To make an orangutan cake, first catch an orangutan. I’m kidding. For the showstopper challenge in the final of The Great British Bake Off, Syabira is making a cake based around the orange-furred ape, and using one of the actual creatures wouldn’t exactly be in keeping with the theme. The idea is that the three finalists have to make a showstopper that celebrates the Earth, ideally with some sort of sustainability message running through like cocoa in a marbled rye.
This blamelesly yawnsome theme is no doubt atonement for the diplomatic incident that was Mexican week in which Matt and Noel shook their non-proverbial maracas while wearing sombreros and ponchos before asking the contestants to make tacos. Mexico deserved better.
Although to be fair, British TV cooks have a history of clunking cultural appropriation. Jamie Oliver, for instance, is paella non grata in Spain after his inauthentic recipe.
Syabira’s manly ape is fashioned from Genoese sponge flavoured with black pepper, while his fur is made from chocolate and hazelnut buttercream. There’s blackberry jam and some shortbread in the mix too, while above this tasty beast is a forest made from inverted meringue kisses that the orangutan is holding up, rather like Atlas bench-pressing our globe.
Abdul’s theme is bees, so expect massive disappointment if you don’t care for honey. Sandro’s also has a theme but for the life of me I can’t recall what it is, being thoroughly distracted by the provenance of his lemons. Like Chris Martin and Sir Francis Drake, they’re from Devon, thus demonstrating the principle that one’s ingredients need have minimal air miles unless you want to make Greta Thunberg cry.
But more about the orangutan. “He’s saying: ‘This is my home. Preserve it’,” says Syabira. I don’t pretend to have the baking expertise of judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, but surely a talking sponge-based ape should stop not just a show but any human doing anything – except standing with their amazed cake hole open. And that is why, in my view, Syabira is a worthy winner.
This series has been denounced in the Guardian for being unprecedentedly mean. And there is a moment where Prue snaps over Syabira’s fetish for tarragon. She even puts some in her blackberry butter cream, possibly because she’s working undercover for the Tarragon Marketing Board.
“You can’t taste it,” says Prue. “Frankly, I’m glad because it’s delicious really.” If that’s unkindness, let unkindness reign unchecked. Paul says something about the sponge orangutan needing more work so he doesn’t look like an ugly ape with a hole in his face (the simian, not Hollywood), but that’s just fair comment.
More striking is the fact that the three finalists are immigrants to this often mean-spirited polity. Abdul is Pakistani, Syabira made a first-week cake in the form of her native Malaysian home, while Sandro was born in Angola and now lives in London’s East End. He never imagined that someone like him would get to present his stuff on the gingham altar.
And yet Bake Off has long been a proving ground for a kinder, more diverse and inclusive Britain. Think of Mary Berry reduced to happy tears after Nadiya Hussain won Bake Off in 2014, despite the nasty Islamophobic jibe the Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell wrote about the diversity of the show’s contestants, including the Bangladeshi-heritage national treasure.
Towards the end of this final, if you listen really carefully, you can hear a noise that sounds like a fan oven but actually turns out to be Suella Braverman firing up the Kigali-bound jet, to send Sandro, Syabira and Abdul to compete in The Great Rwandan Bake Off. As with the orangutan cake, I’m kidding, but a truth remains.
I’m not saying that every week, Bake Off’s kindly and diverse drama unwittingly stands against the home secretary’s disgraceful, cruel immigration policy with the doughty pride of a sponge orangutan holding up a rainforest made from inverted meringue kisses. Oh hold on, I am.
