Week 2: Le Gâteau Vert

I make Monet's favourite birthday cake, do incredibly badly, injure myself twice, and discover a new-found hatred for chickpeas.

---

There is a lot of green slime involved with this recipe.

Before I launch into my baking odyssey - and this week is a bit of a doozy, if I do say so myself - I'd like to just address something. It's not that important, in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like I need to get it off my chest. It seems like it hasn't been mentioned really at all over the last week, which to me is just odd, and it makes me feel like I'm alone in thinking it. I'm just going to come out and say it: Noel Fielding as Marie Antoinette is a fucking nightmare.

*Horror movie music plays in the background*

I don't mean that in any kind of bullshit transphobic, "eurgh, a man dressed as a woman, he must be a sex offender" way. It's just that he's terrifying. I think it's to do with the uncanny valley, which is a term used to describe why things that look almost human, but not quite, tend to be quite creepy to us. It's why a lot of people are afraid of clowns, for example, or dolls, or Michael Gove. Their features are human, sure, but ever so slightly distorted in a way that rings alarm bells in our primitive brains.

Noel Antoinette ticks that box for me. On an ordinary day he's already close enough to the edge of the uncanny valley that he could piss off it. The eye makeup, the cheeky grin and the haircut that seems to have been taken straight from a possessed schoolchild in the 1950s all combine to create something that doesn't look quite right to me. Adding the outfit of an 18th-century French queen to the mix makes something that I can't look at without shuddering.

Terry can back me up. After he was surprised by the be-wigged goth, we all saw the polite "ooh!" of shock. We heard the nervous laughter. We noticed the incoherent babbling about Paris as poor old Terry vainly searched for something to say. But what do you say in the face of The Fielding, beauty spot staring at you like a third eye? There's nothing you can say. The Fielding already knows. It's seen inside your mind now. You can't escape. It will leave you alone for now, striding away with the flutter of a ballgown, but you know that one night - when the moon is new and dark, and you are alone - you'll hear a creak at your windowsill and the faint call of "Awright, Tez?".

Ahem. Anyway.

Week Two: Le Gâteau Vert

Let's be honest, we all know why you're here. It's not because you want to support me through a fun baking challenge, or to get tips for your own culinary efforts. You don't want to see me crafting a beautiful biscuit or transcendent traybake. No, you're here to see me cock everything up and laugh at my failures, you sick bastards. The more things go wrong for me, the better.

WELL HAVE I GOT SOME GOOD NEWS FOR YOU.

I'm not loving the way these challenges are progressing. I found the Wagon Wheels practically impossible, and was hoping for a bit of an easy week. I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic when I heard the words "Claude Monet's favourite birthday treat", but I held out hope. Maybe he was a big fan of a plain sponge? No? No, of course he bloody wasn't.

Le Gâteau Vert consists of three thin layers of pistachio-flavoured Genoise sponge, sandwiched with a pistachio crème au beurre, covered in a pistachio marzipan and decorated with a green fondant and edible flowers. It is, I can confidently state, an absolute pisser to make.

Oh, it all started promisingly. I made the marzipan, and besides getting it stuck to my hands, my kitchen counter and - somehow - my ear, it all went well. Unfortunately, the next parts were AWFUL. Part of this is due to my stupid veganism, because I can't use any eggs, and they are the things that cause the Genoise to actually rise.

I tried to replace them with aquafaba, which is the liquid from a can of beans, usually chickpeas. This is actually a great ingredient - you can beat it just like egg whites, and it works in the same way in most dishes - except it only replaces the whites of the eggs and not the yolks. In the past, I've used gram flour (basically chickpea flour) mixed with water as a replacement, so I tried that again. This was a stupid, stupid mistake.

Well, to be fair, it might have worked if I'd whipped the aquafaba properly first. But I didn't think about why there were eggs in the recipe, and instead just bunged in a bunch of vegan substitutes and called it a day. In the baking world, this is what is known as "are you a fucking idiot, don't do that, you moron". I had basically ensured that my sponge wouldn't rise.

As predicted, it remained flat as an unlucky rabbit after trying to cross the M1. It also overcooked, probably due to being so thin, and stuck to the bottom of the tin. This wouldn't be a problem if it was a nice, thick, well-risen cake, as I could have lost a cm or two off the bottom with no problem. But I don't think I even had a cm to work with. I mean, just look at this mess:

Ignore the green liquid in the background, all will become clear.

Oh dear. Not a good basis for a cake. But I persevered; after all, I could presumably cover my mistakes with a shitload of other stuff, right? But to do that, first I needed to make the crème au beurre, which I assumed was just fancy buttercream. And to do THAT, I had to cook my spinach.

