The premise for Week Five sounds to me like a set of oxymorons: the Challenges involve cake without sugar, bread without gluten, and an ice-cream roll without dairy – quite frankly, my prejudiced baking mind is finding it difficult to see these as bakes at all. Yet, it may well be ‘Free-From Week’ when it comes to the cakes, but the episode is not lacking in half-baked performances, or pie-in-the-sky ideas.

The Signature Challenge asks the contestants to omit sugar, the bread and butter of cakes. This is disappointingly easily done, with the alternative sweeteners ranging from honey to agave nectar; at least this not-so-challenging component of the challenge leaves room for some ingenious solutions. Tamal the trainee anaesthetist brings back his beloved syringe, injecting his polenta cake with a grapefruit, blood orange and honey syrup (the creepiness has not worn off). Following her soda pop syrups from last week, Nadiya continues her kitchen alchemy, introducing Mary and Paul to her no-cook blueberry jam with basil seeds that bloom when they touch liquid.

However, for the first time in the history of the series, I doubt the judgement of the baking gods: when Mary and Paul praise Alvin’s upside-down pineapple cake, I can’t help but feel that they are sugar-coating something I get mass-produced in college hall. There is a painful juxtaposition from this cake, simple enough for me to cook myself, and the far superior products composed by all the other contestants: Ugne’s chessboard effect in her multi-layered cake (which, incidentally, is also gluten-free), Flora’s icing of Madeira cakes, and the cheesy frostings whipped up by pretty much everyone else. I have acute flashbacks of Tracey Emin’s unmade bread bed à la Dorret from Week Three.

Apparently, leaving out sugar is more of a piece of cake than ditching gluten when you are aiming for twelve identical pitta breads. Mat describes his Technical Challenge bakes as “grey and dense”, and the same goes for the general atmosphere in the tent. The contestants are left confused by packets of brown powder and ask ontological questions such as whether pittas are triangles or, perhaps, the same thing as naans. Surely grasping the concept of a pitta should not be the technical challenge here? The judging is accordingly tough all around; the winner, though, is a more than welcome surprise, not least because she manages to erase some of Ian-always-the-Star-Baker’s smugness (please witness my Schadenfreude in action).

Going dairy-free for the ice-cream roll Showstopper seems as easy as apple pie, the trick being coconut fat, so that, as with the signature, there is plenty of room for both substance and style. Alvin brings on Buko Pandan, the vanilla of ice-creams in the Philippines, Nadiya goes technical by squeezing a strawberry and lime mousse inside her ice-cream, and Mel and Sue are incredibly keen on fixing the bikini line of Paul the contestant’s fondant sunbather.

And then there is the drama: Mat’s roll is not only minimalist in style and flavour (what was he thinking? Plain raspberry jam as the sole filling and stripes as the only decoration are hardly going to stop any show), but also in ice-cream which is mostly pushed out of the roll (no, you do not roll an ice-cream roll like a Swiss roll – surely it wasn’t too much of a technical challenge to Google this before shooting the show?). Meanwhile, Ugne’s brave attempt at a chocolate, peanut butter and grape jelly combo ends up looking “a little bit sad”, in always-so-gentle Mary’s words, or like it “dropped from ten feet” as the rather more direct Paul puts it.

It may well have been a slightly eclectic collection of bakes, but this episode came out of the oven as a well-proved mixture with all the necessary ingredients. I mean, who needs dairy, sugar or gluten when you have the Bake Off?