"Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson had fans eating up their flirty press tour, but behind the scenes, it was all a PR 'bake-off'...."

TMZ reports, based on "sources with direct knowledge."

I had some trouble understanding the expression "bake-off," since there was no competition, only collusion, pretending to have found love together. But...

A big slice of the stunt involved Pamela claiming she was baking muffins and sourdough bread for Liam -- something he even played along with in interviews leading up to the premiere. It makes us now assume that was also part of the strategy ... pure role-play PR, not reality.

So some literal baking was involved, but there was no literal or figurative bake-off.

Actors promoting a movie are still acting. Why not act as if they'd fallen in love? 

If you go searching into the term "bake-off," you'll probably quickly arrive at something called the "First Lady Bake-Off." That's something that began in 1992, and it was an unwholesome alliance between the press — Family Circle Magazine — and the Clinton campaign. Wikipedia explains:

Asking to be insulted and getting it.

I just ran across this passage written by David Rakoff, in an essay — from this book — about Paris fashion shows:

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

Hey, ain't it good to know that you've got...

... a muffin... and a friend?