The Great Christmas Cook Off by Helen BuckleyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
For Christmas the TV producers have decided to put on a week-long celebrity chef cook off. Each day the chefs will be asked to make one traditional Christmas dessert (eg mince pies, Christmas cake etc) and the one with the lowest score gets voted off. Among the celebrity bakers are Beatrice Wodehouse, the upper-class woman dubbed the Queen of Chocolate (think Nigella Lawson) and the council-flat clean-eating fanatic Charlie Simmonds. Charlie and Bea had a falling out on national TV and have been sniping at each other on social media ever since. She thinks he's a killjoy and he thinks she is promoting an unhealthy lifestyle that can lead to obesity and other health issues. This competition is the chance for each of them to prove their baking is superior.
As the competition progresses there are a series of unfortunate accidents which precipitate each baker leaving, could there be a saboteur amongst them desperate to win at any cost? Of course Bea and Charlie each believe the other is to blame.
I enjoyed this, much more than the previous book Keeping Up with the Kershaws, which I have yet to finish. However, I did think the food descriptions did go on too long, Charlie's recipes seemed to have had all the joy sucked out of them and Bea's were just one-dimensional, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. Moreover, the identity of the saboteur was pretty easy to guess given all the clues and I thought the reason was a bit weak. (view spoiler) Also, there was a bit of accusation, the apology on both sides one too many times. If you have wrongly accused once, and also been wrongly accused yourself, would you do it again? I think this book also suffers because this is not the first, or even the second, romance I have read which is an homage to The Great British Bake-Off.
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