Bake Off: Crème de la Crème

Bake Off: Crème de la Crème is a British television baking competition on BBC Two featuring teams of professional pastry chefs pit against one another through two different challenges. The programme is presented by Tom Kerridge, and the competition judged by Benoit Blin, Cherish Finden and Claire Clark.^[1] It is a spin-off from The Great British Bake Off, and the eight-episode series was first screened on BBC Two from 29 March to 17 May 2016.^[2]

Format

The series is a competition between teams of professional pastry chefs from high-end hotels and restaurants, as well as supermarkets, armed forces and other companies and organisations. The competition aims to find the finest pastry chefs in the country, who can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and can create desserts that have "stunning visual impact, phenomenal flavour, and texture."^[2] Fifteen teams of pastry chefs are chosen for the competition, with three pastry chefs in each team, one of them the team captain. In the heats, the three teams are given two challenges and are awarded marks from the three judges for each of their creations, the team with the best total score after both challenges is guaranteed a place in the semifinal. The team with the highest total score throughout the whole of the heats is also guaranteed a place within the semifinal.^[1]The competition was filmed at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.^[3]

Miniature Challenge

In this challenge each team have to create a batch of 3 different types of miniatures. All must be uniform in appearance, finished to the very highest professional standards and will only have three hours to make all 108 pastries. Each miniature is marked out of 30 with a total of 90 points available.

Showpiece Challenge

In this challenge each team are asked to reinvent a popular British dessert and present it as a fine-dining showpiece display. Each judge has 50 points they can award with a total of 150 points available.

Episodes

     Team got through to the semi finals

     Team with the highest total score in the heats

     Team was the series Winner

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Critical reception

Early reviews were largely negative, with many reviewers comparing it unfavourably to The Great British Bake Off, suggesting that it had lost the crucial elements that made the original Bake Off a success.^[4] Michael Hogan of The Daily Telegraph complained that the new show "bore no resemblance to it whatsoever, thus seemed to be merely piggybacking cynically on the Bake-Off “brand". He also found two of the judges' accents as well as the scoring system "impenetrable", the baking "bafflingly scientific" and the teams not "terribly likeable". He concluded that Creme de la Creme "was nice but dull", and that as "a Bake-Off spin-off, it was a soggy-bottomed disaster. "^[5] Many of the viewing public concurred with the assessments of the critics and found the show lacking the "charm, fun and warmth" of the original.^[6] Chitra Ramaswamy of The Guardian thought that when the professional version of Bake Off gets serious means that "it gets silly", and he "found the format convoluted, which telly like this should never be."^[7] Gabriel Tate of The Times found the show a to be a "bloodless, uninvolving affair at once frenetically busy and yawningly free of incident, full of astounding technical proficiency and jawdropping invention, but devoid of passion and identity."^[8]

Ratings

References

External links

• Bake Off: Crème de la Crème at BBC Programmes
  
• Bake Off: Crème de la Crème at the Internet Movie Database