Meet the Great British Bake Off superfan who likes a challenge

Another Great British Bake Off ended this week.

Super fans will still be mulling over the results. Was Georgie the greatest? Did Dylan deserve to crash out? And how exciting was Christiane’s last-minute surge towards the finish line?

A huge draw of the show for many is marvelling at the technical challenges. With often minimal or no recipe instructions and the limited time given, how did the bakers manage to pull them off each week? Most of the challenges looked like mission impossible — especially the final weeks’ three tier tea stand filled with plaited filled sandwich rolls, strawberry tarts and mini-iced lemon sponge cakes. It would take most of us a day to get that lot on the table — and to make them look half decent.

Someone who went further than just idly pondering the problem is Harry Lampert. The 29-year-old self-taught baker told me he’s been copycatting the ‘technicals’ for years.

“It stemmed from back when I was in Uni and I thought it would be fun to do all the technical challenges and it became a bit of thing.”

The St Albans resident, whose home bakes on his Instagram account @thatcookingthing could compete with those you’d find in a professional patisserie, proudly shares that he’d come close to appearing on the Bake Off himself. He reached the last stage before the actual show, but “didn’t make the final cut.”

Having missed making it onto the show, Lampert decided to have a go at baking the challenges set by judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith at home and to see how do-able they were. Then rating the recipe himself for whether he’d make them again.

“From my perspective, if I couldn’t make them at home in a kitchen that I’d grown up cooking in for coming up for three decades, what hope did people have doing it on TV with cameras pointing at them and ovens they don’t know?” Although he does have to make allowances for not having a proving drawer — that could speed up the bakers’ breads nor an empty freezer for fast cooling.

So, for the last ten weeks he has been attempting the tasks at home and sharing the results on Instagram.

He’s been doing it for years, but this year was only the second time he’d had enough spare time to finish each challenge. All beautifully photographed on his Instagram account.

“Over of the years, work and life got in the way but given the state of the industry I work in at the moment I have a lot of free time” says the freelance television producer, who specialises in science-related content having studied maths and physics (with a focus on astro physics) at Durham University. A master’s degree at Imperial College in science media production led him to his current field.

With television and food clearly a passion, it’s no surprise he has appeared on cooking competition, Crazy Delicious which aired on Channel 4 and on Netflix in 2020.

Like the GBBO there were three challenges. “I had to cook using certain ingredients; then we needed to create a reinvention of a classic dish. I did spaghetti Bolognese.”

The last challenge was to make a meal for at least eight. He decided to do a brunch with a twist on Jewish flavours. “I did a giant pan of shakshuka, savoury rugelach and served honey cake martinis because I think a boozy brunch is important. And I wanted to do something Jewish or at least Jewish adjacent.” The flavours were clearly a hit with the judges as he won.

He also accessed his Jewish baking skills during his self-imposed GBBO baking challenge with week three’s braided bread wreath: “I’ve been plaiting bread for probably a quarter of a century at this point, so I was, unsurprisingly, thrilled that [that] week’s challenge was a braided loaf of bread.”

Where the bakers were tearing their hair out at the seven-strand plait, he says he found that part simple. “Odd-numbered plaits are normally all done the same way, so this seven-strand braid is plaited exactly the same way as a regular three strand challah.”

The expert challah baker — who rated the finished loaf as a 10/10 — says he’d probably have enriched the dough and glazed it with honey or coated some of the strands in za’atar.

He also took the week 10 challenge in a slightly more haimish direction. Although egg mayonnaise is Jew-ish as a favourite bridge roll topping for many of us, he admits he cannot stand it so filled his mini plaited rolls with smoked salmon mousse.

How does he know what the recipes or instructions the contestants receive? “I actually sit there when I watch and pause it when the recipe is shown on screen and copy it off that so I get the pared down recipe which the contestants get. Sometimes they also read out the recipe they get on the show. I like to do it with minimum instructions like they get in the tent for authenticity”

Instagram: @thatcookingthing