is so much easier (same anglais recipe, etc).


It looked very confused - another thing that has been rewarded this series.

I still have no idea what Karmen's mushroom ice cream was, or that basil and ricotta pastry thing.


Here's what I think happened. Reynold was popular - because he was young, cute, polite, and was producing desserts that were new to the show (though not to pastry chefs). The show thinks this means we all want to see spheres and domes every episode.

It seems like George is on the dessert bandwagon too. Did you notice in San Francisco, he said to Elise that she 'usually cooked sweet and that was great' or something. It was a signpost to us that Elise cooking a good savoury dish shouldn't make her dessert obsession a bad thing (when it is, for the viewer, because its boring).

The reinvention challenge should have been difficult. Presumably an audition dish has been worked on a lot, so at the time was probably better than your actual skill level, so tougher to do something better despite being more skilled now.

But by cooking ANOTHER DESSERT GOD HELP ME they avoided any such skill or hassle.

And the judges created this by relentlessly pushing desserts. But's it's not a baking programme so that's a problem

Elise's brownie looks delicious. One of the best dishes of the season for me, I desperately wanted to eat it.

they need to be a bit more specific in the challenges and say the contestants must make a starter or a main with the ingredients given for at at least some of the challenges

or do what happens on MC UK and get them to make 2 courses in a challenge. the ones happy doing savoury and weak on desserts can do a starter and a main, the ones who are stronger on sweets can do a main and dessert

i think elise has got alot of unfair personal abuse on this thread over the last few weeks, she is doing what the structure of the show allows her to do, she hasn't been the only contestants to default to desserts every chance she gets, shes just got farther into the competition than the rest so its became more obvious

i'm as fed up as anyone seeing the amount of samey dishes that we have but thats the shows fault as much as hers, and given the choice between mim's dessert and elise's from last night i would have picked elise's 100 times out of a 100 as mimi's just sounded terrible no matter how well it was executed.

Agree with this. TBH My annoyance with Elise isn't personal just the fact that she only ever seems to do Desserts and gets away with it!

FWIW I think Mimi 100% deserved to go and Elise 100% deserved to stay, her dish was better and of the 3 is the one I would have ordered if asked.

This, especially the way she tortures anything into a dessert when in fact she's perfectly capable of cooking good savoury. Plus the fact that she regularly ignores advice, which makes her look cocky and overconfident. It's a reality TV show, we can only judge people - and everyone judges people, even if they say they don't - on how they appear, and by appearing in the first place they're inviting people to judge them. All of them could have used the traditional route to get what they want, which doesn't involve going on TV with the prospect of a nice wedge of dosh and the possibility of fame - especially the younger ones. But they choose not to, they choose to expose themselves on a reality show for a quick fix to their ambitions. None of the comments can actually be personal because we don't know them, we only know what they show. And we're entitled to build our opinions on that - that's reality TV. One of the reasons I post on this and the MKR thread and no other reality show is because actually everybody is fairly respectful and is just having a bit of fun. There are never the nasty comments about what people look like - other than things like 'don't like those earrings' - that you get on other forums.

And no one every complains that too many nice things are posted about other contestants. Yet it's the same thing, in reverse.

Mimi was definitely the right one to go. I think she'd been punching above her weight for a while and had been lucky. She's done nicely out of it, too - prep cook for a TV show sounds like a great job! Still looking forward to seeing the back of Elise, though, and really hoping for a Matt v. Elena final.

*would like cika's comment above if only there was a button*

I don't think there's one of us that, on the dishes presented last night, would have saved Mimi. I would happily dive headfirst into an undercooked brownie (although why she didn't serve the edge bits is beyond me)

Yeah, I'd forgotten that did occur to me too. I wonder if that's what they were trying to hint to him? They were trying to tell him to do something, but it wasn't clear what.

Can only agree with others about Elise's chocolate orange brownie with orange blossom ice cream.

Just typing those words makes me feel hungry!!! Like the judges said, an undercooked brownie is still more preferable to undercooked chicken. Plus, by being undercooked, that brownie must've been even more indulgent than had it been more solid.

That was a bit of a farce... So technique is less important than flavour. Can't wait until the judges flip that one... Melted chocolate put in the blast chiller (in a sphere) & then served on some crumbs would have won. Sorry, appreciate that Elise's dish sounded yummy but where is the rewarding of creativity & difficulty/cooking skills? Think her combination of ingredients saved her, not her skills...
I personally don't think her dish was particularly creative, given the quality of the ingredients provided.
If I have to see another flipped sphere mould/parfait/ice cream/crumbs...

actually being nice to eat is more important than technique imo

you wont survive long in the food industry making stuff that doesn't taste very nice no matter how well made it is