Junior Bake Off: the kids spinoff that’s the perfect antidote to baking brutality
Olivia Potts
Updated
“It’s inspired by the melting ice caps,” Bakr explains to Harry Hill, showing off a blue velvet cake to represent geography, and more specifically an iceberg.It is an impressive sight, with painted cracks suggesting fissures in the ice, and two fondant polar bears.
If this were regular Bake Off, my eyes would have rolled back in my head. Even lovely Alice tried my tolerance for try-hard with her “Save Our Oceans” entremets in the most recent series. But this isn’t schtick. Bakr isn’t trying to build a personal brand. He is just a kid who loves polar bears, and he is alsoone of 20 competitors, all aged between nine and 15, on this year’s Junior Bake Off.
Junior Bake Off was a regular feature in the BBC years, but this is Channel 4’s first attempt at putting a school-age spin-off on their blockbuster baking show. They have assembled a formidable presenting team. There is Prue, of course, who needs no introduction. She is accompanied, on the judging side, by former Bake Off contestant Liam Charles, whose enthusiasm is infectious and irresistible (and the perfect antidote to surly, sneery Paul Hollywood). Then there is Harry Hill, an inspired choice of presenter. Hill spends most of his time making jokes to camera, to the adult viewers, which sail over the heads of the young bakers. (At one point Tilly laments to the cameraman: “I think he’s playing games with me!”)
And these kids are good! Astonishingly good. These tiny dots, the younger of whom need their aprons tied for them by the older contestants, turn out exquisite craquelin-topped choux pastry, and 3D structures made out of five kinds of bread. They make biscuits that look like fish fingers and cakes that look like microphones. They are enthusiastic, and earnest, and wear their knowledge as lightly as angel cake, and they give me fragile hope for the future.
This is also a breath of fresh air after an adult Bake Off that was widely condemned as cruel, overly complicated and just a bit stale. For one thing, the bakes themselves are preposterously obscure; I am a professional baker and I can honestly say I have never been called upon to make a 3D sugar display case. Paul Hollywood is brash and capricious (though, to be fair, he always was). The contestants are now so polished that they are boring to watch, and they all have an eye on a book deal and on the career that follows, crafting their public image as carefully as they craft their tartes tatin. We fell in love with this show because of how sweet it was, but now it leaves a bitter taste.
But that’s OK, because we have Junior Bake Off – the Bake Off we deserve. Here, the contestants are baking things you have heard of, and might actually want to eat (or even bake yourself). Viennese whirls! Sausage rolls! Pancakes! The showstoppers are completely ridiculous, but in a good way – the bread sculptures, for example, were modelled on what each baker wanted to be when they grew up, and featured a plane (pilot), a classroom (teacher) and an ice-cream parlour (ice-cream parlour owner). What’s not to love?
The appeal of Bake Off has never really been in the baking. It is a show about success and failure and bouncing back; it is about creativity and growth and making your grandma proud. And these kids deliver in spades. There are tears, and sunken disasters, and drama, but none of it feels manipulative. In fact, quite the opposite. In one heart-in-mouth moment, Oliver runs into George and knocks his perfect plate of English madeleines to the floor. Both contestants dissolve into tears for all of 30 seconds, then everything is OK again. (“My career as a juggler is over,” quips George afterwards.)
The very best thing is that, however brilliant these kids are, they are still kids. They clutch their plushy soft-toy mascots during the judging; they beatbox as Harry Hill raps along with them. They giggle and grin and gurn at each other, remembering only occasionally that there are cameras watching, this is national television, and that millions of us across the country are cheering them along.
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