No one has had much fun with Bake Off this year, have they? For a show lauded as the balm for all our pains the 2019 season has been one massive upset. As upsetting as a deflating soufflé, in fact. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what played the star role in the final’s ultimate technical. Our finalists had to double bake six stilton soufflés, with biscuits, in under 70 minutes, and, boy, did they struggle. Alice had never made a roux; Steph didn’t know what a bain-marie was. Instead of impossibly light creamy, cheesy clouds, we got puddles. And underbaked crackers. The general feeling is that the show has got too difficult, too obscure and too cruel. But has it, really? To find out, I went through the final technicals in every year’s Bake Off since it started.
The first season, in 2010, didn’t come with a final technical. But given that contestants had to make a total of 96 mini bakes, the entire episode qualified as a mountain to climb.
The following year, the bakers had to make a sachertorte in two hours and 40 minutes. Cookbook author Luisa Weiss tells me that, as long as you have a recipe, this wouldn’t be beyond the pale. Similarly, 2012’s 25 fondant fancies and 2013’s 12 perfectly shaped pretzels would not have been impossible. In 2014, things heated up. The finalists had to do victoria sandwiches, tartes au citron and scones – 12 of each – in under two hours with little instruction. Jeremy Lee, the chef-proprietor of Quo Vadis in London, shrieks in horror. “You do wonder why anyone would enter this,” he says. “The reality is most really good baking recipes are quite lengthy.” Having to do this much in that little time seems to him “brutal and unkind”.
Meanwhile, in 2015 the contestants were given a Paul Hollywood recipe for raspberry-flavoured mille-feuilles iced, as professional pâtissiers would do, in fondant. Regula Ysewijn, one of the judges on the Belgian version of the show, winces at the thought. “That’s a very, very hard one,” – the hardest, for her, of all the years’ final technicals. The pastry alone would flummox you, and did for Tamal Ray that year.
In 2016, they had to make a victoria sandwich without a recipe in 90 minutes. Lee says you would have to have made a fair few in your time to swing that. As this is the Great British Bake Off, though, you’d be forgiven for expecting contestants to have done that.
It strikes Ysewijn that the iced ginger biscuits in 2017, last year’s campfire pittas with accompanying dips, and this year’s soufflés haven’t been any harder. She says her team, without consulting their British counterparts, considered soufflés this year, too, because of their instructive value. As she points out: “You’re making a programme, not just a competition. You want people at home to learn something from it.” She says the challenges are tested, both by the setters and amateur bakers, to ensure they are not impossible.
Perhaps, as fans, we are homing in on the wrong thing to criticise: it’s not the challenges but the judges. As the Delish website put it when Prue Leith suggested it’s not up to them to get it right, but the contestants: “Blimey, Prue.” If the warmth has eluded our favourite heartwarming show, she and Hollywood might have something to answer for.
