Bake Off’s Amanda Georgiou reveals how much bakers spend on the show

According to the Dailymail, Great British Bake Off star Amanda Georgiou has revealed the enormous sums of money that bakers spend on the preparation for the program.

Bake Off contestants splash out their own money

The former competitor, who competed in the 2021 season and ended her journey in week six, disclosed the behind-the-scenes details and said she was prepared with hundreds of eggs, a wide variety of ingredients, as well as pots, pans, and pricey tins in reserve so she could excel to her highest ability while filming.

She discussed with Johnny Seifert on the Secure The Insecure Podcast the procedure and how she 'always have 100 eggs' when going to the supermarket:

‘You all spend a lot of money. I would go to the supermarket and I would always buy probably at least 10 boxes of eggs. I'd always have over 100 eggs. In the end, I stopped putting things in my cupboard.’

Amanda continued:

‘I had great big tubs of flour... had all my baking powders out and all my syrups and all the bits and pieces you need for baking.’

Amanda stated that while Channel 4 equips each baker with a budget, most prefer to spend part of their own money as well. She revealed:

‘They give us all a set amount and it's not just the ingredients we bought, we took all our tins and everything with us because you couldn't guarantee they would have the tin you want so, I was buying font tins. The font tins alone were £50'.

She added how her husband is not happy with her because of that:

'I've now got a garage full of baked goods where before my garage was full of lawnmowers and gardening tools. My husband is not very happy with me,'

Elsewhere in the talk, Amanda also revealed how much time the bakers had to prepare their dishes before entering the tent:

‘We have a few weeks, I think it was about five or six weeks (to prepare). We got all the briefings so we knew which week was cake week, biscuit week, bread week, dessert week, German week, and so on.'

She elaborated on the process of writing recipes:

'It's not just bread, it's got to be a theme so they tell you what the theme is and then you start writing your recipes. It's really hard work especially when you're trying to do your full-time job as well. You have deadlines, where you still have to submit your two recipes for each week.’

According to Amanda, contestants need to write their own original, authentic recipe without copying anyone else's. She explained:

'But you have to write your recipes as well and they have to be your original recipe, you can't copy Mary Berry’s or Hollywood's recipe. You send your recipe off and they'll say, ‘No, you've got to rewrite that one. You can't use that one, it's too similar to someone else's.'

Meanwhile, Amanda also emphasized how much time and work she put into the application form to receive phone calls from the production team and baking technicians.

How to get past Bake Off's application round

She said: 'It's what your hobbies are, what things you like to bake, what things you hate to bake, what you are good at what you're not good at.

'They want you to send in photos as well, it's not just an application form they want to see, they want to see at least five photos of different styles of baking. That's a minimum, I think I sent about 20 photos.'

She added:

'The application takes you forever to fill that in. Then you wait for a phone call, which you may or may not get. The phone call is almost like a quiz, to spend an hour talking to someone who knows everything about baking, asking lots of questions to see if you are as knowledgeable as you've said on your application.'

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