Take one tent. Fill with 12 amateur bakers. Garnish with one venerable
cookery writer, one blue-eyed bread-maker, and two comedy queens with a
love of innuendo, and you have the recipe for the most popular show of
our times. When The Great British Bake Off made its debut in August
2010, it had the makings of a modest hit. But nobody--not the
program-makers and certainly not those first contestants--could have
predicted what was to come. Here was a show in which the biggest weekly
drama was whether or not a sponge cake would sink in the middle. And oh,
how we loved it. Here is the ultimate Bake Off fan book: from bread
lion to bin-gate; heart throbs to Twitter trolls; soggy bottoms to
sticky buns. This is the celebration of Britain's most popular cookery
contest.