The Great British Baking Show Season-Premiere Recap: Here Comes the Judge

The Great British Baking Show
Cake Week
Season 17 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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It’s so fittingly Bake Off, sorry, I mean Baking Show, that Prue Leith’s final duty as judge is to star in a somewhat corny Doctor Who–inspired introduction. For those who missed the joke, the British institution Doctor Who, or in this case Doctor Prue, cycles through actors playing the titular doctor by “regenerating” from one to the next. Here, Prue walks into something that looks like a TARDIS (the Doctor’s intergalactic transportation of choice) called a “Proving Box,” totally missing the obvious pun of “Prue-ving Box.” Out emerges Nigella Lawson, the newest Baking Show judge in almost a decade.

I know it’s been precisely one episode, but I’m already loving the addition of Nigella to the show. I didn’t know much about her before this other than that she’s a television food personality with an exciting way of saying microwave, but she seems like a great fit and also something different. With Prue and Mary Berry before her, the person next to Paul Hollywood came off as this sort of doddering but competent grandmother, someone the bakers all wanted to impress because she reminded them of the women who probably taught them how to bake in the first place. Nigella is something different. She’s giving cool, confidence, and expertise, the exact same things that Paul gives, but she gives them with a purr, where he gives them with a bark. I’m also obsessed with Paul taking dainty little nibbles of everything and Nigella just shoving huge spoonfuls into her mouth. Let’s see how many episodes that lasts.

I love the way that Nigella talks about food, using adjectives like bright and savage to describe flavors that we wouldn’t think about otherwise but are so wonderfully descriptive. When she gives instructions during the technical, she says, “Don’t let the sugar shout. Let it sing!” She also describes cakes based on the emotions of the bakers, like anxious and confident, because, on a show like this, a baker’s mental state matters as much as how well they cream their butter and boil their jam. My favorite moment of the episode, however, is when Noel asks new baker Tom (also handsome and also gay, just like last year’s) if he wants a Hollywood Handshake, and Tom says, “I want something from Nigella. I don’t think I’ll be satisfied by just a little handshake off Paul. I want a little Nigella air kiss, a look of, ‘Darling. Fierce. Diva.’” Yes! This is what I’ve always wanted too. Someone who would be Paul’s equal and topple him from the cake stand of being de facto head judge.

While the judging panel may be different, the theme of the first week is the same as always. Yes, it’s cakes, cakes, glorious cakes. So many cakes that it’s like a twerking convention. The signature challenge is to make a stout cake. At first I thought they were all fat-shaming a cake — who cares if it’s a little pudgy! — but no, they have to make the cake using beer or stout. They also have to incorporate one topping or filling. This seems like a very fair, somewhat simple challenge that everyone should be able to pull off. However, like a teenager’s birthday party, there will be mess and there will be drama. 

We go around the room to learn about all the cakes but also meet the bakers and see what established types they fall into. Tom, as noted above, is the competent gay; Gabe is the camp gay and our first baker to be introduced as a member of a throuple; Clara is the token European and the show’s first Portuguese baker; Connie is the lovable older woman; Gary is the older man with a butch job (farmer); Mo is the taciturn youngster who is better than you think; Moyin is the cool young person; Nikki is the daffy auntie; Shannon is the comedic relief; Yannis is the guy who has a tough job (doctor) and probably shouldn’t be here because he has better things to do; and Molly is the one who everyone is rooting for after she overcomes a major fumble this week (more on that in a second). 

That leaves us with Danni. Danni is filling the “true original” slot and, boy, is she a true original. I know it’s against the Baking Show ethos, but I have to admit she kind of bugs me. She’s sort of like a cartoon version of an overachieving nerd. She’s like a real-life Miranda Sings. She’s saluting people, she’s saying, “indeed-a-roonie,” she’s foraging for dandelions in her backyard and making me wonder if she has any friends. However, the more I watched her, the more I started to love her. It’s not often that you get to see a person on television be fully themselves, no matter how the rest of the world feels about them, and that is what our Danni is up to.

She is the source of some of the drama, however. When Nigella and Paul (see, she’s already first!) come around to visit everyone, she tells them about her stout cake and says that she’s bored and doesn’t have enough to do. Sister, do not say those words in the tent. It is built over an old Druid meeting place. It is on ley lines. If you speak that into the universe, it will come back like a boomerang made of turds. Of course, Danni starts to put her cake together and it’s too warm and it starts crumbling like feta cheese in the August sun. She has to present it in a plastic collar, and Nigella and Paul barely want to eat it because it’s underbaked. 

