I just think they’re neat.

Content Warning for Celebrity Traitors spoilers.

A Real Bun Fight

On the plus side of this final of inevitabilities, the challenges did at least seem to be reasonably achievable! I honestly thought that a mere two batches of six different iced buns almost seemed too easy? Both batches did have to be filled and decorated differently – which you could either do by creating distressing realistic hotdogs or just serve some standard buns and their shiny variant

but remember, Jasmine definitely isn’t boring, she’s just a traumatised middle child

what a wonderfully wild thing to admit on national television? And just the final piece of confirmation you needed to know Jasmine was taking this given that Tom and Aaron had to have a thumb war over who got the “I’m gay and I bake!” VT – the winner being Tom

leaving Aaron with a completely nonconceptual VT that was mostly just him talking about him being completely worn down by the application process he is

there might have been more, I was a bit distracted by his mum’s amazing haircut

and much like an unsalvageable bob, Aaron’s buns were a little bit too short and compact

but they really loved his flavours of Pear & Yuzu and Strawberry & Rhubarb which to be fair, are only moderately more interesting than the findings of Jasmine’s 10 week science experiment

thorough research should usually involve more than 4 variables. I know I’ve been a bit of a broken record about Jasmine being consistently safe with her flavours. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t a batch of bakers known for their pushing of the envelope and perhaps that’s an issue with the casting and maybe more so an issue of having reached Peak Bake Off – yuzu and camomile just aren’t the novelties and points of interest they used to be. Nowadays you have to bring out fox blood and just the right amount of arsenic to give a kick to have any hopes of standing out.

While Aaron and Jasmine went with standard fancily decorated buns, Tom was going high concept with his recreation of Marge Simpson’s Dessert Dogs

unfortunately his attempt to recreate her baby ear medicine sabotage backfired because he forgot he wasn’t meant to put it in *his* hotdogs

I genuinely think that this moment shows Tom’s personal growth – if this had happened a few weeks ago he’d have fully disemboweled himself with a sacred katana at Paul Hollywood’s feet. Tom clearly put *a lot* of pressure on himself to get to the final and having got there and been in decidedly second place before any of this began, he finally relaxed. Which should be a cautionary tale to any future contestants to not premeditatively put that expectation on yourself because Paul Hollywood’s eyesight is based entirely on desperation and he will destroy you – he didn’t even crack a single joke about his nipples when served a pina colada finger bun this time!

and Tom had almost certainly made them exclusively to hear about the nipples because there is no corelation between Pina Coladas and Hotdogs. Jasmine may have been calculating the safest route to the final like a baking GPS, but Tom was working from an innuendo gantt chart

and Aaron is trapped in that recurring nightmare you have about sitting your GCSE biology exam naked and realising that knowing the ins and outs of hybrid flower breeding on Animal Crossing doesn’t actually help you.

An Unofficial Iced Bun Ranking:
1. Aaron In First Place Because He’s My Bias
2. Jasmine Goes Shiny Hunting
3. Tom’s Inner Saboteur

The Madeleine-ing Tower

Rounding off the Technical Challenges for this series was what this show does best – sticking smaller bakes to something and calling it a centrepiece. This being a tower of ombre madeleines that definitely feels like it was meant to be the Technical Challenge for Christmas Bake Off given how much it looks like a Christmas tree made from novelty soaps you make the mistake of eating as a child (again, I was stupid kid)

and because this is the final, the bakers of course had very helpful instructions to guide them through visualising a creation that is most definitely Not A Thing

but the real trick of this recipe was working out how to get the characteristic hump on the back of the the madeleines – something Tom and Aaron knew and were not about to let Jasmine in on. You could literally see the hope of potentially winning return to Tom’s eyes as he watched Jasmine put her uncooled batter straight into the oven

and even when she did remake them and do the cooling process, she didn’t have the time to fully cool them so they still didn’t have the hump and it was a humbling third place for Jasmine

yes… complacency would be terrible.

While Jasmine had no humps – Tom and Aaron are so Bake Off pilled they were semantically talking themselves in circles over the difference between domes and humps like they were gatekeeping membership to the Itty Bitty Titty Committee

and so concentrating on the definition of a hump and blinded by Jasmine making a mistake, Tom failed to parse the ombre riddle, choosing to ombre the individual madeleines instead of the tower itself

not that this would end up scuppering him as Aaron had made the mistake of filling his madeleines with too much lemon curd

so Tom was in first place, Aaron in second, Jasmine in third and the real loser being the French who I have no doubt consider this lurid pink tower of tongues an abomination.

An Official Tower of Madeleines Ranking:
1. Tom’s Ohhhhh-mbred Madeleines
2. Aaron’s Made-fines
3. Jasmine Experiencing The Vulnerability The Judges Are Looking For

Ready, Willing and Table Cakes

For their final challenge of the series the bakers were having to self-cater the accompanying finale garden party with Table Cakes measuring a very precise 1.2 metres – The specific 1.2 metres is presumably because it’s easy to source a 30cm cake tin so nobody had to have bespoke ones made for them like the knitters over on Game of Wool having to supposedly commission custom chunky DPNs to complete a vaguely Fair Isle adjacent tank top in only 12 hours.
The show was very keen to inform us was the biggest showstopper that’s ever been in the tent and the bakers would likely have never attempted something like this before!

