The episode begins with the three potential eliminees entering the kitchen. Rishi leads them in because he is the best chef as we all know. Gary tells them that they need to work hard today – it's about time that the importance of working hard was mentioned. Matt tells them that the challenge today will be set by Darren Purchese, who has cooked on three continents – can they replicate a dish created by someone who is so good at booking flights?

Purchese enters, accompanied by Kylie Millar, the former contestant known for having a smile as wide as all outdoors and for being a better cook than anyone in this year's series. She tells the story of how she broke into Purchese's pastry shop and refused to leave. George says he's proud of Kylie. Lucy does a little dance. She has been drinking since dawn.

Darren lifts his cloche – not a euphemism – and reveals raspberry, rhubarb, chocolate and ginger something or other. It's kind of like ice cream but of course not really because that would be too simple. There's parfait and mousse and jelly and nitrogen because yes it's 2013 and god forbid anything get made without nitrogen. How our parents staved off starvation without nitrogen to cook with remains a mystery.

Rishi is nervous because desserts are not his strong point. He informs us that Lucy is really good at desserts, a fact she has proven time and again by having people say so on camera. Samira will have trouble too because she will be cooking with alcohol and will therefore not be able to taste her dish. This is part of an ongoing campaign by Masterchef producers to get Samira drunk.

Darren runs through the pressure points of the dish, which are uninteresting and not really worth listening to. Kylie says "your time starts now" and we are all nostalgic for better times.

"There's ginger everywhere!" Rishi complains, hallucinating under the influence of Darren Purchese's heady charisma. Samira is feeling the pressure – she needs to nail every element.

As she is discussing the allements, Samira flashes back to her home life. She's been up for elimination so often it's amazing there's any home-life footage left to show, but somehow they dig some up. Her food dream is to set up a food bank for underprivileged kids, as she doesn't believe they've suffered enough.

From the balcony Christina offers the advice "Come on Samira, keep pushing", which even by Masterchef standards is pointless. The judges, meanwhile, gather to have a little giggle about how stupid the contestants are. Matt notes how cooking is like driving a space shuttle. He, too, has been on the booze for hours.

Darren offers to taste Samira's alcoholic elements. I think he's coming on to her. Romance is in the air, as Christina says that Rishi is streets ahead and it doesn't surprise her. It doesn't surprise us either: Rishi's superiority has been clear throughout the competition, especially in Rishi's opinion.

Disaster has struck Samira: her cream is over-whipped! Damn her violent temper! "It could send me home," Samira frets, worried that the cream will report her to HR.

Up on the balcony, the spectators who drew the short straw call encouragement to Lucy in a bored sort of way. Lucy is making something called "Babar", an element of the dessert made from real elephants. She confides that she wants to open a café and put all her "learnings" into it. But when she says "learnings", she sounds like she's vomiting. Something is going on with Lucy, I think she's not well.

Emma begins clapping and bellowing. "Cun Lucy! Cun Rishi! Cun Samira!" she calls incoherently. Just how much alcohol is being made available to these people?

It is now time for Lucy to do something very boring with food. It involves the Babar and a piping bag. Apparently Babar is made by piping liquefied elephant meat into little blobs. Or something. It really is tedious. Samira begins babbling about how she was sent home because of her substandard buns. Everyone is very lightheaded.

Rishi is trying his best, but is battling not only the difficulty of the recipe, but the fact Christina keeps shouting at him and refuses to shut up. He has made a mistake and his jelly is the wrong colour. He's panicking because he knows the judges are strict racial purists. Christina keeps calling out. Rishi is not responding to her, but she just won't stop. "I need to keep my brain focused," Rishi says. "Push, Rishi!" yells Christina, as if deliberately mocking his desire to keep his brain focused. One can only assume that Christina's family was wronged by Rishi's in the past and she is now bent on ruining his life.

Suddenly we lurch into a dramatic montage of pots and foil and hands doing things. Samira pulls her Babars out of the oven. They don't look like elephants to me, but I'm not a chef. She must now soak the Babars in a bag. This is what you have to do with Babars – soak them well, to replicate the conditions of their native waterholes. "Get your barbers in liquid!" slurs Emma, almost toppling over the railing. It's just a party up there.

Rishi is rushing to get his dessert finished, having been set back by his jelly obstacles. Christina helpfully shouts meaningless crap at him, knowing that when cooking under pressure the most important thing is to stay as distracted and annoyed as possible.

It is now time to do things with liquid nitrogen and fulfil MasterChef's contractual obligation to help Heston Blumenthal destroy all that is good in the world. They also need to "spray their domes", which surely is technically vandalism.

Samira has problems with her spray being pink instead of red – this will not play well with the notoriously homophobic judging panel. "You've got no time!" Christina barks at her, a vicious look on her face: Christina resents all who would challenge her surrogate son Rishi, who continues to be subjected to her encouraging advice despite not showing for even a second any inclination towards engaging with her in any way.

As Rishi and Lucy plate up, Samira expresses her desire to make her dish as allegant and famminen as possible. But she can't remember how Darren's looked. "Just put your own spin on it," calls Christina, continuing her sabotage campaign.

Time is up. Samira is worried about the colour of her domes. She is afraid she will be eliminated because of this. It's not that she's worried for herself, she just fears that this will expose the shallow, fundamentally unjust nature of the competition.

Rishi serves his dessert to the judges, and indeed it does look like a plate of small frozen rabbit innards. Darren thinks it doesn't look messy, so I guess Darren is blind. "The domes look particularly well-sprayed," he says, seemingly failing to pause and consider the nadir of humanity that this sentence represents. Rishi's dish seems great except that it lacks the bite of ginger, according to Matt. First world problems or what, right guys?

In comes Samira and serves up her pink mousse domes, which would be an excellent phrase to use when writing sex scenes in an erotic novel. As she sets her dessert on the table, George looks at her with pure hatred. But to be fair he looks at most people like that. Samira tells the judges that she did not leave her precious daughters for nothing, and is fervent in her desire to not have to go home to see them.

As the contestants sit and wait, Samira in a lather of nerves, Rishi makes the spot-on observation that "it all comes down to the judges". He really has been paying close attention to this show.

As it happens the judges love Samira's dish apart from the bits they hate. The jelly is too hard, but on the other hand Matt feels like a sponge exploded in his mouth, so swings and roundabouts.

Now time for Lucy, the fake dessert queen of Masterchef 2013. Lucy serves up her dish and enthuses about how little she knows about anything. She then retreats to the waiting room and does a weird little impression of a drunken four-year-old. The judges taste her dish and Darren notes that her Babar tastes a little bit doughy. More like a Celeste than a Babar, really.

George feels like they need to go to the fifth umpire, probably realising even as he says it that it's actually not a very funny thing to say.

It is judging time, and Gary lines them up to tell them all exactly what they did wrong. Rishi had not enough ginger, and Samira committed the cardinal sin of pink domes, but Lucy has served up dry Babar, and the judges' love of European children's literature wins out – she will be going home, and it would be ironic that the dessert queen was eliminated by a dessert, were it not for the fact that the whole dessert queen thing was completely made up in the first place.

Lucy bursts into tears and says she's excited about the next step, which according to the final caption is an online bakery store. She plans to supply local businesses with her "sweet treats", but, you know, people plan a lot of stuff, don't they. Let's not hold our breath.

And so Dreams week ends with the depressing thud of waking up to reality. Tune in for finals week, when the contestants will literally murder each other!