The Great British Baking Show Recap: People’s Choice

The Great British Baking Show
Audience Choice Week
Season 17 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

This is the first-ever Audience Choice Week and — just like Mexican Week, Japanese Week, and Meghan Markle’s Netflix deal — it may be a short-lived experiment. At the onset of the episode, Shannon says, “I know the audience is going to do us dirty.” She’s right. Whenever the public is allowed to vote in reality-related matters, they always make the worst and most chaotic choice imaginable because we are savages and want to see absolute carnage on screen. These are the people who sent Alison Hammond home from Big Brother in week two. (U.K. Big Brother is a whole different thing where the public votes on who goes home, and those on the show can’t even talk about who they want to leave without being punished. It’s wild!) They should not be trusted. But the audience’s choices for this week’s challenges disappointed me differently. I’ve given the producers lots of flak over the years for bad challenge construction, but they are clearly much better than Horatio and Aspartame (those are the two most popular British names) down at the local Tesco’s.

The first challenge doesn’t seem so bad at first. The bakers must make a cheesecake with at least one topping, a challenge Noel tells us was recommended by the ghosts of all four Golden Girls when he did a séance. The trick is that they’re doing the baking with a family member and the flavors need to be inspired by a family favorite. According to our prematurely evicted host Alison, this family inclusion was the audience’s choice, too. So we get to meet Clara’s fiancé, Tom’s equally tall and equally handsome partner, and one of Gabe’s two boyfriends. Oh, you know this challenge absolutely ruined the throuple. How did they decide who got to go and who got to sit at home in the cuck chair and watch this on television six months later? Was it a game of rock, paper, scissors? Lube wrestling? A Kylie Minogue trivia contest? Whatever it was, you know there is one gay in Birmingham still fuming.

To echo a criticism that Nigella and Paul often give the bakers, this stunt doesn’t really add anything. We don’t get to learn much about the loved ones; we don’t learn anything new about the bakers. We don’t see any fighting, and no one messes anything up so badly that they might not be speaking anymore. It’s just kind of a whiff. We do get to hear a cute story from Molly and her husband, Ash. When Molly’s mother first met Ash, she was trying hard to impress him and made him a cheesecake but was so nervous she dropped it on the ground. He’s such a nice boy; he still ate some right off the tile, and that is why she is making a grout- and Lysol-flavored cheesecake. (JK. It’s raspberry, the floor cleaner of the fruit world.) I have a feeling this twist would have been better if there were fewer bakers left. That way we would know more about the cast; be more excited to meet their partners, siblings, and cousins; and have more time to get to know them properly. 

They do end up making some spectacular cheesecakes. Gary’s sister Paula makes edible swans that look like they belong in a glass menagerie. Tom’s partner, Alex, gets to eat his favorite flavors, which are Clorox — sorry, I mean raspberry and white chocolate. Moyin’s mother helps him make a cheesecake with a gorgeous swirl of orange curd on top that delivers our first Hollywood Handshake of the season. Everyone claps except Nigella, who stands by his side with a crooked smile on her face that says, “Oh. We’re still doing … this?” At the bottom are Molly’s floor-related effort, Nikki’s cheesecake that never really set, and Shannon’s. Her cheesecake looks absolutely amazing, with chocolate truffles ringing the top, but Nigella hates the ganache, and Paul says that he does not like it at all, which is the English way of spitting it out on the table and making Shannon clean it up herself. The English. So polite. (Until they drink.)

The technical challenge was also set by the audience (duh), and the bakers are all given a cabinet full of ingredients to make … something. Anything. Whatever they want. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not a technical challenge. What’s crazy is I like the idea. The notion of the bakers just getting a bunch of stuff, no recipe, and little time to prepare is the kind of high-wire act that usually makes reality television sing. If this were a signature or a showstopper, I would have been absolutely thrilled. But it’s not. It is a technical. The whole point of the challenge (which I think has become increasingly useless as the series progressed) is that the bakers are making the same thing and the judges are ranking them based on how well they all stack up to each other. The point of comparing them one to the next is that they are the same. How are they going to compare a lemon drizzle cake to a Paris-Brest to a gesundheit-torte or whatever the hell those graham-cracker sandwiches are that Yannis made? Just look at what the judges came up with. Nigella (a.k.a. her assistant) makes a lemon sponge cake with a meringue covering, while Paul (went to the store, bought, and then) produces an apple tart. 

