Me when every pop song in the 2010s had a terrible rap feature halfway through.

If Danni has a million fans, I am one of them. If Danni has no fans, then that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is against Danni, then I am against the world.

As the sun dims on the Sewing Bee contestants, a new cohort of the bravest people this side of the RNLI must take over as the load bearing emotional support of the United Kingdom, behold the class of Bake Off 2026

and the entire pantheon of Bake Off tropes is present: Big Gay, Sinister Thin Gay, Just Your Dad, Two NHS Workers and The One That Dies Halfway Through

The only notable absence for a perfect Bake Off Bingo is the lack of a bonkers nan but I think whatever Danni has going on is worth at least three women called Carol who have never heard of an avocado

but while Danni is going multi-platinum in my household specifically (they’re everything to me, you can never make me hate them) the most talked about aspect of this series is of course the addition of the Nigella Lawson Thesaurus to the gazebo

and she’s great at it! I do get the impression there’s at least 5 hours of cut judging footage on the editing room floor because she has never knowingly described a cake in less than 100 words and hasn’t quite learned the art of the televisable amount of food to shove in your mouth at any one given time

she’s iconic and has immediately slotted into the role of a judge very well – there was some stiltedness but I also don’t know how much of that was first episode nerves or just not wanting to make any sudden movements lest Moyin bolt for the woods like a startled deer

and speaking of prescribing animalistic traits to reality TV contestants, here they all are with their Animal Crossing counterparts

Over and Stout

For their very first Signature Bake, the contestants were having to make their own take on one of Nigella’s most famous recipes: (no, not the Marmite Spaghetti or the Chocolate Christmas Salami) a Chocolate Stout Cake

which I thought would maybe be a little bit limiting in terms of flavour profiles which is why we ended up with a plethora of Black Forest Gateaux on every point of the stability spectrum

today I am personally feeling like Shannon’s free-standing trifle (remember when they very sincerely tried to make free-standing trifles a thing on this show? NIGELLA WOULD NEVER.)

and somehow this *isn’t* the one that hit the floor, and neither is Danni’s that is being held together like a Looney Tunes character after a grievous accident

she’s made the mistake of mentioning that she was a little bit bored in the tent

and thus one finger on Paul’s monkey’s paw curled and decided that the last 5 minutes of the challenge would be sure to keep Danni busy as their cake disintegrated around them

I *assume* they were trying to shape the cake a little bit like pint glass – it is the only logical explanation I can come up with for whittling away the bottom of your cake like a beaver felling trees

and it’s pretty damning when even the cake that had to be baked in under an hour and by the power of sheer adrenaline is showcasing more structural integrity

obviously it’s still very warm, a problem most of the bakers had but not all of them had the excuse of having to scrape chocolate out of the carpet fibres

the Floor Cake Equinox comes around earlier and earlier every year. I take my hat off to Alison in this moment and how she managed to help rally Molly who seemed to be facing the near impossible challenge of making an entire cake in less than an hour

and it wasn’t bad! They loved the addition of the cardamom and the texture of the cake was spot on – Molly had made the very wise decision of pivoting to the world’s smallest cake tins in order to hopefully bake it in time.

Also suffering from warm cakes was Gary who is responsible for a moment somehow more upsetting than watching Molly go through every single stage of grief in about 15 seconds

and I am of course talking about the leaky cake hole

thankfully he’d managed to bung up the cake hole by the time it got to the judges, otherwise I don’t know if it would’ve received quite such rave reviews

as for his flavours, the challenge may have only called for stout but Gary would be damned if he wasn’t putting the entire bar cabinet in that cake

and like every good shot, you can wash it down with mayonnaise

I am so sorry, I simply do not have the time – this recap is already looking like it’ll be 3500 words, so we’ll just move on to Danni who had also gone for a bit of a boozier cake, lacing it with a bit of port as her dad likes a glass with his pints – I’m just not entirely sure how much port got into the cake

I think we can all accept that Danni is probably here for a very short time and some may say that time is already somewhat borrowed

but MY GOD, if it isn’t a good time! When I look into their eyes I see a glimpse of Ye Olde Bake Off, a time before the option of being a baking influencer or aspirations of a cook book were a thing, they’re operating on vibes and a level of eccentricity usually only reserved for people who run private zoos on the grounds of their stately home. And the girls that get it get it and the girls that don’t never will.

My other bias is of course, Looksmaxxing Eeyore over here who will out mog your trauma

Mo was responsible for one of two Peanut Butter flavoured cakes, his definitely winning this particular battle on account of not being declared dead on arrival

I think if Paul Hollywood said this about my cake I would go find the nearest flowerbed and just bury myself in it but surely BOTH of Gabe’s partners didn’t lie to him about the flavour of his cake

God, what a sausage dog fest.
Mo’s cake was much better received, Nigella declaring it sensational

and making sure to plant Chekhov’s fondness for salt as foreshadowing for later

this is very important later, much to Paul Hollywood having the worst time of his life.

