MasterChef recap: Australia's newest cooking queen is crowned in an action-packed grand finale

• Read all of Ben Pobjie's MasterChef 2022 recaps

Well, it's all come down to this. The Grand Finale. The final showdown that decides who gets the glory, who gets the money, but most importantly: who gets the self-esteem. One woman will walk away with all of it, while the other will slink away knowing they're slightly too bad at cooking to win MasterChef and carry that pain in her heart the rest of her life.

It's a shootout between Sarah, the plucky restaurateur who combines French technique, Indian flavours, and the ability to talk endlessly about the combination of French technique and Indian flavours; and Billie, the former champion who is driven by such relentless greed that she wants to win twice and stop anyone else having a go.

Arriving at the kitchen, Billie and Sarah are delighted to discover their families will be there for the grand finale. This comes as a huge surprise to them assuming they've never seen the show before or have suffered massive head trauma recently. It's important for the finalists to have the families present, because this grand finale is expected to last well over eight or nine months, and they're going to need support. "I really want to make them proud," says Billie, putting her finger on the crucial point: only one woman will end the day with the pride of her family intact.

Jock explains the nature of today's challenge. In round one of two, the cooks can choose between a mystery box with nine random ingredients, a brief that they have to cook to, or a cloche with one or two random ingredients that they must feature in their dish. Given first choice of which to remove, Billie eliminates the mystery box. Sarah eliminates the cloche. Therefore both must cook to the brief, which is:

Cook a dish that is both SWEET and SAVOURY. Like, for example, a shepherd's pie filled with M&Ms, or an ice cream cake haggis.

Heston Blumenthal bursts into the kitchen like a manic goblin, light gleaming off his head, arms waving muppet-style.

Round one begins, to the sound of a huge roar from the balcony where the cooks' families rub shoulders with the dumb losers who weren't even good enough to make it to the grand finale. The judges ask Billie what she's making. She is doing a dessert, inspired by the fact that she's Billie and she always does desserts. But it's not any ordinary dessert: it's a dessert with, like, a whole bunch of stuff in it.

They ask Sarah what her dish is. She goes to a great effort to not just say she's making butter chicken, but the judges are not fooled: they know she's making butter chicken. It's uncertain what the sweet part of her dish is: maybe she's going to put the chicken on a pavlova.

Billie immediately hits trouble as her rhubarb flavour is not coming through strongly enough in the sorbet. The implication being that it should, I suppose. Billie searches desperately for a new idea, afraid that if she doesn't get one her chances of winning the grand finale will be gone and ignoring the certain knowledge that it'll really all just come down to the second round.

Meanwhile Sarah explains that in her dish she wants to show her two loves: French techniques and Indian flavours; although by this stage it's possible that she just says that as an involuntary reflex. If Sarah went half an hour without mentioning French techniques and Indian flavours it'd be cause for an MRI.

Andy notices that Billie has ditched her sorbet. She explains that instead she's going to make a rhubarb and rosemary snow. "You're pulling the snow out?" says Andy. Billie agrees that out is definitely the direction in which the snow is to be pulled. Tension hangs thick in the air as both Andy and Billie refuse to mention the elephant in the room: the fact that "snow" is not food.

From up on the balcony, Minoli observes that watching Billie and Sarah cook is a lot like watching a match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal: Billie shows no emotion and stirs her pot backhandedly; while Sarah sweats a lot and always seems to have a wedgie.

Sarah, meanwhile, has had a brainwave about how to introduce a sweet element to her savoury dish: put sugar in it! How she comes up with these nutty schemes I cannot tell.

It's still early in the episode, but round two is going to take up most of the 15-hour runtime, so it's time to plate up the round one dishes. Sarah goes first. "Very brave to do chicken wings in a grand finale," says Jock – he has killed men for less. Luckily, these particular chicken wings are, to use the technical gourmet jargon, "nice". Melissa calls them "glossy", slumping back in relief that she got that out of the way early.

Then Billie serves her cumin panna cotta with rosemary and rhubarb, which sounds like the frenzied ravings of a madman, but is actually a nice bowl of pink and white things. Jock tells her that her panna cotta is not fully set. "It's like a thick custard," he laments, which sounds pretty nice really, but apparently there's a powerful anti-custard sentiment on the judging panel. Darkness falls. A bitter rain begins to hammer down. Across the land screams of anguish are heard. Melissa rubs it in by telling Billie that her flavours are good, just to throw her miserable panna cotta failure into sharp relief. No dessert has ever been simultaneously so delicious and so depressing.

For the first round, Sarah gets 26 out of a possible 30. Billie gets 21. "I'm devastated," says Billie, and so are people of goodwill everywhere.

And so to round two, where the grand finale brings out its big gun: Heston Blumenthal bursts into the kitchen like a manic goblin, light gleaming off his head, arms waving muppet-style. Blumenthal is the man who revolutionised cooking by making it not only incomprehensible, but also unaffordable. He proved that it is possible to make a thing look like a different thing, and that with sufficient shamelessness you can put literally any disgusting substance into ice-cream and people will eat it.

