Hands up if you’ve ever made a cream horn. I’m guessing nobody, other than the five of us taking part in this challenge (and the Bake Off participants themselves, of course). And with good reason.

They’re a pain in the arse. They require a lot of different processes and techniques, and on a personal note, a week later, I still haven’t got feeling back in one of my fingertips after touching a hot toffee-coated spoon.

Those are all of the ingredients required for this bad boy (apart from marscapone, I changed my mind about the cream at the last minute). I needed to go big following a disastrous game pie week.

I cooked up Bramley apples with cinnamon and caramelised them with sugar. I also tried to make toffee apple slices for decoration, but failed miserably because of the water content once the apples were sliced (this is where I touched the spoon.  Ow.).

I made puff pastry from scratch, which involved a lot of putting it in a food bag in the fridge whilst leaving the kitchen top a state.

When my toffee apples failed, I decided to make caramel wafers, which was interesting, and coated a lot of the surfaces in my kitchen in a fine, sweet, gritty dust.

Lacking cream horn moulds, I fashioned them out of ice cream cones covered in tin foil, which actually worked really well, and meant that I didn’t have the problem one of my competitors had – she actually had proper moulds – of the pastry rising above the mould, breaking the finished pastry when removed.

The last thing I made was chantilly cream, the easiest part of it all.

I can’t even link to all of the different recipes I was looking at to construct these, I bookmarked so many, and even handwrote bits of different recipes out so I knew what I was doing. Here’s the end result: apple and caramel cream horns. It’s puff pastry with a sprinkle of demerara sugar, a caramelised apple and cinnamon-spiced filling, chantilly cream and a shard of caramel.

I got joint Star Baker this week. Totally worth it.