Thursday, March 28

Is It Cake? The bizarre baking show that might rescue 2022 | Food TV


It is incredibly hard not to react to Netflix’s new show Is It Cake? with anything but a wearied groan. It’s one of those infuriatingly packaged US cookery shows where every camera movement comes with a whoosh noise and the editing brief appears to be “make this feel like a panic attack”. It is hosted by a man who does not appear to have ever set foot inside a kitchen. The title has a question mark in it, which means that whenever a journalist writes Is It Cake? in the middle of a sentence, it makes them look groggy and bewildered.

Most egregiously of all, though, the sole premise of Is It Cake? is a brief online fad from two years ago. Perhaps you know it. You will see a video of what you think is a shoe, then someone will cut it open and you realize that it is actually a cake. Or you’ll see a hamburger, but someone will cut it open and it’ll be a cake. Or a laptop, but it’s cake. You get the idea.

This is where television has got to as a medium in the year 2022. Once it gave us The Ascent of Man, now it’s lobbing out old TikTok rip-offs. When humanity eventually comes to perish under the weight of its own hubris, the species that replaces us will come to see Is It Cake? as the moment things went irreparably wrong for us.

Is it a shoe or a cake? Photograph: Adam Rose/Netflix

So it gives me no joy to inform you that Is It Cake? may be the most pure brainless fun that has ever been created. I went into the first episode with my expectations in the toilet, then ended up wolfing down the whole stupid series in one go. I hate myself for it. I currently feel the same way I do after eating too much ice-cream. I am full of regret and dread the consequences. I am almost certainly much stupider than I was a couple of days ago. But I couldn’t help it. The show was just too irresistible.

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Obviously Is It Cake? cannot simply be a remake of the viral videos, because that would just be several hours of people revealing that things that don’t look like cakes are actually cake, which would probably get old after about 20 seconds. Instead, Is It Cake? has bulked things out by handing a member of the Saturday Night Live cast a samurai sword.

First, contestants have to inspect a bunch of stuff on some plinths and guess which one of them is a cake. Mikey Day (the SNL cast member on hosting duty), then tests whether it’s cake or not by chopping it up with his sword (at least for episode one, before they replace it with a knife later in the series). It’s worth pointing out that if your idea of ​​entertainment doesn’t involve watching a man trying to chop a shoe in half before shouting “It is shoe! Not cake!” in defeat, you will get nothing from the show. But it’s also worth pointing out that if this is the case you are spiritually dead.

Desiree Salaverria, one of the contestants on Is It Cake?
Highly skilled … Desiree Salaverria, one of the contestants on Is It Cake? Photograph: Adam Rose/Netflix

The bulk of the show, however, takes the form of a fever dream Bake Off, where the contestants have to try to bake a cake that looks like something that isn’t a cake. If you wanted to be unnecessarily picky and find a part of Is It Cake? that has any intellectual worth at all, this is it. The bakers are all highly skilled and reveal the products and processes that can transform a cake into a thing. It’s fascinating to watch.

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Then some judges come in and have to guess whether the cake is real or not. In the event of a tie, the judges eat the cake to see which tastes best. This happens near the end of each episode and it always comes as a shock because it’s the first time that the cake gets treated like food, and not just an elaborate optical illusion for the delight of some idiots at home. Anyway, then the winner has to choose between two bags of cash, and if they choose the bag that isn’t a cake, they win. End of episode. Standing ovation, everyone.

Look, these are trying times for all of us. Am I saying the only way to achieve anything even approaching joy is to watch a cynically conceived gameshow about a cake that looks like a hat? Sadly yes. Yes I am. This is as bad as things have got. Watch Is It Cake? now and be saved.

Is It Cake? airs on Netflix on 18 March.


www.theguardian.com

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