In Deadpool & Wolverine, someone brings up the subject of The Great British Baking Show, and Deadpool says, “That show stood between me and suicide for 15 years!” I don’t share that attitude — come to think of it, how would Deadpool go about killing himself? — but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started watching the show on Netflix during the pandemic. I detest comfort television, and yet the program is comfort TV at its best: informative and local in mostly good ways, with a regular dose of suspense built into each episode. The season finale comes out on Friday, and if you’ve missed it so far, here’s where things stand.
Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith remain on hand to judge the contestants’ bakes, though Alison Hammond has replaced Matt Lucas as co-host. (You can see Lucas currently in Gladiator II.) That last is a welcome development, though it’s past time for remaining co-host Noel Fielding to move on. He twice refers to the technical challenge as a “mystery shrouded in gingham.”
While The Great British Baking Show is no stranger to foreigners competing, this season offers up something new: an American contestant. Sadly, you won’t have much time to root for Jeff, as the 67-year-old New Yorker encounters health problems that force him to withdraw from the competition as the first baker eliminated.
The structure of each episode continues to be: signature bake, technical challenge, showstopper. When tasking the bakers with making breakfast pastries, the judges take the unprecedented step of letting them rest their laminated dough overnight in the fridge. The challenge still trips up all the remaining contestants. That same episode gives the contestants opera cake as a technical challenge, and the famously bare-bones instructions on the recipes reduce baker Georgie Grasso (a pediatric nurse of Italian extraction who speaks with a ferocious Welsh burr) to tears of hopelessness and despair.
The show has gotten itself into trouble in the past when having its contestants make international dishes, so the most ethnic this season gets is spanakopita. (I would be daunted at the prospect of making my own phyllo dough from scratch.) The first episode has the contestants making Battenberg cakes, and I was wondering when the show would get around to those marzipan-covered delicacies with the distinctive checkerboard design. Even more British than Battenbergs is the infamously named spotted dick, and the bakers run into some severe hurdles making those steamed puddings bound together with suet (beef fat).
When the judges ask the bakers to create a vegan version of parkin, Gill (pronounced like “Jill”) Howard rubs her hands in glee because she hails from Northern England, where the sticky ginger treat is native to, and she’s made it many times. In one of those reversals of fortune that the show is famous for, she places last in the challenge because she forgets to add baking soda as a leavener. (Remember that one season when they had a bunch of contestants of Indian descent, and none of them could bake a decent garlic naan?) Winning the challenge is Illiyin Morrison, who has never heard of parkin but uses her Caribbean ancestry as a guide and approaches the dish as if it’s a Jamaican ginger cake. Meanwhile, Gill becomes hellbent on redeeming herself and incorporates parkin into her showstopper to demonstrate that she indeed knows how to make the thing.
As they say, it’s the bakers who make a given season of this show, and this one gives us Hazel Vaughan, the 71-year-old retired nail technician from Kent who is eliminated early but manages to make a cake to look like a designer handbag, complete with an edible strap that she winds around her arm when she carries it up to the judges. I was rather rooting for Sumayah Kazi, the 18-year-old dental school student with an eye for brightly colored decorations, but a bad week with the spotted dick and a tiramisù sends her out. The finale (spoiler alert) pits the aforementioned Georgie against Dylan Bachelet, a 20-year-old aspiring chef who brings his Indian and Japanese ancestry to his recipes, and Christiaan de Vries, a gay Dutch fashion designer who similarly favors unusual flavor combinations that work. As the weather turns and the prospect of turning on your oven becomes more appealing, The Great British Baking Show remains a cozy source of inspo for your kitchen.
Courtesy Channel 4/Love Productions
