Like Lulu's claim that she's only 74 and the crazier bits of the Bible, you aren't meant to take TV cookery shows literally.
The stuff on Baking Made Easy (BBC2, Monday 8.30pm) might be straightforward if you're an all-pro patissier like Lorraine Pascale.
For mortals, the recipes were fiendishly complex - just as Jamie's famous '30-minute meals' only take half an hour if you've got your own chorus of kitchen-pixies dicing carrot, peeling prawns and stoking your terracotta pizza oven.
Pascale is a former model and looked every inch the part, that inch being the circumference of her minuscule waistline: foxier than Nigella and minus the glacial melancholy of Sophie Dahl's lipstick rictus. Trendily, she even boasts a gap between her front teeth you could park an Ocado van in.
Underlining her fashionista credentials, we got a fleeting shot of the Eiffel Tower, presumably because Paris is a style hub rather than because the tower's strident girders look like an anorexic's rib cage.
Episode three brought us modern twists on old classics, such as a strawberry and mascarpone Swiss roll and a "glamorous" macaroni and cheese.
"Baking is not always fast, but it is always easy," she cooed. And fast it was not, Lorraine gutting a single strawberry with such surgical precision it would take Wimbledon fortnight to do the pile she had.
The high-stakes climax was a face-off with the dreaded meringue, Lorraine tellingly putting on her glasses to introduce what she called "the kitchen nemesis".
Perhaps to make up for a former life subsisting only on nicotine, Lorraine crammed as much fat as she could into each recipe, the mac'n'cheese, in particular, looking as healthy as a lard enema.
Only cynics would speculate that Lorraine starts throwing up the moment she stops eating. Unlike the barely concealed condescension of some TV cooks, her mischievous grin let the viewer feel we were all in on the joke together: we can't bake like her any more than we look like her.
No matter. Calorie-porn has a new standard bearer. As Richard Keys might put it: female chefs are not always fast, but they are always easy - on the eye, anyway.
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The stuff on Baking Made Easy (BBC2, Monday 8.30pm) might be straightforward if you're an all-pro patissier like Lorraine Pascale.
For mortals, the recipes were fiendishly complex - just as Jamie's famous '30-minute meals' only take half an hour if you've got your own chorus of kitchen-pixies dicing carrot, peeling prawns and stoking your terracotta pizza oven.
Pascale is a former model and looked every inch the part, that inch being the circumference of her minuscule waistline: foxier than Nigella and minus the glacial melancholy of Sophie Dahl's lipstick rictus. Trendily, she even boasts a gap between her front teeth you could park an Ocado van in.
Underlining her fashionista credentials, we got a fleeting shot of the Eiffel Tower, presumably because Paris is a style hub rather than because the tower's strident girders look like an anorexic's rib cage.
Episode three brought us modern twists on old classics, such as a strawberry and mascarpone Swiss roll and a "glamorous" macaroni and cheese.
"Baking is not always fast, but it is always easy," she cooed. And fast it was not, Lorraine gutting a single strawberry with such surgical precision it would take Wimbledon fortnight to do the pile she had.
The high-stakes climax was a face-off with the dreaded meringue, Lorraine tellingly putting on her glasses to introduce what she called "the kitchen nemesis".
Perhaps to make up for a former life subsisting only on nicotine, Lorraine crammed as much fat as she could into each recipe, the mac'n'cheese, in particular, looking as healthy as a lard enema.
Only cynics would speculate that Lorraine starts throwing up the moment she stops eating. Unlike the barely concealed condescension of some TV cooks, her mischievous grin let the viewer feel we were all in on the joke together: we can't bake like her any more than we look like her.
No matter. Calorie-porn has a new standard bearer. As Richard Keys might put it: female chefs are not always fast, but they are always easy - on the eye, anyway.
More from this column
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