This challenge is absolute garbage, and this is why the public should not be trusted. At the very bottom is Shannon, who made a lemon drizzle they say is grainy. Hot on her heels is Molly with another lemon drizzle that looks amazing, but the judges say it is way too tough. Rounding out the bottom three are Yannis’s gross Austrian sandwiches. There are a few who shine, including Clara in third with a gorgeous lemon sponge cake. Second is Mo’s Paris-Brest, which is also the name of a French strip club, and the winner is Gabe with a lemon-meringue pie. There are more lemons in this technical than a used car lot. In fact, the whole thing is a lemon. 

The showstopper is just as bad. The only good thing about the showstopper is that we got to meet my two new favorite Baking Show characters, Naomi Hammond, Alison’s twin sister who is a model, and Kettlehead, Noel’s tea-loving naturist friend. The challenge is to make something wearable. Ugh, this reminds me of the overly complicated Baking Show challenges of old where they had to make, like, mobiles out of cookies. How can you make something to wear? They joke about making shoes out of choux pastry, but imagine putting your foot in a profiterole? You could probably make a bra out of cream puffs if you used the right construction. But it’s basically impossible, so everyone just makes hats. How else do you take something solid — any baked good — and make it flexible enough to be on the body? Even Gabe, who is a costume designer, can’t figure out a way to make this work and makes a hat. Sorry, a crown. The funny thing is, making a hat isn’t a terrible challenge. They could have taken it even farther and wanted it to be a fascinator as you see at all those posh English weddings, but edible. See, there’s a great challenge hiding in there somewhere, but the public just can’t find it.

There are a few people who didn’t make hats. Shannon, like your most basic friend from freshman year of college, goes for angel wings. So does Mo, who was inspired by Victoria’s Secret models. (I can’t decide if this is a super straight choice because it has to do with lingerie models, or a super gay choice because making a cake inspired by lingerie models is gayer than Tom fanning Gabe’s cakes.) The bulk of Mo’s wings appear to be inedible paper, and while they look amazing (and supposedly the cake is great), why was he allowed to make the bulk of his creation not food? Tom once again does not disappoint with his pop-culture references and makes a “wig topper” inspired by Dolly Parton. First of all, what is a wig if not a hat made out of hair? Secondly, his cake just looks like hair on the top of his mannequin head, and it’s absolutely stunning. Tom also gets bonus points for doing his mannequin’s makeup and giving her heart-shaped sunglasses. We know Dolly approves because Noel says she told him as much at the séance after he was done getting that first challenge from the Golden Girls. 

The real winner here is Clara, who makes a handbag out of cake using a Lucite base with cake on top of it and a strap attached. She walks down Naomi Hammond’s runway with it on her arm, knowing that it is sturdy enough to make the trip, and everyone gasps. She even textured the fondant on the outside so that it’s alligator print, which is insane attention to detail. When Paul and Nigella eat the piña-colada-flavored cake, they’re happier than a Real Housewife who just got a Birkin. Clara — who is apparently moving to Georgia (the state, not the country), where she will have to suffer the indignity of calling her season The Great British Baking Show — is the only choice for star baker, and she wins with her future father-in-law cussing a blue streak on national television and international streaming services.

The rest are just hats and come in various degrees of success. Gary makes a very fine-looking winter hat because he’s worked in knitting factories his whole life. What? I thought he grew pygmy goats? Nikki makes a kind of rudimentary sombrero that looks like a chip-and-dip, with a curved brim that is full of other treats. It’s a great idea, and the judges love the contents. Moyim makes a cake that was supposed to be a top hat but just looked like a big green cake balanced on top of a head. When Paul moves past it, the whole cake splatters on the ground, and Molly’s husband, Ash, creeps out of the bushes and starts eating it off the floor. It is his favorite flavor. But I am shocked that no one apologized or said anything about it, especially because the judges say what survived is delicious. 

The bottoms are basically Molly’s baseball cap, which looks like a dome with a bill just plonked onto it, and Shannon’s wings, which the judges say are just a gingerbread cookie with some icing on it. I thought for sure that Molly would go home after her disastrous bakes, especially because the judges didn’t like her cake and actually enjoyed Shannon’s biscuit wings. But it’s Shannon who is eventually done in by the viewers. Don’t worry about it, girl. They screwed over Alison, and look how that turned out for her.