The three finalists of The Great Kiwi Bake Off 2021: Courtnay, Jasmin and Alby (Photo: TVNZ/Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureDecember 9, 2021

The 10 best moments from the Great Kiwi Bake Off finale

Staff writer

The three finalists of The Great Kiwi Bake Off 2021: Courtnay, Jasmin and Alby (Photo: TVNZ/Tina Tiller)

Three Great Kiwi Bake Off bakers stand before us, but only one can be the winner. Will it be Courtnay, Alby or Jasmin? Tara Ward watches the grand finale to find out.

Friends, lovers and ladyfingers, The Great Kiwi Bake Off is over for another season. We’ve hoovered down nine weeks of poo cakes and patisseries, and after three tense rounds of tiny treats and tall cakes, Alby was crowned the winner. Despite an intense start that threatened his chances of victory, Alby didn’t give up. His mix of sophisticated and unusual flavours won the judges over, and he left the GKBO kitchen with a new glass trophy and a hearty smile.

Judges Sue Fleischl and Dean Brettschneider were thrilled for Alby too, but I did worry about them when they set eyes on Alby’s 40-egg whopper of a matcha cake.

Do not stand at my cake grave and weep, FleischlSchneider. You’d think two people whose job is to eat baking all day might look a little cheerier, but perhaps Sue and Dean were reflecting on their own Bake Off journey. Maybe Sue had changed her mind about how good cassata was, and maybe this was the moment Dean realized he never wanted to see an eclair stuck to a cake dangling from a wooden plinth ever again.

Praise the pastry gods for the unfailingly upbeat presenters Hayley Sproull and Madeleine Sami, and the brave finalists Courtnay, Jasmin and Alby, who stared green marzipan in the eye and lived to tell the tale. The GKBO finale was their baking Everest, and they knocked the bastard off. Let’s stuff our faces with ten of the best moments from this season’s grand finale.

1) Alby’s redemption from vexed to victorious

Dr Alby receives a vision from the future and it involves a lot of split buttercream (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Thirty minutes into the finale and Dr Alby was having a shocker. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to plate something,” he panicked after his buttercream split four times, which apparently is four times too many.

But when Alby gets knocked down, he gets back up again, and there’s nothing more inspiring than a doctor healing himself with cake. Alby bashed out a flavoursome technical bake and a whopper of a matcha cake that Dean called “eclectic but well balanced”. It shows that when life gives you split buttercream, just bake the shit out of some green tea and you too shall be embraced by sweet Sue Fleischel.

2) Dean’s face when Jasmin announced she was making a ‘hanging cake’

Or maybe he really loves it (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Dean knows a lot about baking, but is it his dream to see cakes hanging upside down on a hook? His expression would suggest not. Would they have pulled this sort of stunt on New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker, back in the day? Again, the eyes say no.

3) The moment Courtnay asked Sue how big her mouth was

It’s purely for scientific reasons, Sue (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Fun fact: petit fours means “little ovens” in French, and those little suckers are supposed to be eaten in two bites. Rules are for breaking, and if you can eat them in one, France will salute you and give you a chateau with a moat. We never found out how big Sue’s bite was, nor did we find out if mirror glaze lets you see directly into your soul. Anyone? It’s fine.

4) The figurine Hayley and Madeleine made for Jasmin’s cake

If 2021 were a tiny person made of fondant, this is exactly what it would look like. Look, we’ve all been Fondant Man this year, and sometimes we just need a few quiet moments slumped under some dangling eclairs to collect ourselves.

5) This shot of Courtnay hooning around in a convertible car

She’s the Thelma to Sue Fleischel’s Louise (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Not sure why this was in the finale, but absolutely loved it.

6) Cassata: the technical challenge nobody knew anything about

Technical challenges are supposed to push the bakers beyond their comfort zones, and old mate Sue Fleischl saved an absolute doozy for the finale. She asked the bakers to make a cassata, a traditional Italian cake layered with sponge and ricotta cheese. None of the finalists had heard of it before, but well done GKBO for getting the phrase “curds and whey” back on primetime TV in 2021.

7) The apron Jasmin’s children gave to her for good luck

No, you’re crying and I am Fondant Man, slumped in the corner weeping into my curds and whey yet again.

8) When the three finalists stopped baking to get on the plonk

The cynic in me says the booze was a sneaky New World product placement, but the rest of me that is made purely of gingerbread and good wishes says this was a heartwarming moment that captured everything GKBO stands for. One hour into a five hour bake, Courtnay called everyone together to raise their classes to their GKBO journey. Nobody toasted to Christina’s poo cake from week one, though. Never mind.