There’s also drama thanks to Molly, who is taking a bundt cake out of the oven and drops it on the floor into a big sticky mound. She retreats from the tent for a moment for a little cry, as Allison comforts her and also rubs it in a little bit, telling her that the cake looked perfectly baked. Really, Allison? Are you also going to tell her to pick the lint out of it and serve it to the judges? But Molly is better at getting the Baking Show ethos than I am, and she gets back in there and bakes a cake that the judges are pretty happy with, if not as expert as the one she intended.

They end up at the bottom of the rankings along with Shannon, who serves up something the judges say is delicious but more like a trifle than a cake. At the top of the pack is Handsome Tom 2: The Revenge, whose Black Forest–inspired cake looks absolutely divine, and Mo, whom Nigella praises for making a gooey cake and using enough salt to make it “sing like a song.” Paul tells Gary that he made the best cake in the tent, but it’s falling apart a little because he decorated it when it was too hot. I’m sorry, but as a gay man who spends too much time on Instagram, I will tell you that there is no such thing as too hot. (This has also taught me that there is such a thing as too much crop on a top, but the lesson on hotness stands.) 

The technical challenge is to make a coffee-and-walnut cake, and the gimmick is that they get no recipe at all, just one of Baking Show’s signature drawings of a cake with its component parts. This is pretty fair, since they should all know how to make these component parts, and the drawing is perhaps more descriptive of what it should look like than the recipes usually are. There are no true disasters, but Molly, Danni, and Shannon all end up in the bottom again, and Gabe, Gary, and Tom are in the lead. What is up with the guys doing so well this episode? Is the patriarchy winning? Is this what happens when a strong female judge enters the tent?

The showstopper is to make a self-portrait cake, but most of it is left up to the baker’s discretion: It has to be at least two layers and contain a rendition of themselves, but it’s not like it must be an architectural marvel or have a million layers or something. This leads to a variety of interpretations from our bakers. Moyim gives us the 3-D treatment you know the producers would have demanded three seasons ago. Connie makes an abstract version of her face that, while it doesn’t look exactly like her, is cool and beautiful. Gabe goes the extra mile and makes a mirror with a replica of his drag persona, Blu Romantic, hiding behind it, and cracking the mirror open gives Nigella an existential crisis. Yannis is the most technically proficient, creating a pointillist map of his face in frosting that’s absolutely brilliant to behold, and it’s amazing that he pulled it off in time. 

The drama in the showstopper once again comes from Danni, who is making a cake using magnolia jam, stinging nettles, and something she calls sticky willy, which I think is what the kids in her school told her this weed was called so that they could giggle when she said it with sincerity. Though she puts it together with dowels, her green cake is leaning, and as the cast heads outside to await judging and eat blueberries in the sun, the cake bends further and further back, like it’s trying to win at limbo, until it’s all over the floor just like Molly’s was a few hours earlier. 

The best-looking cakes include Tom’s, which is him as a Simpsons character on top of an enormous carrot cake. Gary’s is once again beautiful, with a fondant drawing of himself on top of a green-and-brown cake that looks like the decoration you’d see on a pub sign near his farm, though Paul charges him to be more daring with his flavors and design in the future. Mo’s cake, however, looks absolutely amazing, a large black base with a white-and-brown ombré layer on top and a painted portrait of himself and his cat, Simba, on it. What can’t Mo do? He bakes, he does calisthenics, he hangs with his mates, and he paints something that looks like it could win a coloring contest at a local drugstore. Paul also loves his lemon cake with blackberry compote so much that he gives it a thumbs-up, which is as close as Nigella would let him get to giving out a handshake. As the judges give him positive feedback, our Danni is very excited, clapping for him and bouncing up and down like a bobblehead going down a cobblestoned street.

You would think that Danni wouldn’t be so excited since she’s so clearly going home, but we all knew she isn’t. How? Because Shannon had to bow out of the competition early because she wasn’t feeling well. This happens once a season on Baking Show, and we all know what they do: defer sending anyone home and then nixing two people the next episode. In this instance, given that it’s the first episode, I don’t know that they should have worried about it. Molly saved herself in the showstopper with a gorgeous pink-and-orange cake that has the consistency of a fuzzy sweater, and there was nothing Shannon could have done that would have been worse than Danni’s two disasters. I guess we’ll see if she can shake her nerves in the next episode, but I have a feeling that it’s our true original who will be packing up and heading home first.