Bake Off: The Professionals (previously Bake Off: Crème de la Crème from 2016 to 2017) is a British television baking competition featuring teams of professional pastry chefs pit against one another through two different challenges. It is a spin-off from The Great British Bake Off, and its first episode was screened on BBC Two on 29 March 2016. The eight-episode first series of the programme was presented by Tom Kerridge, with Benoit Blin, Cherish Finden and Claire Clark serving as judges. The second series was presented by Angus Deayton, but Claire Clark did not return as a judge. The third series moved to Channel 4 to join The Great British Bake Off after the BBC declined to renew the series. The Channel 4 series has been renamed Bake Off: The Professionals, and is presented by comedian Tom Allen and former contestant on the main series, Liam Charles. The first series was won by the Squires Kitchen Cookery School team led by Mark Tilling, followed by a team of military chefs led by Liam Grime, a team from London Hilton Park Lane with Emmanuel Bonneau, Thibault Marchand and Erica Sangiorgi from Kimpton Fitzroy London Hotel, and Laurian Veaudor and Thibault Courtoisier from Cocorico Patisserie. Andrew Minto and Michael Coggan from Gin and Bake in Cardiff won in 2021. Format The series is a competition between teams of professional pastry chefs from high-end hotels and restaurants, as well as supermarkets, armed forces and other companies and organisations. The competition aims to find the finest pastry chefs in the country, who can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and can create desserts that have "stunning visual impact, phenomenal flavour, and texture". Teams of pastry chefs are chosen for the competition, with three pastry chefs in each team in the first two series, one of them the team captain. From the third series onwards, teams of two competed. In the heats, the three teams are given two challenges and are awarded marks from the three judges for each of their creations, the team with the best total score after both challenges is guaranteed a place in the semifinal. The team with the highest total score throughout the whole of the heats is also guaranteed a place within the semifinal. Each episode consists of two challenges: Miniature Challenge In this challenge each team have to create a batch of 3 different types of miniatures. All