Rise and shine Contestants on The Great Canadian Baking Show more supportive than competitive
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/10/2022 (813 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
What happens when Winnipeggers meet abroad? They become fast friends — even when meeting as competitors on a national baking show.
“We were immediately Winnipeg brothers from the start,” Nigel Batchelor says of Jomar Manzano, a fellow Prairie contestant on the sixth season of The Great Canadian Baking Show.
Batchelor was born in Vancouver and grew up in Winnipeg, while Manzano was born in Winnipeg and has since relocated to Toronto. The pair are among a group of 10 amateur bakers competing for bragging rights on the CBC program inspired by The Great British Bake Off.
On set, fast friendships were the norm.
Carmen Cheung/CBC Nigel Batchelor learned to bake with his mom, who was a professional baker.
“Oddly enough, it didn’t feel like a competition at all,” Batchelor says. “It’s just such an amazingly loving experience.”
“This was a bunch of geeks that spoke the same language,” Manzano says. “It’s also the most genuinely nice people you’ll ever meet and I’m happy I shared that time with them.”
Manzano, a structural engineer by trade, learned to cook with his mom. A natural scientific bent eventually led to a lifelong love of baking. As a contestant, his goal was to show off his skills, while incorporating all the facets of his identity.
“With any of my baking, I put it through a Venn diagram of what it means to me,” Marzano says. “I’m Filipino, so I like to make sure that Filipino food is front and centre. My backgrounds from both Winnipeg and Toronto are important, so there’s definitely food and bake culture there that I draw upon.
Carmen Cheung/CBC Jomar Manzano tries to incorporate his identity as a proud gay Filipino man into everything he bakes. 
“But then, I’m also a very proud and open gay man, so having some kind of queer part to my bake is something that I also tried to consider.”
Filipino ingredients such as jackfruit, pandan and ube feature prominently in his creations.
For Batchelor, home was also an important source of inspiration. His mom was a professional baker and, as a kid, he often “helped” her whip up cookies in the kitchen at home.
“I’ve been baking since I was really small, kind of as soon as I could get up to the counter,” he says. “It was mainly just eating cookie dough, but it’s in the blood; it’s hard not to do it when it’s around that much.”
Geoff George/CBC Nigel Batchelor takes an experimental approach to baking.
As an adult, Batchelor’s baking style trends towards the experimental. He recently made a ranch dressing cake topped with raw carrot slices for an online baking club hosted by some of the show’s alums. The prompt was to create a sweet dessert based on a French yogurt cake.
“It had ranch dressing seasonings and herbs, essentially bastardizing hundreds of years of French pastry,” he says with a laugh. “It actually turned out quite delicious, but that’s just how my brain works — I get an idea and I have to do it.”
This was Batchelor’s fourth time applying to be on The Great Canadian Baking Show. He and Manzano both fell in love with the U.K. version of the competition and it became a long-held dream to take part in the feel-good series.
Finding out he’d finally been cast was met with “overwhelming disbelief.”
To prepare for the show, Batchelor dug into food memories and spent time practising different kinds of sweet and savoury treats. During filming — which was apparently very hot, thanks to multiple ovens blasting inside the show’s trademark tent in the middle of an Ontario summer — he focused on keeping calm.
“Once you’re there, you just go and bake — it’s just cake,” he says.
Manzano took a more scientific approach. Cake, cookies, bars and bread are his forte, so he spent time working on technical skills he hadn’t yet mastered. He also enlisted relatives to help prepare for the on-camera experience.
Geoff George/CBC Jomar Manzano prepared for the competition by enlisting family to run mock episodes ahead of filming.
“I actually trained myself before coming onto the show by getting my family members to ask me questions and be in the kitchen with me,” he says. “But I don’t even know what the result is of all of that.”
Season 6 of The Great Canadian Baking Show debuted on Sunday, and Marzano and Batchelor were both nervously excited to watch themselves on TV. The program is hosted by comedians Alan Shane Lewis and Ann Pornel, with judging by acclaimed pastry chefs Bruno Feldeisen and Kyla Kennaley. New episodes air every Sunday at 8 p.m. on CBC and can be accessed on-demand through CBC Gem.
eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca
Twitter: @evawasney
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