Directed by Emma Reynolds Country of origin United Kingdom First episode date 29 March 2016 Number of episodes 8 | Theme music composer Tom Howe Original language(s) English Network BBC Two Language English | |
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Genre Cookery
Reality Competition Judges Benoit Blin
Cherish Finden
Claire Clark (2016) Cast Tom Kerridge, Angus Deayton Presented by Angus Deayton (2017–), Tom Kerridge (2016) Similar The American Baking C, The Great British Bake Off, BBQ Champ, First Class Chefs, Tom Kerridge's Proper P | ||
Bake Off: Crème de la Crème is a British television baking competition on BBC Two featuring teams of professional pastry chefs pit against one another through two different challenges. The first series of the programme was presented by Tom Kerridge, and the competition judged by Benoit Blin, Cherish Finden and Claire Clark. It is a spin-off from The Great British Bake Off, and the eight-episode series was first screened on BBC Two since 29 March 2016.
Contents
It was announced in January 2017 that Angus Deayton will present the second series of Crème de la Crème, and Claire Clark will not return as a judge.
Format
The series is a competition between teams of professional pastry chefs from high-end hotels and restaurants, as well as supermarkets, armed forces and other companies and organisations. The competition aims to find the finest pastry chefs in the country, who can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and can create desserts that have "stunning visual impact, phenomenal flavour, and texture." Fifteen teams of pastry chefs are chosen for the competition, with three pastry chefs in each team, one of them the team captain. In the heats, the three teams are given two challenges and are awarded marks from the three judges for each of their creations, the team with the best total score after both challenges is guaranteed a place in the semifinal. The team with the highest total score throughout the whole of the heats is also guaranteed a place within the semifinal.The competition was filmed at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.
Episodes
Critical reception
Early reviews were largely negative, with many reviewers comparing it unfavourably to The Great British Bake Off, suggesting that it had lost the crucial elements that made the original Bake Off a success. Michael Hogan of The Daily Telegraph complained that the new show "bore no resemblance to it whatsoever, thus seemed to be merely piggybacking cynically on the Bake-Off “brand". He also found two of the judges' accents as well as the scoring system "impenetrable", the baking "bafflingly scientific" and the teams not "terribly likeable". He concluded that Creme de la Creme "was nice but dull", and that as "a Bake-Off spin-off, it was a soggy-bottomed disaster. " Many of the viewing public concurred with the assessments of the critics and found the show lacking the "charm, fun and warmth" of the original. Chitra Ramaswamy of The Guardian thought that when the professional version of Bake Off gets serious means that "it gets silly", and he "found the format convoluted, which telly like this should never be." Gabriel Tate of The Times found the show a to be a "bloodless, uninvolving affair at once frenetically busy and yawningly free of incident, full of astounding technical proficiency and jawdropping invention, but devoid of passion and identity."