The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

Policies and support#

Late work and extensions#

A bake-off is judged on food that has to exist at a fixed time — a loaf baked two days early or two days late is a different loaf, so there’s no automatic extension for a missed bench. If illness, an oven failure or something else outside your control is going to stop you turning up, ask before the deadline, not after it. Come with what you have: a genuine attempt with an honest account of what went wrong is assessed on its merits.

When a bake fails#

A collapsed loaf isn’t the same as a failed assessment. Fault diagnosis is part of what’s being judged — naming what went wrong, why, and what you’d change is worth marks on its own, most explicitly in bake-off 2’s criteria. Bring in the bread you actually made, with the honest version of your notes, rather than not turning up at all. Notes describing a bake that plainly didn’t happen cost you more than the bad bake would have.

Academic integrity#

The bread on the bench has to be the one you baked. Talking through a formula, comparing hydration or troubleshooting a stall with another student is normal kitchen practice and is fine here too, provided you declare it in your notes — who you talked to and what changed as a result. Baking someone else’s dough, or bringing in bread someone else made, is not — and marks the same way an empty bench does, not as a bad loaf but as nothing having been baked at all.

Food safety and allergens#

Bakes are cut and tasted on the bench, in front of the room and each other, so treat every loaf as something someone else is about to eat. Declare any nuts, dairy, egg or other common allergens before your bake is cut, not after. Keep raw eggs and dairy refrigerated until they go into the dough, wash hands and equipment between doughs, and don’t bring in anything you wouldn’t eat yourself.

Getting help#

Say something before the deadline, not after it. Marisol and Idris would rather hear about a dying starter or a broken oven on a Tuesday than see an empty space on the bench on a Friday.