My first bite of Bake Off whipped me into a frenzy

My favourite meal consists of shreds of mature cheese paired with fine onion shavings enclosed in a crusted wheat orb, with a side of thinly-cut potatoes and a goblet of very thin apple jus in comfortable, laid-back surroundings.

Or, as I like to call it, a cheese and onion cob, packet of crisps and half a pint of cider at the Tap & Tanner with my friend Ross.

I love food ever so much. A strict vegetarian for three years, I spend a lot of time bemoaning the lack of decent veggie options at restaurants and opting for the same takeaway every time.

Vegetarian food needs a lot of seasoning, spices and herbs that I simply have no idea how to deal with. I don't have the time to work out how to cook. I'm not a foodie, I just love eating.

You can imagine how utterly perplexed I was then when I tuned in to The Great British Bake Off. What began as a mission to have something to talk to my colleagues about on a Thursday morning quickly became an hour of shock and awe.

One of the tasks was for the bakers to make a posh stripy cake, the name of which slips my mind. That doesn't matter though because, let's face it, I'm never going to need to look up the recipe. I don't even own a wooden spoon.

But back to the show, here were a group of harassed cooks brandishing whisks. Under immense time pressure and up against excellent competitors, these seemingly lovely people were reduced to sweating, obsessive compulsive wrecks.

Ever so gently, they carefully ladled out thin layers of cake. Cake and cake and cake and cake. Hundreds of layers of cake.

I love cake, everyone. Gosh, I do. So much cake.

But as the bakers meticulously created millimetre-thick layers of sponge, grilling them in varying degrees of brownness, I felt frustrated. Frustrated that these people were so stressed out by it all, frustrated that Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood were expecting them to create perfect layers in this world of imperfection.

I felt frustrated that the whole thing would surely be bone dry, what with being grilled and all every six minutes. I felt frustrated that when the cameras were off the poor, sad-looking cakes would be gobbled up by unappreciative runners and people that hold the furry microphone sticks. All that work and what was it truly for?

What is this madness? I couldn't understand why these people would put themselves in this position. Lives seemingly depended on the neatness of these tiny layers.

I felt frustrated to hear hearts audibly break when cakes flopped and someone's life was ruined when they were turfed back to real life from telly life because their creation was on the wonk.

It's not to say that I don't like The Great British Bake Off, I enjoyed it. Mel and Sue were great, the music was lovely and I was reminded of the summer throughout, seemingly a million miles away from this grey October.

I was frustrated by a lot of things during my first experience of Bake Off.

Most of all, l I was frustrated that I hadn't got any cake in.