In the words of the singer Shania Twain, it looks like we’ve made it! After nine eliminations, it’s time for a winner to be crowned as this 10th series of The Great British Bake Off draws to a close. As is customary on the show, three bakers are left vying for the final prize: Alice, the 28-year-old geography teacher, Steph, the 28-year-old shop assistant who has won the Star Baker title an impressive four times, and David, a 36-year-old health adviser – and a skilled baker who has somehow consistently missed out on the Star Baker honour.
Unlike other Bake Off episodes, the final doesn’t have a theme tying all three challenges together. Instead, judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith are free to pick whichever bakes they view as the biggest curveballs for the three finalists.
It’s off to an exciting start with the signature challenge, during which the bakers are asked to create the “ultimate chocolate cake” in just two hours. I might be biased, as a huge advocate of chocolate in all its forms, but this is a genuinely interesting bake. While a chocolate cake might sound easy on the surface, it’s hard to get the texture and the flavour right. Specifically, it’s tricky to hit that perfect balance between fudgy and cakey, and for some reason it’s surprisingly difficult to make a chocolate cake actually taste like chocolate. (I know all this, by the way, from eating many chocolate cakes, not from baking them.)
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David opts for a chocolate Armagnac and prune cake with a mirror glaze. Alice goes for a chocolate, pear, maple and ginger cake, while Steph’s pick is a classic Black Forest gateau. Choosing to craft such an uncool (I say this with love, I for one love Black Forest cake), retro confection (the popularity of Black Forest cake famously peaked in the Eighties) for the Bake Off finale is clearly an act of bravery.
Come judging time, it turns out that David’s cake, while beautiful, tastes a little too strongly of Armagnac for Hollywood and Leith’s tastes, while Alice’s bake tastes good but looks “a bit clumsy”, according to Leith. Steph’s Black Forest gateau is a bit overbaked, but its rich cocoa flavour and neat architecture mean that Steph makes it out of the signature challenge slightly ahead of her two fellow finalists.
Things take a strange turn during the technical challenge. Hollywood wants the bakers to whip up stilton souffles with snappy biscuits on the side – so far, so good, but the souffles must for some reason be served out of the dishes they’re baked in. I’m no expert, but I am 1) French, and 2) able to search “stilton souffles” on Google Images, and although stilton souffles do appear to be served out of their dishes every once in a great while, this presentation appears to be the exception, not the rule. Souffles at large are typically served inside the dish, and in fact, the American food writer Amanda Hesser wrote in The New York Times in 2000: “Any failed souffle can simply be turned out of its dish and served without shame, like an unmolded custard” – suggesting that if you have to take your souffle out of its dish, then it means your souffle is a failed one.
All this to say, it’s a little rattling to watch Hollywood, a man who has the nerve to serve souffles out of their dishes without any justification whatsoever, judge other people’s souffle skills. Nevertheless, judges render their opinions and Steph comes last while Alice is second, meaning David emerges as the winner of this technical challenge.
The challenges, by the way, are interspersed with sequences that see the three bakers’ loved ones reflect on their journey towards the final. This serves a double purpose: fill some airtime, since the final must last about an hour even though there are only three people left in the running, and raise the emotional stakes by showing us what a potential victory would mean for each baker. In a touching segment, Steph’s mum informs us that her daughter was “not in a good place this time last year” and was struggling to figure out what to do with her life – until she found solace in cooking. These segments serve as a reminder of Bake Off’s biggest strength, which has enabled it to stand out from other TV contests: its ability to be unabashedly genuine and to delve into its participants’ emotional vulnerability with kindness.
Speaking of emotional vulnerability, it’s time for the showstopper challenge, and poor Alice is worried sick. While finalists typically get to walk out of the tent at the end of the final to be greeted by their families and friends, Alice’s parents are stuck in Ireland due to a cancelled flight and might not be able to make it back to England on time. Through tears, Alice progresses through the challenge, for which the bakers must create a deceptive picnic basket and its contents, meaning – as explained by co-hosts Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig – that each element must look like one kind of food but taste like another (for example, the bakers may craft cheese-shaped biscuits). Oh, and each basket must contain variations of cake, enriched bread, and biscuits.
The showstoppers, naturally, are marvels of creativity. David somehow crafts peaches out of spiced bread, cheese out of lemon cake, and sausage rolls out of fig rolls. Alice makes strawberries out of raspberry macarons, ice cream cones out of bread buns, and a pork pie, chicken drumsticks, and scotch eggs out of carrot cake. Steph goes for fairy cakes made out of bread buns, strawberries made out of macarons, and an impressive chicken burger consisting of lemon-poppyseed cake.
This finally brings us to the big reveal we’ve all been waiting for, as Leith and Hollywood pick (drum roll, please)… David as the winner of this year’s series! There’s no doubt in my mind that the verdict will elicit a lot of reactions on social media, but the fact that David was never crowned Star Baker throughout his time on the show, establishing himself as this year’s underdog before rising as the programme’s champion, has a daring, rather pleasant edge to it. Congratulations, David, and until next time!
