One would imagine that there are certain minimum expectations for a person having the both enviable and unenviable task of replacing Mary Berry as a presenter of the Great British Bake Off. To have the demeanour of a delightfully raucous aunt at a wedding who's just teetering on the verge of tipsiness. To have a delightfully antiquated name, that could either belong to an expert baker or to a brand of lavender-scented tissues from the 1930's. Prue Leith has both of these qualities in spades. However the most important thing that you'd expect from a presenter of a show exclusively themed around the baking of cakes and other sugary delights is that they have a sweet tooth.
Well, in last night's episode she revealed that she doesn't especially like 'really sweet things'. This was pretty baffling given that the fact that the episode focused on the first new addition to the format since its move to Channel 4, 'Caramel Week'. Caramel, to the unfamiliar, is sugar, pure molten sugar, and sugar, to the unfamiliar, is sweet. Despite this Prue was seemingly leading the caramel frenzy last night, choosing 'stroopwafels' for the technical challenge. As who hasn't, at some point in their lives, at down and decided to make a relatively obscure type of Dutch waffle.
Unsurprisingly, all nine bakers were utterly deplorable at strooping their wafels. Throughout the show, when presented with some caramel, Paul Hollywood would greedily devour it with impassioned glucose-driven glee, like some deranged wasp, while Prue would wince and bemoan the caramels for being too sweet.
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It was an odd revelation for ol' Prue to make. It'd be like hearing that Jeremy Clarkson isn't really all too keen on cars, or that Kel from Kenan & Kel is actually more of a fan of a mango & passionfruit soda. Either way, we can only hope that Prue eventually develops the sweet tooth that she presumably needs to keep going with the show and is thus able to more happily embrace the diabetes that will inevitably come her way.
