In France, Le Meilleur Pâtissier (The Best Pastrychef) seems a slight oddity, given that France’s baking tradition is professional rather than domestic. (I have watched contestants perform the most peculiar challenge of baking “un cupcake géant” – since cupcakes are miniature cakes, it seemed to me that the contestants were, in fact, merely baking cakes.) Bake Off Italia is flirty and dramatic, set in beautiful formal gardens. The Scandinavians are keen on the format. They seem to favour lurid decoration (I watched a Danish chap on The Great Bake Fight produce an electric guitar formed of a blue-iced cake, presented in a guitar case). For The American Baking Competition, which also had Paul as a judge, there were Route 66 signs on the tent wall, and fist-pumping.
There is Bake Off in Turkey and Brazil, and in Thailand and Romania and Ukraine. What is most remarkable about these overseas versions is how they merge, chameleon-like, into their host cultures. Those apparently indelible signifiers of Britishness turn out, after all, to be evanescent. When I asked a Swedish friend what the tent, pastel kitchen units, and perky crockery displays in All of Sweden is Baking brought to mind, she replied, immediately: “Ikea and summer weekend cabins.” Phillips has not even lost hope of selling the format to China, which has no tradition of covered ovens, let alone baking – despite the fact that one broadcaster has turned her down on the grounds that Chinese audiences won’t watch a television programme “that makes you fat”.