Sir, just last week you made a 12kg chocolate beehive in a flower pot, this is nothing!
And if you think for a moment that it being the biggest bake they’ve ever made would mean Paul and Prue might use their legs and walk over to the bakers for the showstopper judging, THINK AGAIN

I can just feel that the show wants someone to drop their showstopper one day because why do they walk around to judge the much more transportable Signature bakes but insist everyone has to delicately inch over with their bust of Geoffrey Spicer-Simson rendered in shortbread teetering precariously on a breadboard?

Despite the challenge being for a stupidly big cake, the challenge seemed to be well calibrated with all the bakers managing to complete their cakes in the 4 and a half hours. Or in Aaron’s case, the 4 hours because he lost about 30 minutes of work to an aggressive drum solo on a mixing bowl

given that in the past they’ve had to do a complete bench wipe when someone breaks a bowl or cuts themself too badly, I would like to hope that Aaron was given back the time spent clearing up. But judging by his cake and generally deflated disposition throughout the judging process, I’m going to assume that didn’t happen

I can see the vision – a very minimalist cake with pops of colour looks stunning but the scale of everything is really off and I agree with Paul that the icing detail looks more like a mistake than a choice – possibly further exaggerated because of the colour making it look like a grouting job done by a scummy landlord

and everything on the top is layed out far too rigidly which doesn’t mesh with the organic, marble-veined icing. And sadly the cake was overbaked and lacking in punch for the judges, which is a real shame because his Darjeeling and Apricot combination was the only interesting thing happening as Tom and Jasmine seemed to have collectively bought out the entire UK supply of raspberries

I’m putting a moratorium on raspberries next year – THEY’RE NOT EVEN NICE! They’re just a strawberry that can’t commit to the bit.

Jasmine was pairing her raspberries with cardamom as a nod to 6 tenths of her bakes on the show and the resulting cake did look very impressive

she’d also, importantly, done by far the most baking with additional meringues and a Swiss Meringue Buttercream to boot

the other two had opted for American Buttercream – possibly the worst cake icing, losing only to that very specific fondant icing your gran covers a Christmas cake in and constantly leaves you wondering if you’re chewing on icing or your own teeth.

Tom’s cake was more traditionally Bake Off (read: panderingly so) featuring a grassy meadow and a raspberry jelly centrepiece harkening to the cake in the opening titles

but his model of Teletubbyland complete with sacrificial blood pool (how do you think Tinky-Winky still looks so young?) had to taste as good as it looked

and WHADDYA KNOW? Tom’s 3 episode narrative of being all style and no substance comes to a perfect end (I feel like the show forgot he won Star Baker in Biscuit Week and was consistently in talks for Star Baker in the first 5 weeks)

which is nice for him. I wish Aaron had managed to stick his landing so well. But ultimately, Aaron was very much The Christiaan of this series – a weird track record, no real obstacle to overcome and sort of just being kept around to do something interesting like a circus bear being poked with a stick to do its funny little walk.

An Unofficial Table Cake Ranking:
1. Jasmine’s Jasmine Themed Cake
2. Tom’s Teletubby War Map
3. Aaron’s Cowboy Builder Cake

Given that nothing about this series has felt surprising, it wasn’t about to start being interesting now. Especially with Jasmine having not Pulled a Richard by coming in to the final with 5 Star Baker titles and suddenly deciding to have one of the worst days of her life. Richard losing Bake Off 2014 walked so that Joe Marler fucking up the final of Celebrity Traitors could run

Joe having the entire game worked out and still perfectly orchestrating the only way that Alan Carr could possibly win <3 Truly a moment only possible in a singular reality.

Anyway, Jasmine didn’t fire a double barrel shotgun into her feet and so she is our 2025 Bake Off Champion

but the real winners were definitely Iain and Toby on their mates date

a mullet is truly a majestic thing when in motion.

And thank you for everyone for reading these recaps despite a wonky publishing schedule – it’s been a tough one to keep motivated with covering and life has been busier than usual but I think ultimately I’m glad I stuck with it! But the show does owe me an entire series of slightly formidable women over 45 next year.

And with that, there’s only one way to end these things: The Alternative Montage!

At risk of ending this recap on too sad a note – Bake Off ended with a dedication to one of their editors, Dan Blackman and I really admire Love Productions having this reverence for the people that make this show possible, even if we the audience don’t know them

and I would like to do one of my own. This week, the news Avaryl Halley, a movie reviewer on YouTube and member of the How Did That Get Made production team died after an 18 month battle with cancer. We talked a few times because she read the Bake Off, Sewing Bee and Throwdown recaps – which is wild to me! She and her co-host on MovieBitches, Andrew Galdi, are massive influences on my writing style and own taste in media. She was a massive appreciator of the niche, the camp and the artistically bewildering. There is nothing she didn’t know about the most obscure and terrible of movies or TV shows and is a tremendous loss for it

drink wine, watch bad movies and stay cunty.