Was This The Hardest First Week in ‘Great British Baking Show’ History?

Last Friday gave us the premiere of this year’s The Great British Baking Show, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, this may be the most stressful first week yet. The first week’s challenges, usually designated as “Cake Week,” typically falls on the soft side of advanced baking skills range, a combination of introductory bakes (a cake using a mold, for instance) with an upper-level skill folded in to start the process of separating the wheat from the chaff. This formula varies, of course, but general consensus is that subsequent weeks are intended to be more difficult until the climactic finale.

What the first week doesn’t do is nearly give me a heart attack, yet this premiere induced more gasps and shrieks out of me than any that I can remember. Usually, it takes a few weeks for me to go full anxiety mode during Baking Show despite its categorization as a “comfort watch” (which it is, it just also happens to test my nerves). Is this just perception or actually something rooted in reality?

This year’s competitors, the usual assortment of twelve charming individuals, were confronted with a Swiss roll for their Signature Challenge. The inclusion of an inlay design was added to this already-challenging cake. A little more intense, but okay. Notable bakes: Tom’s blueberry and mascarpone tartan design, Aaron’s blueberry and lemon curd honeycomb. Notable heartache: Hassan’s chocolate, coffee, and caramel rose design that he tried lifting with his bare hands (you’re stressing me out, sir). For the Technical Challenge, contestants were assigned nine fondant fancies—multiples of anything immediately ups the difficulty level. What made this Technical even more hellish was giving it a “Taste and Bake” (a concept first introduced last season) twist, modifying the challenge so, in lieu of written instructions, competitors are only allowed five minutes to inspect a completed version of the dessert itself. But unlike last year, however, each person also had additional ingredients intended to confuse the players, demanding they use their judgment to determine if it was actually used in the bake.

This is … a lot.

For the Showstopper Challenge, the bakers were assigned a landscape cake. The four-hour time limit pressures the bakers, resulting in cakes of varying levels of completion. I thought I was stressed out before, but then Iain’s chocolate and stout cake came along and pushed my blood pressure to medically concerning heights when the bottom layers, newly softened thanks to melting filling seeping into the layers, caused the whole thing to slump over in a wet heap. Had it not been for Iain’s determination, refrigeration, and some brilliant decorating (few other cakes evoked “landscape” quite as well), the cake would have been doomed.

The difficulty level of this Cake Week felt borderline excessive. Before I make any assertions, however, I wanted to see if my suspicion over this being the hardest first week ever held any water, so I went back through all the Netflix seasons to compare (as a U.S. viewer, only the last eight previous seasons are available). Listed by collection in the order of challenges, Signature, Technical, and Showstopper, these are the bakes from past premieres:

Collection 12
Loaf cake
Taste and Bake Battenberg cake
Hyper-realistic cake (remember winner Georgie’s amazing ‘Fanny the Chicken’ cake?)

Collection 11
Vertical layer cake (a round layer cake with the layers going vertical as opposed to the normal horizontal)
The Great British Baking Show title card chocolate cake topped with raspberries
Animal-shaped cake

Collection 10
Dozen mini sandwich cakes
Red velvet cake
3D home replica (layer cake made to look like the bakers’ homes)

Collection 9
Dozen decorative mini rolls
Malt loaf
Antigravity illusion cake (at least a portion of the cake has to appear suspended in air)

Collection 8
Battenberg cake
Six mini pineapple upside-down cakes
Celebrity cake bust (among the most notorious challenges; melty-faced Ziggy Stardust, anyone?)

Collection 7
Fruitcake
Six identical angel cake slices
Dream childhood birthday cake

Collection 6 (deviated to biscuit week)
Regional biscuits (biscuits that are traditional in a particular town or area)
Eight wagon wheels
Biscuit selfie portrait

Collection 5
Fruity cake (cakes with fresh fruit, not to be confused with the traditional fruitcake)
Dozen chocolate peppermint mini rolls
Illusion cake

All in all, I would venture to say this was indeed the hardest first week yet. Several seasons come rather close, especially last season and collection eight (I had forgotten all about the Lupita Nyong’o cake), but the array of challenging elements makes this premiere stand out. The question to ask now is what it means for the rest of the season. How difficult are these challenges going to be? For what it’s worth, I don’t think The Great British Baking Show is at risk for going back to its ‘stunt bakes,’ where challenges leaned towards the outlandish. I do think, however, that we’re going to get to witness new heights when it comes to the technical aspect of baking. I’ll be sure to practice my breathing exercises.

The Great British Baking Show streams every Friday on Netflix.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba.