One I Prepared Earlier

In cooking shows it is seldom realistic to expect the dish to be cooked in real time, particularly if the dish has to be cooked over a long time or there is a long waiting period in preparation. Baking a loaf of bread, for example, requires the dough to rest for an extended period and then a long baking time. Few programs are three to four hours long, and much of that time would be watching an oven be hot. So instead, after putting the dish into the oven, the chef will often then take another plate out of it, the same dish prepared a while before and allowed to cook. This is a vital time-saving method when the chef does this live, in front of a Studio Audience. When there's extremely limited time, such as on a cooking segment of a show, this helps keep the end result sane due to a lack of time to properly prepare the ingredients.

An alternative approach for non-live productions is an elapsed-time cut, where they simply don't film the wait. Good Eats gives this impression sometimes. This approach may also be used for budget constraints. On The New Yankee Workshop, Norm Abrams probably isn't going to build an entire second desk to avoid waiting for the paint to dry on the first (although he does when he planned to make more than one anyway, as with chairs).

Cooking show parodies make fun of this trope, putting goopy cake batter into one oven and opening another oven to reveal One I Prepared Earlier that already has icing and decorations. Parodies that use the skip to omit several vital steps can overlap with Step Three: Profit or And Some Other Stuff.

The phrase originated on Blue Peter, but was also used for craft makes which have the same problem, as glue and paint can take hours to set.

Compare Already Done for You. Not to be confused with In Medias Res, which used to be named One We Prepared Earlier.

Examples of One I Prepared Earlier include:

Comic Books

Mocked in the Timon and Pumbaa comics in Disney Adventures: a fictional cooking show uses fake ones they prepared earlier. As it just so happens, the day they were doing pigs was the day that a) they forgot to put in the fake and b) the day Pumbaa climbed into the fake oven. With hilarious consequences.

Live-Action TV

Blue Peter is the Trope Namer.
The Frugal Gourmet had something like that. He had two ovens, one atop the other, and would pop the dish he had prepared into the one and then take one he prepared earlier out of the other.
- Graham Kerr also did this on his later shows.
Happens with Art Attack and Smart, both of which are art programmes, and since the stuff being made would often need to dry overnight, the presenters would need to take out things they'd prepared earlier.
Australia's Play School does this for art and craft all the time, even using the trope name, although sometimes they seemed to do it to avoid the tricky part of the process...
Averted in 30-minute meals with Rachael Ray. Rachael does continue cooking during commercial breaks, but unless something gets burned and she has to replace it, there's no 'prepared earlier' food.
A non-food example: During the "Jaws Special" on MythBusters, Adam was talking to the camera about the method he was using to build a fake shark, and pulled out a mockup "he'd prepared earlier".
Another non-food example is lampshaded on The Secret Life of Machines. Tim is detailing how old fashioned blue prints are made as part of the program about the photocopier. After putting some chemicals on the blank paper and the drawing to be copied on top of it, it then has to be exposed to bright light. "This actually takes rather a long time, so um, I've done one already that I've prepared earlier, a bit like a cookery program."
Non-food: On Chicago's Ray Raynor and his Friends Ray would do an at-home crafts project following instructions, the implication being that kids at home would do it at the same time. They'd have one they prepared earlier (used as a model, "this is what it looks like when you've finished") which would look great, and the one Ray made would look like shit.

Puppet Shows

Parodied in an episode of The Basil Brush Show, where the eponymous fox finds a muffin recipe from one of his relatives, but they take 45 minutes to make whilst the show is only 25 minutes. Cue a screenwipe where we see a tray of finished muffins and Basil saying, "And here are some I made earlier."

Web Original

Non-food: In a British PSA for a CPR technique, actor Vinnie Jones proceeds to demonstrate, noting he needs a guy who's not breathing. Cue a body being slid across the floor in front of him and Vinnie stating, "Here's one I made earlier."

Western Animation

In an episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, Rolf is telling the boys about a family cure for pimples that needs to be brewed overnight. Eddy (who has a ridiculously large pimple on his head) complains, but Rolf cuts him off by saying fortunately he prepared some earlier. Ed claps.