Much of this challenge involved everyone trying their best to find the nichest of all stouts, resulting in a good selection of global options ranging from Connie’s use of Dragon Stout from Jamaica which she paired with mango

and Moyin’s use of Nigerian stout for his Walnut Stout Cake

and as much as Paul loved the combination of flavours, he was more interested in Moyin’s personal best sprint time

and as much I enjoy Paul Hollywood’s hubris and will beg them to release the Paul Hollywood vs Moyin sports day footage, my favourite part of this conversation is Nigella noping out of this conversation the moment Paul challenges him to a race

she will have no part in this man’s ego and subsequent hubris.

There were also some continental options, Yannis’s cake was a nod to Austria’s Sacher Torte which had gone really well for him

the only slight detraction was that he needed to add a little bit more apricot, it was getting a little overwhelmed by everything else. But it wasn’t the only one getting lost amongst the richness of the chocolate

the throuple is now a Quad. Yannis, your apparently mandatory polycule dachshund is in the post.

Clara had brought in a Portuguese stout for her orange flavoured cake but had made the mistake of perhaps promising too big with the sugar dome

diva, it’s the first day in the tent, take a leaf out of Danni’s manifesto written in dandelion and burdock on two slices of rye bread and go simple, it doesn’t matter if you’re twiddling your thumbs for 20 minutes, at this point in the competition you just need to fulfil the objective of having a cake-shaped cake

the sugar dome was just an attempted flex and the cake did still work with out it and the judges weren’t particularly put out by it not being there.

Lastly we have Nikki who was also going a little bit extra with the decorations, having decided to make tuiles designed to look like glasses of Guinness

I’m just not quite so sure the final effect gives that so much as a grave site of some sort of gothic warlord and the retinue of soldiers that had to be buried alive with him

it’s giving very Lithium by Evanescence music video

and much like Lithium by Evanescence, the taste is immaculate.

An Unofficial Chocolate Stout Cake Ranking:
1. Mo’s Louis Vuitton Stout Cake
2. Tom’s Strong and Stable Gateau
3. Gary’s Leaky Cake Hole
4. Nikki’s Pit of Emo Guinness
5. Moyin St-out running Paul Hollywood
6. The Dragon’s Mango Hoard
7. Dome and Dusted
8. Yannis’s Sa-sure, It’s Fine Torte
9. Gabe’s DNR Bundt
10. Shannon’s Decanted Trifle
11. The Inaugural Floor Cake
12. Danni’s Acetate Case of Emotion

Bake By Numbers

It continues to be a Very Special Nigella Episode as she was in charge of setting the Cake Week Technical Challenge of creating a Coffee and Walnut Cake, although I highly doubt she had any hand in the ominous vertical gingham shroud

I fear we may have swung a little too far on the reality-tv-o-metre with this one as the bakers found themselves without a recipe and having to pull a Nailed It! by taking all of their cues from the Tom Hovey illustration

and despite the Generation Game side quest of it all, somehow the results were better than if they’d included a basic instruction like “cream the butter and sugar” leading to some poor accountant from Salisbury really overthinking what that meant. The only real instructions they’d been given was Nigella’s piece of Shakespearean vaguery

which everyone took as an explicit instruction to see how much salt it took before Paul Hollywood frothed up like a slug

but for the most part it was a pretty uneventful Technical Challenge – the Baking Gods had been kind and answered Molly’s prayers to spare the carpet

however, there was only so much they could do as she landed in last place for a cake that delivered on neither being Nigella Lawson’s Personal Salt Lick or sustaining Paul Hollywood’s caffeine dependence. Which had at least saved Danni a little bit, allowing their very collapsed cake to get 11th place

never has anyone in the Bake Off Tent had such a struggle against he concept of verticality since Joe Sugg got a paper cut and folded like an ironing board

the real success story of the challenge was Tom, who was flying by the seat of his pants in a very vibes-based approach to the challenge

and had decided to even risk the potential pettiness of this challenge and add a few unasked for caramelised walnuts to the equation at the risk of being told it doesn’t look exactly like the drawing anymore

by while Nigella may have quibbled about whether or not the nuts actually needed to be sweeter – how DARE you deny her the inherent hollow salinity of a walnut? Paul was more concerned with Nikki’s nut size

However, there was a note of slight awe to that exclamation as she landed in 5th.

