Andrew Vine: Where fondant fantasies meet rock-hard reality

WE’VE gone baking mad, our heads filled with visions of creating glorious Technicolor confections and bearing them to the table to the rapturous “oohs” and “aahs” of those dearest 
to us.
Paul Hollywood and Marry Berry in The Great British Bake-OffPaul Hollywood and Marry Berry in The Great British Bake-Off
Paul Hollywood and Marry Berry in The Great British Bake-Off

And it’s all the fault of the television programme that reaches its climax this evening, when millions of us will sit down to watch the finale of The Great British Bake Off.

Its sequel will be the The Great British Baking Boom, millions being spent on cook books bound for Christmas stockings, and countless millions more in the bakery aisles of supermarkets, given a new lease of life by the show’s runaway success.

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Fair enough. It’s caught the public’s imagination, perhaps because of a generosity of spirit, for what’s the point in baking a cake if not to share it? Fold in moments of drama, garnish with tears and add contestants who exhibit real skill, and a perfectly presented bit of entertainment is the result.

The presences of a pantomime villain in Paul Hollywood, the glowering Mr Nasty of fondant fancies, and a Fairy Godmother in Mary Berry, who’s cornered the market in providing a template for flawlessly gracious and elegant ladies of a certain vintage, also help.

They have, of course, also tickled the fancy of a nation as partial to a double entendre as a slice of Battenberg with their straight-faced use of the term “soggy bottom” as an expression of opprobrium, provoking a mass outbreak of tittering that would have had Frankie Howerd green with envy.

I fear many more soggy bottoms, as well as trembling lower lips, lie ahead as would-be Pauls and Marys captivated by the fantasy that they can produce anything as good as on the telly rush out to stock up on silicone moulds, marzipan and glace cherries, only to find their kitchens are places of hopes as sunken as a collapsed soufflé when what emerges from the oven bears little resemblance to the glossy photograph in the cook book.

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They have my sympathy. I’m all too familiar with the cake wetter than a bath sponge, or the supposedly airy and fluffy delight that lands on the worktop with the thud of a dropped breeze block.

At about the time when Mary had to bake between the power cuts of the three-day week and Paul could only fantasise about growing a goatee, I was part of the generation that was the doubtful beneficiary of a government belief that baking needed to be taught in schools, and so it was, under the rather austere title of Home Economics.

Most of us had already tried our hand at baking at home with our mothers, and the results had not been encouraging. Even next door’s dog, which could be relied on to eat almost anything, looked insulted when my efforts were offered over the fence after being judged unfit for anything else.

Still, the education system knew best. Lads who had shown some aptitude for woodwork and metalwork had their chisels and files taken away, to be replaced by sieves and scales, as they were pointed towards Victoria sponges and butterfly buns.

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A procession of kindly female teachers were in charge, and I realise now just how patient they were with a classful of enthusiastic but inept boys entirely unsuited to baking cakes, maintaining a Zen-like calm as the kitchen became covered in a fine dusting of icing sugar.

Every lesson was punctuated by emergencies. A tearful boy escorted to the school nurse after he somehow managed to get his ear full of margarine, burned fingers, flour in the hair and eyes, people slipping on spilt buttercream. Our parents were models of forbearance, smiling brightly and showering praise on the barely edible and misshapen horrors revealed when the lids were taken off cake tins and Tupperware boxes borne proudly home.

There were rock cakes harder than Flamborough Head, scones that could have been used as weights for plumb lines and an upside down cake that whichever way it was turned resembled nothing so much as the sort of shapeless monster that threatened to destroy the world in a 1950s science fiction film.

My father, struggling manfully with one batch of buns, tapping one thoughtfully on the table and producing the sound of an auctioneer’s gavel, took them out to the greenhouse, where with the aid of a claw hammer, he broke them up before spreading the crumbs on the lawn for the birds, which appeared to have some difficulty taking off afterwards.

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So baking isn’t easy, which means I shall be full of admiration for this evening’s finalists, winner and runners-up alike. But I do wonder if there ought to be a note of caution sounded at the end. Not so much, “Don’t try this at home”, as “Do try, by all means, but don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t turn out quite how you imagined. Oh, and do try not to get margarine in your ear”.

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