Great British Baking Show Broke the Technical Challenge

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Be warned, this contains spoilers for the sixteenth season of The Great British Baking Show, the finale of which was released on Netflix on November 7th.

This season of The Great British Baking Show wasn’t very good, and I think Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, and the show’s producers need to revamp the technical challenge. It’s become predictable and needs a complete overhaul.

Congratulations to Jasmine Mitchell for winning, despite her bakes being consistently good, but not particularly groundbreaking, and sticking to flavors Paul and Prue clearly favored. However, this season highlighted a strange emphasis on the technical challenge, pretending it carried as much weight as the signature and showstopper bakes – which simply isn’t true. The technical challenges have become so difficult that contestants rarely succeed, making it hard to use as a fair way to judge them. Now, the technical challenge only seems to matter when the judges want it to, and this inconsistency is frustrating for viewers. It’s a big change from what made the show so popular. Today’s contestants are aware of what Paul and Prue like and focus on perfecting the showstopping bakes, which makes the technical challenge less important. Essentially, preparation now matters more than performance, and that shift has changed the competition’s core dynamic.

Each week on GBBS, the three challenges – signature, showstopper, and technical – are equally important in judging the bakers. The signature bake is a baker’s personal statement, showcasing their favorite flavors and style. The showstopper is a much larger, more complex creation designed to test their skills under pressure. A particularly impressive signature can even earn a coveted handshake from Paul Hollywood, and a stunning showstopper can save a baker from being eliminated. The technical challenge, falling between the other two, tests the bakers’ core skills and ability to adapt, as they’re given no advance notice of what they’ll be making.

In the earlier seasons of The Great British Baking Show, when contestants came from a wider range of ages and backgrounds, the technical challenges offered a glimpse into the bakers’ lives. We saw how bakers like Nancy Birtwhistle and Jane Beedle excelled because they’d often made those recipes for their families, sharing personal stories along the way. However, recently the show has featured younger, less experienced bakers, and the technical challenges have become overly complicated or poorly designed – remember the disastrous taco challenge? This has diminished the competitive spirit, turning the technicals into a stressful ordeal. Instructions are often minimal or missing altogether, and bakers are given less and less time. While Paul and Prue still expect a high standard, the results are often inconsistent and sometimes poorly executed because the current contestants frequently lack the necessary skills or simply don’t have enough time to complete the challenges.

The technical challenge on the show used to be a chance for bakers to surprise us with hidden skills. Now, it’s become more about highlighting their mistakes, often through drawn-out shots of things going wrong – like the frustrating parchment paper piping bag challenge or messy fondant. What was once a difficult but rewarding part of the competition, even making it to the semi-finals, is now often the very first challenge. This shows how much harder the show has become. We used to enjoy seeing bakers discover they knew more than they thought, but now it usually reveals what they don’t know. Because of this, there’s no longer a predictable pattern to how bakers perform in the technicals, making each season less consistent. You’ll often hear the judges comment on how bakers who excel in the signature challenge struggle with the technical, and vice versa. While technicals were always intended to be hard, the wildly different results now mean they don’t really show us what the bakers are truly capable of.

The show deserves credit for trying to improve the technical challenges this season, showing the producers recognized a problem. However, these changes still seemed designed to trip up the bakers. For example, in Cake Week, offering extra ingredients that weren’t meant for the fondant fancies led to almost everyone failing by adding almond flour. Similarly, the white chocolate tart in Chocolate Week was difficult to judge fairly because bakers could choose any components they liked, making direct comparisons impossible. While GBBS is trying to liven up the technicals, they need to feel truly important to the competition again. For a long time, the technicals haven’t carried the same weight as the signature bake or showstopper. This allows Paul and Prue to give the technical challenge as much importance as they want when deciding who goes home or who is Star Baker – it’s suddenly crucial if they want to use it that way, but irrelevant otherwise.

For a long time, the technical challenge wasn’t taken as seriously as the showstopper and signature bakes. That’s why it was so surprising this season when Paul and Prue started eliminating bakers solely based on a poor performance in the technical challenge, even if they excelled in other areas. For example, Pui Man Li created a stunning coconut sweet-bread, but was sent home after finishing last in the doughnut technical. Nadia Mercuri’s flavorful tiramisu wasn’t enough to save her after her white chocolate tart base was deemed undercooked. Even Toby Littlewood, who made a beautiful and delicious macaron showstopper, was eliminated due to a messy framboisier in the semifinal.

Initially, the judges, Prue and Paul, were strict with technical challenges. However, as the season went on, even the best bakers struggled with things like gala pies and soufflés, forcing the judges to relax their standards. Aaron Mountford-Myles consistently performed poorly in the technical challenges and his showstoppers weren’t much better, yet he remained on the show. (His macarons were particularly disastrous!) Ultimately, Jasmine won the final, despite placing third in the last technical challenge – building a madeleine tower. To be fair, all three finalists, including Jasmine and Tom Arden, had trouble with the technical, failing to perfectly shape the madeleines or correctly place the ribbon. This widespread struggle highlights how difficult and, ultimately, unimportant the technical challenges have become.

As a huge fan, I’m starting to really question the point of the technical challenge. If even the best bakers are struggling to figure out what the judges want, what is it actually testing? And it’s frustrating to see some people eliminated for a bad technical bake while others are let through – it makes it feel like the rules don’t matter, and the judges just do whatever they please. The technicals are supposed to show us who really understands baking – things like how dough should feel, or how long something needs to bake – because these are things you can’t practice beforehand like with the signature or showstopper challenges. But by ignoring or changing the rules as they see fit, Paul and Prue seem to be rewarding bakers who are good at following instructions, not necessarily the most naturally talented ones. Honestly, no matter how much they try to make it seem important, the technical challenge has become a bit of a disaster, and all the presentation in the world can’t hide that.

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2025-11-10 21:56