You put WHAT in your tea loaf - cannabis flour? GBBO contestant introduces judge Mary Berry to baking with hemp



Considering she’s been a cookery expert since the Swinging Sixties, you would have thought there was little left for Mary Berry to learn about.

Then she was confronted with a rather exotic tea loaf on this week’s episode of the Great British Bake Off.



The 78-year-old judge on the show had to expand her mind to the idea of hemp – made from cannabis plants – when a contestant decided to use it in flour form.

Get a good whiff! Mary Berry smells some hemp flour before eating a Date & Hemp Yorkshire Tea Loaf on The Great British Bake Off

Looking worried: Cookery queen Mary Berry asks more about the ingredient in the loaf

Got the giggles? Miss Perkins, Hollywood and Mr Middleton try not to laugh as Mary Berry enquires more about the hemp flour

‘I know nothing about hemp,’ a slightly worried-looking Miss Berry confessed, before innocently asking contestant Howard Middleton: ‘Is it a grass?’

It was left to a giggling co-host Sue Perkins to explain: ‘How would I describe hemp to you, Mary? Let’s just say this is the legal side of hemp. So there’s an illegal side and a legal side.

‘And it’s very, very good for you. It’s got loads of Omega 3. The leaf is naughty cigarettes, Mary.’

While illegal cannabis plants contain psychoactive ingredient THC, hemp is safe to eat because it comes from plants that do not contain hallucinogenic substances.

Viewers found the scene on the BBC2 show so entertaining that Mr Middleton’s name became one of the most used phrases in the world on social networking site Twitter.

Half-baked effort: Mary wasn't too keen on the sweet dough made by Howard Middleton, and her face says it all