It is funny the things that stay with you, isn’t it? For instance, if I ever need to create an escape valve for rising feelings that risk bursting out, I allow myself a two-minute rage about the Bread Lion. That was the magnificent creation by Paul Jagger in the 2015 Bake Off’s bread week – yes, nine years ago, what’s your point? – sculpted out of three kinds of dough and which emerged from the oven an Aslanesque beauty, wise, benevolent but with just a hint of danger and Paul Hollywood called “one of the best things I’ve seen in bread, ever”. And yet, Jagger did not get star baker nor even a Hollywood handshake for his efforts. I have known no real peace since.
So it is possible that I approach Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking not entirely in the lighthearted spirit in which it was intended. Because I need bakers of all kinds, let alone those who produce what this lot does in its first round, to be revered as gods. People who can bring raw ingredients together to make something delicious? Sterling work. Those who can do it in light, fluffy cake form and add meringue? Top notch. Those who can transform cakes, meringue, chocolate, cream, vanilla pods, mango and passion fruit puree, pistachio nuts, lemon curd and isomalt into a writhing Slytherin snake (complete with 864 individual hand-moulded, hand-applied scales), a hyperrealistic stallion-head Patronus wreathed in chocolate leaves, a cabinet of potions with a bottle pouring out dragon’s blood mid-air (“It should be on a movie set,” says one of the judges), Luna Lovegood sunglasses that reveal a hidden message in icing, a chocolate Whomping Willow holding an almond cake flying car? What can we call these people but gods? When one tier of someone’s cake is wrapped in a Gryffindor scarf that looks exactly is if it has been knitted out of icing, when rice paper and malted mousse lilies appear to be levitating in front of a white horse, no one can say for sure that divine forces have not been at work.
