Great British Bake Off Celebrity Cake Busts

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About

Great British Bake Off Celebrity Cake Busts refers to cakes made as part of the showstopper challenge in Series 11, Episode 1 of baking competition show The Great British Bake Off. The bakers were tasked with making cakes that looked like the head and shoulders of a celebrity they admire. The resulting cakes were later mocked on social media, as most of the chefs had difficulty making accurate likenesses of their chosen celebrities. In particular, busts of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Tom Delonge and Lupita Nyong'o attracted the most commentary.

Origin

Series 11, Episode 1 of The Great British Bake Off aired in England on September 22nd, 2020, and September 25th, 2020 on Netflix. ^[1] In the episode, the bakers' 3rd and final challenge was to make cake busts of celebrities they admired, meaning they had to make a cake in the shape of the head and shoulders of a celebrity. Most of the bakers struggled to make accurate likenesses, resulting in some comical-looking cakes, particularly those meant to look like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Lupita Nyong'o, and Tom Delonge (shown below).

Spread

After the episode aired, the various cakes were mocked on social media. Many users made Skull Cow Can't Hurt You jokes. For example, Twitter user @Mosborne93^[2] posted the joke using pictures of the Bowie and Mercury cakes as well as cakes depicting journalist Louis Theroux and Bob Marley (shown below, left). User @rachieburn_^[3] also posted a Skull Cow joke using busts of Theroux and David Attenborough (shown below, right).

Other popular jokes about the cakes include a post by @bricklyrspice^[4] quoting Blink-182 with the Delonge cake, gaining over 390 retweets and 2,100 likes (shown below, left). Delonge himself joked about the cake on his Instagram page.^[5] User @JaimeBolton^[6] posted a 2020 joke using the Bowie cake, gaining over 390 retweets and 2,600 likes (shown below).

Jokes were covered by the Daily Dot^[7] and the cakes were ranked by Thrillist.^[8]