No Meredith this week so Alison and Sheldon hold down the fort! We get the full update on Alison’s baking marathon last week and …wow… just wow. SIX delicious cookies and wait till you hear where they went … so proud of our friend. Sheldon had no chance to bake but we talk about the intricacies of Naan and how a great one is such a feat! We also get an update on the type of chocolate he used for his ganache… spoiler alert… the ladies were correct in their assessment. Spoilers for E3 below. Right out of the gate, we were both a little surprised to learn that this GBBO The Professionals is in fact a “two group” show, much like the Juniors were. So after this week we will be seeing a whole new group of pastry chefs in the mix… which means we need to learn new names and Sheldon will need to write small to get his notes grouped on one page (it’s a thing with him…). The team was really happy about this episode as it was the first to them that felt like an actual “Bakeoff” episode. The first challenge was a surprise and combines a couple of … interesting flavors of chocolate and grapefruit. Alison made a good comment that one thing we don’t love about these bakers is that everything seems to be a “layered dessert” and we’d like to see more creativity. Jamie and Andrea delivered on that where they did cream puffs! (Yes… it activated some trauma in Sheldon - see last episode). Some interesting flavor combos, and to us it was really hard to understand what the judges really wanted… we’d expect grapefruit to be present… not “exploding” but folks got dinged for not enough grapefruit. Hard to gauge their expectations. We liked the idea of Kevin and Mari Victoria had of candying the grapefruit, and it paid off. Andrew and Michael had a rough go of it thought and their stuff just looked awful. The showpiece was a great one - first one we’ve loved. Robots and chocolate. We both agreed on our favorite right away and it’s execution absolutely elevated the team that created it. It was fun and they delivered the goods. Again we didn’t understand some of the criticism when one team was dinged for not having a more exciting movement… they met the brief… As far as the chocolates themselves, this was where we got to see some fun skills. The flavors were mixed for us - We both like different things, but it was nice to see some good execution for the most part. Some of the flavors didn’t for for the judges though - Jamie and Andreas olive oil, pate de fruit and Rosemary missed the mark. It is definitely safe to say that the Showpiece flipped the story and the team that got sent home would not have been after the first round. Our assessment of the episode. Best we’ve seen of the series.