'The Great British Baking Show' Collection 10 Premiere Recap: Cake Week
For those who have been watching The Great British Baking Show since it debuted on PBS in 2014, this has been the conform TV show for the last decade of upheaval, there for us after Brexit, the 2016 elections, and all through the pandemic. This week's premiere should be celebratory, as it's the first time since 2019 that the show has filmed on its regular ten-weekend schedule and not in a compressed five-week Bake Off Bubble timeframe as it has since 2020. The premiere's Star Wars scroll opening and pun-tastic sketch suggest the production planned for it to be one. But events have overtaken them, and now GBBO's return comes at a time when the nation needs comfort again.
The series' opening ran 90 minutes (with commercials) in the U.K., making it 67 minutes on streaming, and those extra moments, despite Noel Fielding's terrible Star Wars costuming, are worth it. (Prue's tiny pink glasses are at least cute.) With a dozen bakers to get to know, ensuring everyone has time in front of the camera to present their bakes is crucial. Whether they're faking it until they make it like Syabira, wailing over crumbs like Maisam, or just being themselves (like Paul Hollywood), this is everything we need ahead of the weekend. So let's head to Welford Park, where the show has finally returned after two years, and see what comes out of the oven.
As it has been since time immemorable (save one hiccup in Series 9/Collection 6), it is Cake Week for the show's premiere. For the first challenge, the bakers make mini-sandwich cakes. Miniature cakes are pretty standard for the Signature and/or Technical challenge in the first week, usually either a half dozen or a dozen, depending on the intricate nature of the cake in question. "Sandwich cake" is just the Britishism for a layer cake (because there's icing and/or jam sandwiched between the layers of cake), so the show is going pretty easy on them for this first outing, despite Matt Lucas' joking threat they would only have an hour. (An hour sandwiched between two half-hours. Ha ha ha, etc.)
