The Great British Bake Off airs first exit after brutal drama of collapsed cake

The Great British Bake Off got off to a chaotic start last night with TWO bakes so disastrous they seemed destined for the bin - or the floor.

One of them was from 30-year-old development scientist Hassan, from South Yorkshire, who became the first to leave the tent after his Swiss Roll fell into an oozing puddle of sponge, chocolate and caramel.

“I’ve had a mare,” he sighed, looking at the “horrible mess” before him. “I’ve proper mucked it.” Sure enough, when it comes to the judging, judge Paul Hollywoodannounced: “It looks like it fell out of a tree.”

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The second round also went badly so before he even started on his landscape showstopper, Hassan already knew he was in the firing line. “I’m quite nervous,” he said. “It’s not looking good.”

But when he was announced as the evictee - much to the relief of software delivery manager Leighton who was also a contender to exit - Hassan admitted he felt “genuinely gutted” to be going home so soon.

He said that things had gone wrong from the start. “I think I am a bit upset, but I did expect it though,” he said. “Honestly for my first ever bake in the tent to come out looking like that was appalling to say the least for all the practice and work put into it. On the positive side, it tasted better than it looked.”

He said that the disaster had wrong-footed him and affected everything else he did. “It didn’t come out as planned, but the worst thing was that it affected my baking after that,” he sighed.

“I enjoy the idea of the technical challenge, where you’re testing your own abilities against a challenge that you go in to blind. But for this technical, we had no recipe - also it was made trickier with the added fake ingredients which added another layer of difficulty.”

As the judges set the toughest challenges ever seen for the Cake Week opener of series 16, Prue Leith worried: “It’s their first time in the tent and we’ve given them a really difficult technical,” to which Paul laughed, “It’s great isn’t it?”

The bakers were given no recipe at all in the technical challenge, which also came with a selection of red-herring ingredients.

Insisting that he’d enjoyed his brief time in the tent despite his Swiss Roll disaster, Hassan admitted: “I had a strong inkling I was out after the judging for my

Showstopper, so when I heard my name, I thought ‘Damn, I guess that’s it for me then’. I remember Prue coming up to give us a big hug first, then turning left and having a huge queue of people lined up to give us a hug - the support from all of them felt reassuring to me and helped cheer me up a lot.”

Hassan said he would stick to his day job but continue to bake as a hobby. “In terms of my goals in the overall baking world, I don’t have any plans,” he said.

Luckily for him, plenty of other bakers struggled with issues including over-baking, wonky cakes, using the wrong ingredients or flavours, running out of time and ideas that were “too simple”.

Iain, a 29-year-old software engineer from Belfast, also suffered a collapsed cake during the showstopper round - which drew gasps of horror from all around the tent. But somehow, with cake and filling all over the worktop, he staged an incredible salvage operation and somehow scraped his landscape cake back into shape.

The other bakers were hugely impressed with his efforts, with medical student Jasmine marvelling: “That’s actually miraculous. That’s insane. You’ve smashed that.”

During the judging Paul and Prue seemed none the wiser about the devastation beneath Iain’s decoration. “I’d happily eat a plateful of that,” Prue declared, with Paul adding: “It tastes great, well done.” Bake Off continues on Channel 4 on Tuesday evenings at 8pm.

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