Nothing screams “holiday season” more than a cutthroat baking competition among friends. At least, that’s what I was hoping to achieve with the second annual Bay Area Holiday Bake Off (trademark not pending).
Instead of holiday cheer and good vibes, though, the tension escalated: Mind games were played, feelings were hurt, and life choices were questioned. (It didn’t help that anxieties were already high thanks to the tornado warning that many of us woke up to that morning.)
By the end of the event, and in the days after, I found myself wondering whether the Bake Off made me complicit in a capitalist-mentality scheme to pit people against each other, deflating the self-esteem of my friends and loved ones along the way.
The competition featured 19 individual matchups, which meant a lot of sugar and a lot of room for disappointment. Bakers had to pick one of four categories to participate in: tray bakes (e.g. cookies), cakes/loaves, tarts/pies, and savory. We ended up scrapping the savory category when the only entry was from someone who wanted to make guacamole, which I determined did not count as a ‘bake.’
Once we got the categories sorted out, it was time to make the bracket. There were a disproportionate number of entries in the tray bake category, so some folks faced off against people outside of their category earlier than they would in a more balanced game.
“We have some really great brackets in our society,” Holiday Bake Off emcee Jake Hanft told me. “This Bake Off is akin to that of March Madness,” which meant that some competitors were “the victim of a tough match-up.” But I figured it was the only way to ensure the best entry came out on top.
The competition wasn’t designed to be anxiety-inducing, but anxiety still seemed to be the somewhat-unfortunate effect. Even before the event officially began, as people reviewed the brackets and saw their match-ups trickle in with their respective bakes, it was clear no one was having a good time.
Take this unprompted feedback I received from a baker the day after the competition.
“My entire therapy appointment today was about the cookie party and its bigger meaning in life,” Jeremy Borkat, who was knocked out in the first round of voting, texted me later. “According to my therapist, I am the cookie.”
Borkat, who made an objectively-delicious blueberry waffle cookie with maple syrup, was knocked out by a Dolly Parton-inspired blue coconut cake, which voter (and rejected guacamole submitter) Kay Cassidy described as “tasty but chaotic.”
The ultimate winner was Bake Off star Ava Henderson, who made a delectable gingerbread cookie sandwich with orange buttercream frosting. Henderson, who was eliminated in the first round last year, told me she felt like “the cookies represented some part of myself.” So the stakes felt high to choose “the right cookie, and the right category, and the right recipe,” but she said she still ended up “doubting [those decisions] the whole time.”
Cassidy, meanwhile, had a simple response to whether she thought Henderson deserved to win.
“I don’t,” she said very matter-of-factly. She later added that she generally doesn’t like ginger cookies, but that “doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good cookie.”
Cassidy thought Zoe Statman-Weil’s lemon cake was the most deserving entry, but she declined to vote for the cake, “because I knew she won last year and I didn’t want to boost her ego.”
Statman-Weil, no thanks to Cassidy, ended up placing third. She said she felt like she “really needed to bring it this year to show [last year’s win] wasn’t a fluke.” While she felt “really anxious while baking and in the hours prior to the competition,” Statman-Weil said she “enjoyed the rollercoaster.”
For next year’s Bake Off, however, emcee Hanft suggested perhaps our social circle would be better served by ditching the competitive nature of the event, and just enjoying everyone’s bakes, minus the viciousness and angst.
“So much of our lives are in competition,” he said. “I wonder if that’s the magic of The Great British Bake Off, a show I’ve never seen before.”
