Bake Off: The Professionals (previously Bake Off: Crème de la Crème from 2016 to 2017) is a British television baking competition featuring teams of professional pastry chefs pitted against one another over two challenges. It is a spin-off from The Great British Bake Off, and its first episode was screened on BBC Two on 29 March 2016.^[1] The eight-episode first series of the programme was presented by Tom Kerridge, with Benoit Blin, Cherish Finden and Claire Clark serving as judges.^[2] The second series was presented by Angus Deayton, and Claire Clark did not return as a judge.^[3] The third series moved to Channel 4 to join The Great British Bake Off after the BBC declined to renew the series.^[4] The Channel 4 series has been renamed Bake Off: The Professionals, and was originally presented by comedian Tom Allen and former GBBO competitor Liam Charles. Currently it is presented by Charles and comedian Ellie Taylor.^[5]

The first series was won by the Squires Kitchen Cookery School team led by Mark Tilling,^[6] followed by a team of military chefs led by Liam Grime,^[7] a team from London Hilton Park Lane with Emmanuel Bonneau,^[8] Thibault Marchand and Erica Sangiorgi from Kimpton Fitzroy London Hotel,^[9] and Laurian Veaudor and Thibault Courtoisier from Cocorico Patisserie.^[10] Andrew Minto and Michael Coggan from Gin and Bake in Cardiff won in 2021.

The series is a competition between teams of professional pastry chefs from high-end hotels and restaurants, as well as supermarkets, armed forces and other companies and organisations. The competition aims to find the finest pastry chefs in the country, who can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and can create desserts that have "stunning visual impact, phenomenal flavour, and texture".^[1] Teams of pastry chefs are chosen for the competition, with three pastry chefs in each team in the first two series, one of them the team captain. From the third series onwards, teams of two competed. In the heats, the three teams are given two challenges and are awarded marks from the judges for each of their creations, the team with the best total score after both challenges is guaranteed a place in the semifinal. The team with the highest total score throughout the whole of the heats is also guaranteed a place within the semifinal.^[2] Each episode consists of two challenges:

Miniature Challenge

In this challenge each team have to create a batch of three types of miniatures. Each must be uniform in appearance, finished to the very highest professional standards and will only have three hours to make all 108 pastries. Each miniature is marked out of 30 with a total of 90 points available. Other challenges may replace the miniature challenge. For example, there may be a secret recipe challenge for one of the heat rounds where the contestants are not given information beforehand on the bakes they have to do, and only given a recipe on the day before they start baking.^[11]

Showpiece Challenge

In this challenge each team are asked to reinvent a popular British dessert and present it as a fine-dining showpiece display. Each judge has 50 points they can award with a total of 150 points available.

The format changed from the first series to the third. The first series started with 15 teams, three teams in each of the five heats, with the winning team each episode guaranteed a place in the semifinals, with one additional wild card from the heats. Three teams were selected from the two semifinals to compete in the final. The second series started with ten teams separated into two groups of five, with one team eliminated each episode over two sets of three heats before the semifinal.^[3] The two winners from the two semifinal then compete in the final. From the third series onward, the competition started with twelve teams, in two groups of six, again with one team eliminated in three sets of heats.^[12] The remaining six teams, three from each group, then competed for a place in the quarterfinal, followed by the semifinal, leaving three teams in the final.

Early reviews were largely negative, with many reviewers comparing it unfavourably to The Great British Bake Off, suggesting that it had lost the crucial elements that made the original Bake Off a success.^[23] Michael Hogan of The Daily Telegraph complained that the new show "bore no resemblance to it whatsoever, thus seemed to be merely piggybacking cynically on the Bake-Off "brand". He also found two of the judges' accents as well as the scoring system "impenetrable", the baking "bafflingly scientific" and the teams not "terribly likeable". He concluded that Creme de la Creme "was nice but dull", and that as "a Bake-Off spin-off, it was a soggy-bottomed disaster".^[24] Many of the viewing public concurred with the assessments of the critics and found the show lacking the "charm, fun and warmth" of the original.^[25] Chitra Ramaswamy of The Guardian thought that when the professional version of Bake Off becomes serious means that "it gets silly", and he "found the format convoluted, which telly like this should never be".^[26] Gabriel Tate of The Times found the show a to be a "bloodless, uninvolving affair at once frenetically busy and yawningly free of incident, full of astounding technical proficiency and jawdropping invention, but devoid of passion and identity".^[27]

The version on Channel 4 was given a lukewarm reception by the critics. Although Michael Hogan of The Daily Telegraph considered the new pairing of Allen and Charles an improvement as presenters, he found it "lacking the warmth, wit and charm" of its parent programme.^[28] Lucy Mangan of The Guardian thought that, unlike the original programme, the professional version failed to get viewers invested in the contestants, and that "watching professionals get it wrong" was "a cold, slightly embittering experience".^[29] James Jackson of The Times described it as a "format fluff" that is "like a smaller, colder moon orbiting the warm Jupiter giant that is the GBBO mother show".^[30]

The French version Le Meilleur Patissier: Les Professionnels is broadcast on M6.^[31]

The ratings figures are from BARB.^[32]