An Official Coffee and Walnut Cake Technical Ranking:
1. Tom’s Vibes-based Coffee and Walnut Cake
2. Gary The Bridesmaid
3. Gabe’s Not Dead Yet
4. Mo’s Coff-ish and Walnut Cake
5. Nikki Big Nuts
6. Co-needs Salt
7. Ya-skimped on the Salt
8. Clara-fication: Needs Salt
9. Moyin’s A-salt of Paul Hollywod
10. Shannon Needs More Salt: The Nigella Lawson Story
11. Danni’s Shortstack
12. Piety Only Gets You So Far

The Bake Modern

Finishing off the introduction to the bakers, they were having to make self-portrait cakes in the hopes of recapturing the magic of Laura’s neckless Freddie

but it appears the bakers have learned and only one baker attempted a full 3D sculpture, that brave soul being Moyin with his Hibiscus curd filled cake being inspired by the Nigerian drink, Zobo

the use of the very aerated sponge to replicate his hair texture is an inspired choice, as is the slightly visceral nature of the cake once you cut into it

it was definitely one of the standouts of the challenge, Nigella was particularly taken by the sherbety notes of the curd. It was slightly overbaked, which again a lot of the bakers had problems with, but is particularly impressive in the case of Moyin who had forgotten to turn his oven on to begin with

but he wasn’t the only one to have a pretty crucial setback as Yannis forgot about 60% of his sponge before putting it in the oven

and Yannis couldn’t really afford to lose time because his portrait was probably the most ambitious one in the room, save for Danni who forgot that at some point she’d walked through a fairy circle and made enemies with an Archfey who controls the concept of gravity

and Yannis was ready to jump too given how much time his Pointillism portrait was taking up

Despite Yannis circling closer and closer to the centre of the Bake Off torment nexus, his final cake was very impressive looking

the almond Chiffon was overbaked but the combination of cherry, almond and pistachio was always going to be a winner.

I think I if I had to do this challenge, I probably would’ve have gone the same route as Clara doing a Van Gogh portrait because you don’t have to be particularly good at art to somewhat replicate his style (soz Vincent, I didn’t mean for you to catch strays – love your work, cried in your gallery xoxo)

and also like Clara, I’d be throwing pennies into a well until Paul Hollywood vanished

well, I’ve found my Diva of the series – this is up there with Nancy repeatedly just referring to Paul as “The Male Judge” <3
The judges were a bit hit and miss on Clara’s cake – they did think her portrait was a little bit simple and to that I say, GUYS… they just wanted to make cakes, none of them applied for having to draw anything more demanding than a stick figure, not everyone is as easy to draw as Tom!

I love that as much as this looks EXACTLY like Mad Scientist Peter Lorre it is also very obviously Tom

the only critique was that his raising agents were coming through too much but they loved the hefty use of cinnamon in his carrot cake.
Shannon had quite a similar concept of just draping fondant over a cake and applying facial features to it like Mrs. Potato Head

but her cake went only partially made as halfway through the challenge she had to be walked into the limbo beyond the giraffes

but she’s back in the preview for Biscuit Week looking a little bit like she’d rather be anywhere else

Shannon, power through, we cannot have another person going the same way as Ballin’ Sasquatch Jeff

some say he’s still roaming the woods of Welford Park.

Shannon’s sudden absence is, I think we can state pretty plainly, pretty much entirely the reason Danni lives to see Biscuit Week and for that I have to thank Shannon Christ for her selfless sacrifice

Danni was incorporating some of her hobbies into the cake, these being foraging for innuendo

and fixing broken electronics which were represented by the fact she served her portrait of Brittany from The Chipettes on a PC tower

Nigella’s face as this husk of dead technology was set before her <3

truly Danni is a one person baptism of fire.
Aside from getting to say “sticky willy” on TV, the cake’s main gimmick was that it was a vegan bake, which was getting a lot of blame for the fact the cake’s hobby is base jumping

and I don’t really think we can pin this one on veganism so much as Danni giving her cake a truly insane centre of gravity

’twas the vegans that made them do it.

Molly was also incorporating her hobbies into her design, the top tier of her cake being wrapped with a knit-textured fondant that was very effective

and she may well have had one of the better self-portraits in the room, or at least the only one the show was willing to show as a side-by-side

they loved her cake too – you can’t really go wrong with a lemon cake. Which brings us to my need for psychological compensation from the Bake off writing team for THIS

using “lemon party” and GARY of all people is criminal behaviour. This poor man just wanted to come on this show and talk about his big horse and comfortingly rotund chickens and he’s being used as tactical warfare against millennials who have been chronically online since 2005

and his farming life was very much a theme of his cake, which I thought looked great!

however, Paul Hollywood is apparently taking a leaf out of the Michelle Visage book of TV Judging and decided he needed to see more than a cake-shaped cake from Gary

it’s been ONE episode – you cannot ask Gary to put forth a dot-free face yet!

