Will’s butter cream has split! Reb’s caramel is runny! And Janusz has used so much of Poland’s cherry vodka reserves in his sponge there’s bound to be a diplomatic incident. Bake Off is back with its formula unchanged and a new, almost teeth-achingly sweet dozen of culinary klutzes. As fuel bills rocket, war ravages Ukraine and we mourn not just the passing of the second Elizabethan age but the advent of the third one in the form of Liz Truss, this band of bakers is tasked with cheering up broken Britain. Like that’s going to happen.
Episode one is always a perilous business, especially for Paul Hollywood’s waistband. It is cake week and, insanely, the contestants’ second task is to make a red velvet cake with at least eight layers of sponge sandwiched between cream cheese mortar. Hollywood complains that he has to sample 12 of these towers as part of the judging process, even the ones (I’m looking at you, Rebs) so claggy the sponge sticks to the roof of his mouth. I’ve spoken to several cardiac specialists about this (I haven’t really) and they all say the same thing: Bake Off challenges involving multi-tiered cakes should be reserved for the final rounds when there are at most three cakes for Hollywood to sample.
But if the first episode is tough on Hollywood’s arteries, it’s also challenging for us viewers. It’s like speed dating with 12 candidates, each presentable enough to take home to the parents, but – or maybe this is me – none really gets the pulse racing. I turn quickly against Sandro because he goes to the gym twice a day. I don’t want to be body shamed by a baker. But then I warm to him because he is a full-time nanny which, unless I misunderstand modern Britain, built blokes rarely are.
I’m captivated by West Country supermarket cashier Carole, not just because she sounds like Kerry’s bed-bound mum from This Country, but because of her hair. It is entirely pink, but then so are her glasses which she pushes back into her thick locks where, like a badger in a hipster’s beard, they are bound to get lost. It’s Where’s Wally for eyewear, and at some point Carole is bound to seize Prue Leith’s glasses, also pink, from the judge’s face until she is clubbed senseless by Prue’s enforcers for her temerity. I was ready to hate senior project manager Dawn because she was billed as having been an adviser to Boris Johnson, but on closer questioning it seems she wasn’t involved in making the ex-chumpmaster general’s, and I use the term loosely, policies.
But, you rightly ask, isn’t the 13th series of Bake Off exactly what we don’t need now? More than 42 million adults in the UK, according to Cancer Research UK’s recent projections, will be overweight or obese by 2040. What Britain needs is the Great British Salad Toss or the Great Prole Knit in which Kirstie Allsopp teaches participants how to save money on heating bills by knitting jumpers, throws, blankets, even their dinners in line with the government push to keep us warm without curbing shareholders’ dividends.
Only Noel Fielding understands this. “The best red velvet cake will be made into skimpy briefs for me and Matt,” he tells contestants. “Why are you laughing?” It’s a serious business: Marie Antoinette’s let them eat cake philosophy is so 18th century; today we must not eat cakes, but wear them to reduce fuel bills.
In that sense, Abdul is an outlier, forgetting to turn his oven on, even though baking without an oven is like the sound of one hand clapping or Liz Truss governing.
Think about it: knitting socks by candlelight like we did in 1973 will make us leaner and fitter, better prepared for resisting Russian invaders on the beaches. Sprawling in our pants watching strangers make showstopper challenges only leaves us more open to Putinesque expansionism.
These caveats notwithstanding, Bake Off is a beautiful thing, a depiction of a diverse Britain healing itself through the medium of cake. That diversity is solemnised in the showstopper challenge, where contestants are asked to bake a cake of a fondly remembered house. Abdul makes a replica of a family home in Pakistan. “I’m piping clouds out of Italian meringue,” says Janusz, as he decorates a cake version of his mother’s high-rise flat in Poland.
I’m rooting for Syabira, whose cake of her old home in her native Malaysia includes a homage to the palm tree which she, emulating monkeys, used to scurry up as a kid. If only she’d made a tiny marzipan monkey to complete the memory.
Rebs, a barista from County Antrim, makes a simulation of her family home in which, during lockdown, she and her parents would beguile the hours with cocktail nights. They were partial to pina coladas, hence the cake’s structural support of pineapple rings. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Northern Ireland,” she tells Paul and Prue. “But it rains all the time.” To simulate that rain, she comes up with the finishing touch – a fine mist of coconut rum sprayed over her house. Then Paul and Prue, with the unbearable ruthlessness that’s always been Bake Off’s subtext, cut up her home and eat it.