Today, Heston has set the cooks the challenge of making his taffety tart: a tart that somehow manages at the same time to be taffety. Based on an Elizabethan recipe written by Shakespeare in an attempt to create a new kind of edible play, it is unbelievably fancy looking and has apple and crumbs and cream and fennel and crunchy bits and all kinds of weird crap. "The original taffety tart never looked like this," says Heston, so what the hell he's playing at I don't know. Billie is awestruck. "It looks terrifying," she says, before realising she's actually just looking at Heston's face.

The second round cook begins, with Sarah five points in the lead but suffering the disadvantage that Heston's taffety tart has no Indian flavours in it. They have five hours and 15 minutes to complete the dish, a timespan that emphasises how much this dish is not worth the effort.

As it's a pressure test, the cooks get to follow a recipe, which as we have noted before, is basically cheating. Despite this, the observers on the balcony quickly notice that in making their caramel, Billie and Sarah have each used a different kind of sugar. Sarah has decided to use the kind of sugar the recipe tells her to, while Billie, ever the maverick, has decided to give the wrong kind of sugar a go. Suddenly Billie realises why her caramel is the wrong colour, and utter catastrophe looms. There is only one way that Billie can rescue her dish, and that is by making the caramel again with the right kind of sugar. Which she does. And everything is fine. Bit of an anti-climax.

There now follows several minutes of red-hot, edge-of-your-seat, spectacular pastry-rolling action. It's a lot like Top Gun.

Billie takes her pastry out of the oven. It's golden-brown, but it's not quite dark enough, and in a time when Australian TV is striving to increase diversity, that's a problem. She decides to make the pastry again, in line with the theme that is developing in her cooking.

Sarah also takes her pastry out of the oven. It's a terrible disgusting molten mess. "I don't know what to do," Sarah says. Briefly she considers making a curry out of it. But suddenly, from the balcony, Mindy offers some advice. "Come on, girl!" she yells, and Sarah realises what she needs to do: she needs to come on. She cuts out pieces of her terrible pastry and moves on.

Billie checks her second batch of pastry. It's dark, but she thinks it can be darker. With the heady scent of adventure filling her nostrils, she puts it in for another ten minutes like the wild anarchic spirit she is. It comes out even darker. Billie throws back her head and shrieks with bestial joy.

As Sarah works on her apples, Dan chips in from the balcony. "How do you like them apples?" he cries, attracting a ferocious rain of blows from everyone else on the balcony.

Billie is way behind due to her pastry shenanigans. She doesn't see how she can possibly finish, but fortunately now that she's said that, she's certain to. "This ice-cream needs to be perfect. Heston's ice-cream was beyond perfect," she says, contradicting herself awkwardly. The ice-cream is being made with nitrogen, because Heston's food philosophy is that nothing is worth eating unless the chef had to wear goggles to make it.

The final element that must be made in the taffety tart is the crumble. Both women are experts at crumbling, but Billie notices that her crumble looks oily. An oily crumble is the kind of crumble that could easily rob a person of the MasterChef trophy. There is only thing Billie can do: stop and reflect on her life while sad music plays. Having thought a bit about whether she wants to win, and decided that yes she would quite like to, she makes the crumble again. Having already made pretty much every element of the dish twice already, she's becoming an expert at repeat efforts. With five minutes to go, she bashes the hell out of some new crumble. "Nice and quick," calls Mindy, but Mindy has already indicated that she's on Sarah's side, so her advice is dubious to say the least.

Billie's second crumble is much better and Billie can now begin plating up with what has to be warp speed. Sarah kicks back in a deckchair and puffs on a well-earned cigar, while Billie frantically puts fiddly little bits of stuff on top of other fiddly little bits of stuff. And then, all of a sudden…

It is over.

Billie flashes that famous Billie smile: the smile that says, "it was a close thing, but I'm still better than all of you". Sarah comes in looking refreshed from a nice massage and spa treatment that she had time to fit in between finishing her dish and the end of the challenge.

Sarah serves her taffety tart to the judges first. She tells the judges that if she wins the grand finale, her mum will be very proud of her, but if she doesn't she won't be. The judges stuff their faces with her tart. They immediately notice that the ice-cream is melting, which frankly doesn't seem like something Sarah can be blamed for – it's just physics, isn't it? Maybe if there were fewer candles cluttering up the room it would melt slower.

The judges are happy with Sarah's tart, but her pastry is a slightly different texture to Heston's, which in many cultures is considered a hate crime. "There are a lot of positives here, however I'm going to go straight to the negatives," says Andy, which is typical.

Time for Billie's tart, which all in all she basically had to make twice. She tells the judges that she's grown a lot, and it's true that she is quite tall. Billie believes that this season has proven that she's a good cook, something that literally winning MasterChef apparently wasn't able to do for her.

As the judges gaze upon the wonder that is Billie' taffety tart, they are overwhelmed by a feeling of serenity and gratitude that they have been blessed to be born into a world where such a dessert can exist. As they taste the tart, they understand what it is to ascend into the celestial realm and French kiss God Himself. Never has a taffety tart been so taffety. "My mind is blown," says Melissa. "The pastry is unbelievable," says Andy, and that's something coming from old Debbie Downer himself. The three judges and Heston weep with joy and hold each other tight, knowing true joy for the first time.