and it’s not like Gary had played it *that* safe – he’d still delivered a really well done self-portrait that was instantly recognisable as him, granted it’s easier because he is the only man over the age of 35 in the tent

one day I’ll stop complaining about the show being clogged up by beautiful 20-somethings. Speaking of which here is Mo and his equally beautiful cat of ambiguous gender

I think all of us at some point have had an apparently male pet that one day suddenly gives birth – mine was a rat called… *big sigh* Ratty. I was so proud when she gave birth to 12 babies and didn’t eat a single one of them! Mum of the year, right there!
The judges were wild for Mo’s cake, just call him Mo-hannes Vermeer and hang it in The Rijksmuseum

and Paul seemingly agonised over whether or not he can dish a handshake out in episode one without pissing off the internet again after that one series where he really shorted to the handshake economy

Mo was worried that the flavours of his cake weren’t inventive enough but the judges really didn’t think so. I imagine it’s easy for that doubt to settle in when you’ve got Danni on the bench next to you draining a ziplock bag of what looks like puddle water from the car park of one of their favourite National Trust locations

but Mo’s simple combo of Blueberries and Lemon was perfect in the eyes of Paul “Visage” Hollywood who has not yet decided that lemons are the new Marie Antoinette

Shannon, put it away!

The last of the citrus flavours was from Gabe who was going all poignant and high art with his cake – the self-portrait being his drag persona, Blu Romantic, hidden behind an isomalt mirror that had to be broken open, god bless the queers!

unfortunately the Bake Off filming schedule did not allow enough time for him to get into full Blu drag so he could only go as far as putting on about as much drag as PM ever did on Canada’s Drag Race

it was this EVERY week for NINE weeks – PM stood for Pissing Meoff, which is now the name of my drag persona. Don’t think I’d get too far in the Bake Off application for plans to make a Pissing Meoff cake, not that I’m applying. But one day I’ll give into that intrusive thought

water is wet, the sky is blue and Tom does an alarmingly good Diana impression

Tom, Linus Karp, Jack Shep and Marmalade starring in Princess Diana: A Very Battle Royale.

Connie and Nikki were both going for the classic combination of Chocolate and Cherry. Connie’s cake was inspired by a trip to Thailand and an elephant sanctuary she went to

if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had a friend go to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand and end up with a severe back injury inflicted upon them by an elephant, I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s damn funny that it happened to the same person twice. It sounded like Connie had a better time of it, although she hadn’t quite managed to get it all done, leaving her self-portrait somewhat scalped

she’d concentrated a lot more on the moulded elephants that Nigella made the mistake of complimenting and thus landing herself with an elephant-shaped lump of modelling chocolate like Monica being gifted Gladys by Phoebe on Friends

oh babe, that’s going straight into Nigella’s Cupboard of Unwanted Kitchen Gadgets (not be confused with the Cupboard of Novelty Pastas) along with the spiraliser, the Dutch pancake press and the set of cutlery she permanently borrowed from the David Mellor Visitor Centre in Hathersage. LAWSON, YOU’VE BEEN CLOCKED.
The judges liked the flavours well enough though – I just personally wish that maybe there was more unity between the Thai inspiration and the flavours? But maybe elephants really love cherries? Nikki’s flavours weren’t quite so well received, with the judges thinking it was all a little bit too chaotic and prone to distracting other classmates

and the presentation of the cake was no less chaotic and a pretty good illustration of why you should never draw every single individual tooth

hey, if you’ve got teeth as good as Nikki, you might as well show off as many of them as you can!

An Unofficial Portrait Cake Ranking:
1. The Cat That Got The Lemon Buttercream
2. Paul Hollywood Is Uninvited From The Lemon Party
3. Tom’s Portrait of Peter Lorre
4. He’s Blu Da ba dee da ba di
5. Moyin’s Anatomically Vascular Cake
6. What’s The Pointillism Of It All?
7. Molly’s Knit Picking
8. Vincent van GO AWAY PAUL
9. Scalped! At the Elephant Sanctuary
10. Nikki, please move to the front of the class
11. Danni’s Computer Crash Landing

Star Baker was a pretty close run race between Tom, Gary and Mo with it ultimately going to Mo because Gary made the crucial mistake of making cake-shaped cakes on Cake Week of all things…

I don’t quite know what discounted Tom because they raved about all three of his bakes and he had won the Technical Challenge. I suspect Tom may be the contestant they string along and only award it to him in like Week 6 by which point he’s just about launching grenades across the baking aisle.
As I’ve repeated throughout the recap, due to the fact Shannon was suddenly taken with Mysterious Bake Off Sickness (she does not owe us an explanation) nobody was going home this week meaning my favourite three sheep in a trench coat lives to bake again!

so we move on with a full cast of 12!