Baking is a sort of alchemy. With precise judgment, a lot of practice and expert patience, the skilled kitchen craftsman learns to transform clouds of eggwhite into shiny-topped macarons, pools of molten chocolate into hard and gleaming tempered sheets, dusty heaps of flour and foaming yeast into elaborate plaits of yielding bread. And on Tuesday night, the oven timer of fate will go ping and another transformation will be complete: the winner of the Great British Bake Off will be declared and one amateur baker's life will change forever.
This isn't hyperbole: Bake Off is one of the few talent shows that has the power to launch a career, with previous contestants making the jump to pro cuisine thanks to the programme. The show comes trimmed with pastel bunting, and iced with the gloriously awful puns of presenters Mel and Sue, but beneath all that is a sponge layer of steely determination.
This is serious culinary business, and the judges and bakers never forget that. Harsh, then, that so much coverage has focused on the most negative reactions to the most competitive person in the competition, with journalists on tabloids and broadsheets across our great baking nation preheating their laptops to ask the critical question: why do people hate finalist Ruby Tandoh so much?
Tandoh – a 21-year-old student who has shown both exceptional talent and a punishing streak of self-deprecation from episode one – has been accused of being too weepy, of false modesty, of scraping by on her looks, of flirting and so on. And whatever jibe a hack would like to make, there's always some obliging sniper on Twitter to offer a quotable chunk of unpleasantness.
Here's why I think people are so free with their dislike of Tandoh: because they follow the same narrative the media does, and they know that when a woman does well, step number two is always to give her a pummelling. Leave your high-achieving female in a warm place to prove, and once well-risen, knock her back with both fists. And Tandoh has committed the terrible crime of caring visibly about the competition, when it's widely agreed that women are silly things and baking is a silly, woman-y thing. Imagine crying about the consistency of the mousse in your Charlotte royale!
Well, imagine it. Imagine doing something and caring sufficiently about the outcome that it could move you to tears of self-reproach and frustration if it goes wrong. Imagine doing the thing you love most in the world and presenting it to world-class experts for judgment, and them finding it wanting – and knowing yourself that it wasn't good enough. Most of us, most of the time, live lives where good enough is more than enough. Most jobs don't ask for any particular skill beyond showing up, and much expertise is viewed with suspicion in a silly, slapdash world where the term "gatekeeper" is waved about like the lowest possible term of abuse.
Week after week, the Bake Off sifted away the less-than-excellent. The bakers who didn't appreciate that techniques are there to be followed fell away, as did the bakers who could imitate but not invent, until only the very best were left. The other two finalists might not be as demonstrative as Tandoh – Kimberley Wilson and Frances Quinn are more likely to allow themselves a quietly bitten lip or a triumphant smile, and still get called smug for their efforts – but their standards are just as exacting. In fact, show me a skilled baker who isn't a perfectionist, and I will show you my lumpy scones: caring almost to the point of derangement about your creme patissiere is the whole point of Bake Off. Tandoh's tears are part of the reason the Bake Off is legitimately great, and anyone who's missed that doesn't even deserve cake.
