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It is funny the things that stay with you, isn’t it? For instance, if I ever need to create an escape valve for rising feelings that risk bursting out, I allow myself a two-minute rage about the Bread Lion. That was the magnificent creation by Paul Jagger in the 2015 Bake Off’s bread week – yes, nine years ago, what’s your point? – sculpted out of three kinds of dough and which emerged from the oven an Aslanesque beauty, wise, benevolent but with just a hint of danger and Paul Hollywood called “one of the best things I’ve seen in bread, ever”. And yet, Jagger did not get star baker nor even a Hollywood handshake for his efforts. I have known no real peace since.
So it is possible that I approach Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking not entirely in the lighthearted spirit in which it was intended. Because I need bakers of all kinds, let alone those who produce what this lot does in its first round, to be revered as gods. People who can bring raw ingredients together to make something delicious? Sterling work. Those who can do it in light, fluffy cake form and add meringue? Top notch. Those who can transform cakes, meringue, chocolate, cream, vanilla pods, mango and passion fruit puree, pistachio nuts, lemon curd and isomalt into a writhing Slytherin snake (complete with 864 individual hand-moulded, hand-applied scales), a hyperrealistic stallion-head Patronus wreathed in chocolate leaves, a cabinet of potions with a bottle pouring out dragon’s blood mid-air (“It should be on a movie set,” says one of the judges), Luna Lovegood sunglasses that reveal a hidden message in icing, a chocolate Whomping Willow holding an almond cake flying car? What can we call these people but gods? When one tier of someone’s cake is wrapped in a Gryffindor scarf that looks exactly is if it has been knitted out of icing, when rice paper and malted mousse lilies appear to be levitating in front of a white horse, no one can say for sure that divine forces have not been at work.
In the opening round, 18 people who have never met are divided into pairs (usually one baker-type and one pastry chef-type) and given six hours to come up with and create a 2ft-high (at least, please!) showstopper based on Harry Potter’s wizarding world. The above is just some of what they do. I haven’t even mentioned the popcorn and mousse-filled snitches, the peanut butter and salted caramel-stuffed spiders or their shiny hand-tempered chocolate bodies. The whole thing is overseen by James and Oliver Phelps – AKA the Weasley twins in the movie adaptations – who are clearly the nicest boys in the universe, though their identicalness only becomes more astounding the longer you watch. “Is … is one of them cake?” you start wondering about halfway through.
With a 90-minute run time, the energy is kept up nicely without the experience becoming too chaotic or stressful. There is enough room to breathe and appreciate the magnitude of the tasks the pairs have set themselves. Although the true stress they are feeling can occasionally be glimpsed. One couple, Zoe and Jordan, are incorporating a bit of technology into their showstopper (a celebration of Hufflepuff house, involving a badger cake sitting on top of an evocation of Platform 9¾ and surrounded by apple crumble trunks, natch) that will shoot out edible Hogwarts invitation letters from its mouth. What happens, asks one of the twins, if it doesn’t work? “Then,” says Jordan tightly and unsmiling, “we throw the letters at the judges.”
The judges are the chefs Carla Hall and Jozef Youssef, who are well-known on the US cooking show circuit and culinary forces to be reckoned with. They must decide who has earned a ticket for the Hogwarts Express that will allow them to journey onwards to the next round and who “hasn’t done quite enough”. I shall say little more about the outcome except that one result has pushed Bread Lion off my list of raging injustices and that the fact that there are people in this world with the amount of talent, patience and perfectionism laid out here makes me weep great ganache tears and vow in 2025 to do better. Just … better, all round.
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