9) When friends and family arrived and Alby told Pera how much her advice helped him

Two legends, one bake off (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Confirmation again that Pera is a true angel, and that GKBO is the nicest show on television.

10) The news that Christina is still making poo cakes

Never change, Bake Off.

Season three of The Great Kiwi Bake Off is available on TVNZ OnDemand.

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Image: Archi Banal

InternetDecember 8, 2021

Meet New Zealand’s most extreme Spotify listeners

Josie Adams

Contributing writer

Image: Archi Banal

This year’s Spotify Wrapped is out, and the competition is on: who among us has the wildest listening habits? Josie Adams explores for IRL.

This year, one man in Auckland listened to Spotify for 468,377 minutes; or roughly 325 full days. A young woman in Wellington played Dua Lipa’s ‘Love Again’ 645 times. I, for the second year in a row, am proud to announce I’m in the top 0.5% of listeners to beloved ironic-electronic music duo 3OH!3.

Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” feature shows the power of data collection. Each year in December, the music streaming app collates its users’ favourite songs, musicians and podcasts, and presents them in a fun personal slideshow. It’s easy to be cynical: we shouldn’t enjoy Spotify Wrapped because it’s a marketing ploy, or we’re stupid to be impressed by an app just feeding us back our own choices, or we should never have used Spotify in the first place, because it underpays artists.

All of these things are true, but millions of us went ahead and shared our listening habits with the world. We were proud, or proud to be embarrassed, or swore we were asleep. It turns out white noise and its lesser-known cousins, pink noise and brown noise, have plenty of ardent midnight listeners.

Jarrad, the Auckland man who listened to Spotify for 325 days, played his son 12 hours of brown noise every night; with twins on the way, this number could be set to increase. Of course, that still leaves an impossible 13 hours every day to account for.

He’s flummoxed. “I still don’t understand how I got that number,” he said. Spotify says its Wrapped feature only includes data from 10 months of the year – January 1 through to October 31. This means now’s your chance to listen to Grimes, Mystery Skulls, or Christmas music; no-one will ever know.

It also means that Jarrad would have listened to his favourite music – brown noise, Fat Freddy’s Drop and John Mayer – for 25 hours every day. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?” But he’s not lying, and he’s not alone – a listener in France achieved a similar ridiculous number. Jarrad puts the impossible number down to using two devices.

Despite the presence of John Mayer, he isn’t embarrassed by this year’s Wrapped results. “Last year I was in the top 0.001% of Jack Johnson listeners,” he explained.

This is what Spotify Wrapped looks like when you’re a compulsive listener and/or superfan.

A New Zealand-based Reddit user known to us only as Death6703 was in the top 0.001% of Jimmy Eat World listeners, which is maybe the single most impressive statistic I’ve seen this year. They’d listened to 9,674 minutes of the early-noughties American rock band, or almost eight straight days.

“I know that their biggest commercial success was ‘The Middle’, but I think my top five are ‘Just Tonight’, ‘Pain’, ‘Blister’, ‘Get it Faster’ and ‘Bleed American’,” Death6703 told The Spinoff. “But they have so many great songs. I could list so much more.”

The user assured us that despite the October 31 cut-off date for data collection, they haven’t let up on Jimmy Eat World. “I think I had at least an additional 50 hours in the past three weeks,” they said. “I’ve been listening to them a lot more.”

On the more modern and popular side of listenership, one Wellington woman has achieved what thousands dream of. Georgia, a 23-year-old masters student, is in the top 0.005% of Dua Lipa listeners worldwide. Her favourite song? ‘Love Again’, which she played 645 times; that’s over two full days spent listening to one song.

“I feel both proud and embarrassed,” she said.

Despite the astonishing play time, Dua Lipa wasn’t her most-listened to artist. “Kanye West was the number one artist in my playlists this year,” she said. “It’s the world’s greatest (worst) crossover.” Human nature is complex, and so are our listening habits.

While discovering you’ve listened to 14,000 minutes – almost 10 straight days – of Dua Lipa might give some listeners a reason to step back and find some serenity in silence, Georgia feels differently. “My New Years resolution is to make it into the top 0.001%,” she said.

“Dua says jump, I say how high.”

Do you make your living in the gig economy? Tried to delete your internet presence? Met the love of your life in a strange way online? If you’ve got a great yarn about the internet impacting your life, get in touch with us at irl@thespinoff.co.nz.