GBBO – Our favourite moments

So that magical time of year is upon (no not christmas), it’s bake off time! Once again we get to delight in Mary and Paul’s comical reactions to all kinds of weird and wonderful bakes, so in honour of this momentous occasion we’ve rounded up our favourite bake off moments from the past series.
Like last year, we’ll be doing weekly bakes taking on the various challenges of the show, you can check out last years recipes here.

Not long now Paul and Mary!

So to kick us off, it’s got to be James Moreton from series 3 and his gingerbread barn disaster/masterpiece, we should probably point out here that James is our favourite ever contestant and to us he can do no wrong. And this example prove just that, when tasked with creating gingerbread structures in the quarter final it all seemed as if James’ barn was beyond rescue, but, like a phoenix from the ashes, came his derelict gingerbread barn, and boy was was it magnificent.

Next on the list is another moment from series 3, the rum babas. Definitely the most hilarious of all the technical challenges, the lesser known 60s dessert baffled almost all of the contestants (but not James because he is amazing and king of the babas). Among the disasters, there was John’s, it didn’t look to bad (we’ll give him that) but he had unfortunately used salt instead of sugar… needless to say, Paul wasn’t impressed.

Now, we come to Matt, the lovable lanky one from series 6, and his encounter with the tennis cake. The actual cake was less of a problem for him, however the various forms of icing proved more of a struggle. His first attempt at the green fondant left him with truly luminous green gloop. After rectifying this he moved swiftly on to piping the white net to sit on top of the cake, so far so good… then he put it in the oven. Cue hilariously baffled facial expressions from Nadiya and lots of laughter from us.

From one icing disaster to another, our next top memorable (and equally hilarious) moment is back in series 2, when the final technical challenge had the contestants make Sachertortes (yum) which traditionally have ‘Sacher’ piped onto them. Unfortunately for Mary-Anne, her daughter’s name Sasha was very similar, and so her’s ended up being a ‘sacha’torte…

Although we have already declared our love for James, we must admit, Tamal comes a close second. The moment we knew it was when he was talking about the inspiration for his vol au vents, a sandwich. But not just any sandwich, one of the top 2 sandwiches of his life. To paraphrase Tamal, think about that moment quite a lot…

Again, in series 6, we would like to talk about Alvin. We definitely had a soft spot for him and all his associated hilarity. Such as his flat pack aproach to the biscuit showstopper… very ikea. And when he decided to bake a years supply of bread for no apparent reason. And we can’t leave out the adorabley heart warming moment when Paul helped Alvin with his ice cream roll.

Now, we will admit that an 8 strand plaited loaf isn’t the easiest, but boy were there some interesting outcomes when it was the technical challenge of bread week in series 3. Our favourite being the guy who just gave up entirely and went for the classic 3 strand instead…

You all knew it was coming. Of course we had to include bingate. Possibly the most controversial of all bake off moments, there’s nothing we can say that hasn’t been said before, but there are few things better than Paul and Mary’s faces when instead of a baked alaska, they were presented with a bin. Oh Iain…