Look how far we’ve come. Just 14 short years ago, The Great British Bake Off burst on to the scene, proving once and for all that televised baking contests weren’t the tedious, niche ordeals the industry previously thought. How much did the concept catch on? Well, I just watched a show where a cake opened its mouth and deliberately vomited coconut sauce all over a screaming judge, so the answer seems to be “quite well, thanks”.
The show in question is Killer Cakes, a Prime Video baking show hosted by Scream’s Matthew Lillard, in which contestants are tasked with producing cakes that make the trials in the Saw franchise look tame. There are cakes that ooze blood. There are cakes that wriggle and lurch. One cake – and I hope this doesn’t count as a spoiler – takes the form of a mutated pig man being sliced through the navel by a moving circular saw. You have to wonder what Paul Hollywood would make of it all.
In truth, Killer Cakes is not the greatest television series ever made. It has that haphazard overedited American reality show feel, where it seems as if every sentence anyone speaks has been assembled from 30 or 40 other sentences. And at this point in time, baking shows have become so prevalent that everyone knows the preparation process off by heart. The correct way to watch Killer Cakes is to start an episode, immediately scrub forward until the last 20 minutes, then see what the cakes are actually like without all the tedium of baking.
In one sense, however, the show stands as undeniable proof of the sturdiness of the baking competition as a format. Want to see a bunch of lovely bakers in a tent? There’s Bake Off. Want to see child bakers? Junior Bake Off, or Discovery’s Kids Baking Championship. Want to see people baking at Christmas? There’s Christmas Cookie Challenge or Holiday Baking Championship (both also Discovery). Want to see people baking cupcakes only? Cupcake Wars. Want to see people bake things that test the limits of engineering? Baking Impossible. Want to see people bake cakes that look like hyperrealistic gym bags? Is It Cake?. Want to see bakers try to CSI a dessert by inspecting trace amounts of ingredients left around the set for some reason? Crime Scene Kitchen, which is an actual show that really exists. Are you someone who will financially benefit from the needless brand diversification of a beloved children’s author? Then Dr Seuss Baking Challenge is for you, and potentially only you.
What these shows have in common is an understanding of why baking shows are so popular. First, all of them – even Killer Cakes, despite its gory premise – share a core seed of wholesomeness in their DNA. It’s almost completely impossible to bake a cake maliciously, and so by their very nature baking competitions are about good-natured people trying to produce something delicious to make other people happy. Even during these late stages, when the contestants all tend to be slightly more overtly attention-seeking than you’d like, they’re all still operating from a base point of niceness.
They’re also, for the most part, family friendly. I’ve got young kids, and I’ve taken to using baking-competition shows as a way to lure my children away from the wastelands of YouTube and towards the safer ground of proper telly. Is It Cake? is particularly brilliant at this, but most of the others (again, with the exception of the mutilated pig man show) can hold their attention better than most dramas.
Most importantly, they’re cheap to make. We live in an era where the scripted television industry is dominated by vast IP extensions such as The Penguin or House of the Dragon, which cost several million dollars an episode to produce. Putting on a baking competition, where all you need are a couple of ovens, some flour and the contact details of a celebrity judge nobody has ever heard of, must be an extremely cost-effective alternative.
Still, you have to wonder how long it can last. Increasingly, the thing that makes or breaks a baking show is the quality of its reveals. Killer Cakes gets a pass purely because some of the cakes belch fluid at the judges. Is It Cake?, too, is much more of a guessing game than a baking show. But there are only so many ways you can show someone whisking eggs into sugar, and my sense is that the end is probably in sight. After all, once you’ve made a cake that pukes, you’ve probably run out of road.
• Killer Cakes is on Prime Video now
