Okay, just watched the first episode (“Cake Week”) of this season – Surely there are other fans here?
First, I think I like the way they’ll be showing the series this year, one episode a week, and just a few days behind the British premiere. It’ll force me to avoid binge watching the entire series in one day of gluttony.
Second, does anyone else feel they have really, really screwed up the casting? It looks like way, way more importance has been put on finding ‘cute young things’ versus actual good bakers. I mean, the technical challenge was pretty much just make make a single pan of genoise sponge (albeit flavor and color it three ways) and I lost count of how many of the bakers said they’d never made a genoise before!
Really?
And the results proved they weren’t lying, I’ve never seen such consistently poor judgments of a bake.
The competition does seem a bit light, but I do feel that the first episode often feels a bit “in the air” so to speak, and it usually takes me into the second episode before I have a sense of the skills people are bringing (or aren’t bringing).
And, yes, we noticed that there was a significant lack of people 40+
It is a very young group of bakers this year - just the one older bloke and no older women at all.
I believe the producers did address this in some of the pre-publicity, saying that these were the best bakers they could cast. I guess there’s no reason to disbelieve them. The show is consistently one of the most watched terrestrial shows in the UK and, although I’m sure they’d always like more viewers, I’m not sure they’d want to alienate existing viewers. It has, however, been a couple of years since they rather controversially changed broadcasters in the UK (BBC to Channel 4) and, as that seems to have worked out okay for them, maybe they now feel confident enough to play around with the format a bit.
