So how DOES Paul Hollywood bake his permatan to perfection?
EVERYBODY’S wondering it: considering that there’s a perpetual downpour outside the Bake Off marquee, how is it that paul hollywood turns browner every week?
Is he nipping away to a villa in the Med on his days off? Or just lying under the grill when the contestants have gone home from The Great
British Bake Off (BBC1)? Fellow judge Mary Berry revealed her own theory — she suspects him of pinching the coconut milk to use as suncream.
Coconut milk was in great demand after dairy products were banned in the ‘ showstopper’ round, which involved an ice cream roll. Impossible challenges have become the norm in this series, with paul and Mary demanding miracles and then penalising anyone who so much as whimpers.
As well as ice cream without cream, they wanted cakes without sugar and bread without gluten. The only baker who seemed unfazed was the irritatingly smug Ian, winner of the Star Baker award three weeks in a row, who preened: ‘ All the other bakers want to break my fingers but that’s something I’ll just have to live with.’
Others were showing their nerves in different ways. ‘I’ve got Cake Fear,’ stuttered fireman Mat, which sounds like a great movie about a baking psychopath, starring Robert Mitchum.
Apologetic Alvin kept calling paul hollywood ‘Sir’. paul didn’t correct him — he’s probably hoping everyone does it. This extremely respectful attitude seemed to work, because while all the other bakers were working wonders without sugar in the first round, Alvin simply made a bogstandard pineapple upside- down cake and spent the last half hour of the challenge twiddling his thumbs.
By the time the judges came to taste it, his pudding was cold and congealed, and looked like something from a Seventies school canteen. But ‘Sir’ paul pronounced it delicious — and then went on to savage Ian’s creation, a marvel of delicate icing that resembled a hat from Ladies’ Day at Ascot.
The stress also got to the other paul, a prison governor and one of the seven remaining rivals. he spent most of his ‘ showstopper’ day modelling a sunbather out of icing, to decorate his tropical cake.
She started off naked, to the delight of Mel Giedroyc and Sue perkins, whose innuendos went into overdrive. Governor paul added a bikini, and then a sausage of pink icing that looked anatomically all wrong.
Mel and Sue were in hysterics. ‘Sir’ paul just glowered. All this silliness made the hour float by, light as one of Mary’s spongecakes.
Sue got much heavier in the one-off travelogue that followed, Kolkata (BBC1). Arriving in the teeming Indian city most of us know as Calcutta, she was falling over herself to apologise for the Raj, Queen Victoria and imperialism.
‘ I come here as an english person,’ she declared snobbishly, ‘sort of embarrassed and ashamed at appalling colonial aggression . . . we don’t have the empire any more, we just have guilt.’
Actually, what we’ve got is the Commonwealth, the most successful international fellowship in the world. But Sue isn’t one to let logic or facts get in the way of her Leftie, patronising, middleclass pity for the poor.
After touring part of the city’s slums, Sue was invited to tour a dilapidated mansion by its owner, the niece of Calcutta’s great poet, Tagore.
The rooms were huge, the faded elegance oddly moving. All Sue could see was a prime city site that could be developed as high-rise housing for the homeless. Incredibly rudely, she said as much.
Back on the streets, she was bristling at the sight of men bent double and pulling rickshaws. ‘I would never get on one of those as a passenger,’ she assured us. It was like going on a city break with Jeremy Corbyn.
Sue redeemed herself, though, whenever she met children. They adored her instantly, and it was plain to see how much she loved them.
Yesterday she revealed that a brain tumour that affects her hormones means she will never be able to have children of her own. She will surely be a brilliant ‘Auntie’ to the lucky sprogs of many friends.