The Great British Bake Off

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About

The Great British Bake Off, known as The Great British Baking Show in the United States and Canada, is a long-running reality competition series in which amateur bakers compete to complete baking challenges. The show has been widely praised as a gentle alternative to more intense competition shows and has run for 12 seasons as of 2021. It has also produced several meme templates online, such as I'm Just Now Asking Myself Whether I Might Have Made An Error and Bon Appetite.

History

The Great British Bake Off was created by Love Productions and first aired on August 17th, 2010.^[1] A new series has premiered annually since. The first seven series of the show appeared on BBC networks and were judged by Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, with Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc acting as presenters. Starting in Series 8, the show moved to Channel 4, and Berry, Perkins and Gierdroyc left the show while Paul Hollywood agreed to stay. Berry, Perkins and Gierdroyc were replaced by Prue Leith, Noah Fielding, and Sandy Toksvig, respectively. After three series, Toksvig left the show and was replaced by Matt Lucas. Series 3-12 have been broadcast on Netflix.

Format

Save for the first two series of the show, each series of Bake Off features 10 episodes, each of which features three challenges: a signature challenge, in which bakers work to create a bake they've practiced; a technical challenge, in which the bakers are tasked with making something they haven't practiced based only on a recipe; and a showstopper challenge, in which the bakers are tasked with baking something particularly astounding. Each week, one person is named "Star Baker" and another person is eliminated.

Online Presence

The show became very renowned after its first two seasons thanks to critical reception and word of mouth, peaking at over 13.85 million viewers in Series 7. The subreddit for the series, /r/bakeoff^[2] was created on August 7th, 2014, and has over 46,000 subscribers. A second subreddit for the show, /r/GreatBritishBakeOff,^[3] has over 24,000 subscribers. The show's fan page on Facebook^[4] has over 1.2 million likes. The series has a rating of 82 on Metacritic.^[5]

Bon Appetite

Bon Appetite refers to three panels from The Great British Bakeoff in which comedian and contestant James Acaster explains his disastrous flapjacks with the quote "Started making it. Had a breakdown. Bon Appetite." The images were used as reaction images on Twitter following the episode's premiere.

The day the episode aired, Twitter users began using the moment as reaction images. Twitter user @scottygb tweeted "Literally us all" with the images that day, gaining over 17,000 retweets and 52,000 likes. User @robynhfrost tweeted the images with the caption "the creative process," gaining over 66,000 retweets and 193,000 likes (shown below, right).

Celebrity Cake Busts

Great British Bake Off Celebrity Cake Busts refers to cakes made as part of the showstopper challenge in Series 11, Episode 1 of 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.

I'm Just Now Asking Myself Whether I Might Have Made An Error

I'm Just Now Asking Myself Whether I Might Have Made An Error, aka I'm Just Now, Internally, Asking Myself, In Quite A Worried Way, Whether I Might Have Made An Error is a quote from British television presenter Nick Hewer while on The Great Celebrity Bake-off. After the quote was posted to TikTok by the Bake-off account, it began seeing use as a sound effect that was paired with scenarios where people were in unfortunate situations.

Mexican Week

Great British Bake Off Mexican Week refers to the controversy surrounding an October 7th, 2022 episode of the Netflix program The great British Bake-Off, which was believed by many to feature negative stereotypes about Mexican culture and to show a general misunderstanding of Mexican cuisine.