In this increasingly dull world, the sucrose-soft Great British Bake Off is one of the most warming shows on the box but in the fourth week the cake competitive season takes a turn on the dark side.
The “Bake Off Curse” is the baker who places high in the competition stage – whoever wins Star Baker at Week 4 has never won the competition as a whole.
Don’t trust us? Yeah, the evidence is in the pot.
Since the Star Baker title for his 2nd series in 2011 introduced into the British Great Bake-off format, weeks 4 are statistically the unhappy week for anyone who receives the award.
Week 4 sometimes (but not always), the wheat begins to detach from the chaff and adds fiddly subjects to be learned by the bakers.
In the last ten series, the contestants with a particular specialization have been challenged by week 4: four-season ‘pies and tarts’; six ‘batter’ seasons; seven “caramel” seasons; and ten ‘mills’ seasons.
This might understand why someone who wins Star Baker in week 4 may not take the top spot. Take the ‘batter’ topic of season 6 – this is a much more specialist and niche technique than cake week, which suggests that a week-four winner is less commonly known.
However, it is not to say the one-trick Pony are those who shine in this special Bake Off themes. On four out of ten episodes, the focus of the fourth week was ‘Desserts,’ a complex topic in which bakers attempted a wide variety of bakes like burnished cream, a tortoise pastry, and meringue roulade.
And over the last decade, the fourth week Star Baker award was won by some of the best-loved bakers of the show, including season 4’s Kimberley, series 5’s Richard (known for his perpetual pencil in the ear), and last year’s sweetheart Steph. Neither baker, however, has been crowned the best amateur baker in the nation.
Conclusion
To reach the end, our baker’s best bet will be on Biscuit Week to face the challenge, with 78 percent of all finalists having won a star baker for their biscuits between the two seasons and ten. Those who do well in pastry-week are likely to be finishing, with 57.1% of all-star pastry-week bakers heading for the top 3.
Since excelling at the final show, the health advisor and nurse won the top trophy, making him the first to win without ever winning Star Baker And, since 2020 is potentially one of the strangest years on earth, something in the tent of dreams could happen.
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