If you didn't watch the show, the cake gets a lot of its green colour from spinach water, which is presumably easy to make if you have a vital piece of equipment: a muslin cloth. You see, all you have to do is wilt the spinach in a bit of water, blend it all into a puree, and then squeeze the water out of it. I managed the first two steps, no problem. But when it came time to squeeze, I didn't really know what to do. I don't own muslin, largely because I don't know what it is and, at this point, I feel like people will judge me if I ask.

I settled on wrapping the spinach in kitchen roll and squeezing the liquid out that way. I buy pretty decent, strong kitchen roll, so it's not that ridiculous an idea; at least, in theory. In practice, however, it lasted about five minutes before bursting. And oh god, how it burst. It was like someone burst an alien's zit, spurting green slime over me before oozing unpleasantly.

The aftermath. Look at the OOZE.

Oh, and did I mention how hot it was? The time I left between boiling the spinach and attempting to squeeze it was, apparently, not fucking enough. It was like green lava, burning my hand and causing me to yelp like somebody had just yanked out a fistful of my pubes. So far, this crème au beurre was not going well.

The next step was to turn that spinach water into a syrup. This was something I felt good about. It's very hard to fuck up a syrup, I thought. It's just sugar and water. Only a moron could mess that up. Oh, how I do set my self-esteem up for disappointment. Ladies and gentlemen, I fucked up the syrup.

This would be the point where I describe what I did wrong, only I have NO IDEA. I heated the sugar with the spinach water as the recipe said, but it didn't thicken for ages and ages. Then, all of a sudden, it turned into lurid green cement. Panicking, I took it immediately off the heat.

Now, I'd like to put yourself in my position. You have a pan in one hand. In the other, you are holding the spoon you used to stir the syrup; something that you know was cooking at well over a hundred degrees. You need to put the spoon somewhere while you grab your phone to look up what to do next. Where, dear reader, would you put it?

If you answered "anywhere but in my mouth, obviously, you fucking moron" then congratulations! You are significantly more intelligent than me. At least this time, it wasn't because I wanted to taste the hot thing. That's of little comfort to my woefully scalded mouth, but I'm taking it as a moral victory nonetheless.

Tongue blistering, I moved onto the next bit: whisking the syrup into butter and eggs. Only, I didn't have butter or eggs; I had more chickpea flour and water, and something called TREX that I thought would taste like butter. Unfortunately, it did not. It was more like vegan lard, like someone had butchered a particularly fat carrot. I'm sure it's great for baking, but not so much for buttercream.

There was a second problem: upon hitting the TREX/chickpea mixture, the syrup gave up the last pretence of being a liquid and instantly turned rock solid. I tried to whisk it together, but all I ended up with was very well whisked vegetable lard with a lot of spinach-flavoured rock candy floating in it. I can only assume that this was not how Monet liked his birthday cake.

I did the only thing I could do: I chucked it in the blender and pulverised the absolute shit out of it. It seemed to work in terms of texture, and it certainly looked the part. Tasting it, however, revealed a nasty surprise. The only flavours I got were chickpeas and lard. At this stage I was knackered, so I just chucked about a kilogram of sugar in it, blended it some more, and gave up.

The time was at hand. I needed to assemble the damn thing. I felt intimidated, somehow. I was full of irrational fears. I didn't have the proper tools for this, surely? Oh no, wait, that wasn't an irrational fear; something I realised when I started hacking at my paper-thin Genoise sponge with a blunt bread knife.

I did succeed in cutting it into two pieces. It's just that I also cut it into about 57 more pieces as well. No matter; my horrible crème au beurre would serve as the cement in this catastrophe. I teased it into the vague shape of a cake, then dumped a circle of marzipan on top of it. It... it did not look elegant.

At least it's green...

Did it taste good?

Ehhh... I guess? I know I'm my biggest critic and all that, but I was genuinely surprised that people seemed to like this one. I couldn't get over the flavour of chickpeas and vegetable lard that was faintly present. Sure, it tasted mostly of sugar, which is no surprise, but there was still that lingering aftertaste, hanging around like a fart in an elevator.

Look at its lardy glory

Maybe ignorance is bliss, and I only noticed because I knew those terrible, terrible ingredients were in there. Maybe most people I know secretly love the taste of beans and lard. I'm not one to judge.

There's not really a lot more to say about this one. It was a sweet, pistachio-y, bright green mess full of WAAAY too many chickpeas that was able to hide its horrific construction under mounds of sugar. A master baker, I ain't.

What do chickpeas taste like mixed with vegetable lard?

Kiiiiind of like when I was a kid and used to chew my Legos.

Jam burns or syrup burns?

Oh, I will take jam burns any day over the sweet agony of boiling sugar syrup stuck to the roof of my mouth.

What's that knocking at your window?

Now you mention it, it is a bit weird; I'm on the fourth floor and OH MY GOD THE FIELDING FOUND ME