I watched 11 seasons of Kids Baking Championship

and I learned a surprising amount of lessons

Hello! The weather is very nice today in NYC and that is making me feel…things? So, a happy Sunday to us all!

I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. Like many things this month, I am also taking a bit of a break with the project as I recalibrate for unemployment and so on. I’ll pick a new organization come August and we’ll continue on then.

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In the last month, we’ve made a eulogy, had a surprise in a lyft, explored the multiple truths of nostalgia, and bridged the gap between want and need. All in all, it's been a serious and reflective time. So, for this week’s edition of the newsletter, we’re going with a lighter, more delicious fare.

I am the only person I am aware of who pays for Discovery+. The only person in my general age-range anyway. It’s a streamer that covers Food Network, HGTV, History Channel, TLC, Lifetime, and more. You can learn how to bake a cake while hunting for ghosts before diy-ing your entire house. It is an app that was made for me. And I literally started paying for it for the Baking Championship Culinary Universe. I signed up because of the Halloween Baking Championship specifically.

I have written previously about my love of baking competition shows so this should not be a surprise to anyone. The voracity by which I consume (ha) these shows is also probably not a surprise. Watching multiple seasons in as many days? Sounds reasonable to me! 

All of the Baking Championship shows are fun. They have silly challenges with weird flavor combinations. There are costumes and decor and season specific jokes. Everyone is a very serious baker, of course, but not too serious of a baker. The hosts, some of whom you are not sure how they ended up on a baking show, really lean into the theme. (Jesse Palmer, I don’t know why you are here but I’m glad you are.) Duff Goldman is involved in nearly every baking championship. Throw a rock from Spring to Summer to Holiday and you’ll hit his goofy bald head. 

My absolute favorite baking championship lately has been Kids Baking Championship.

The kids are the best. As hosts, Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli lead the young bakers through ten weeks of challenges. It’s the highest stakes baking competition with the lowest stakes, in my opinion. It is either great joy or great background noise. Take your pick. (It’s both.) And THE KIDS, the kids are awesome. 

Which brings us (finally) to the cake of today’s missive: over the last week, I have watched 11 seasons of Kids Baking Championship. And from those seasons, I have pulled 11 lessons, in list form of course, to share with you. 

(Is this SEO? Is that what a list is? Am I doing it?)

1. There is a Dad Joke for every situation. 
You might roll your eyes but you will always laugh a little.

2. Hosting one of the Baking Championships in the Baking Championship Culinary Universe is like putting on a high school play. 
At the top of every episode, the hosts come out to tell the bakers what their challenge of the day is. But, of course, they can’t just tell them. This is a “show and not tell” moment. There are flimsy sets. There is stilted dialogue. There are costume pieces that were obviously pulled from some dusty storage somewhere. There is a decent amount of “oh hello, I didn’t see you there.” The hosts get the challenge of the day across but not without laughing through most of it. It is HIGH art. (And I would absolutely write on a baking show.)

3. We were lied to about what fashion will look like in our 50s and 60s. 
I’m not sure if you are aware but the Golden Girls characters’ ages ranged from 53 to 62 years old over the course of the series. Which is YOUNG. And yet, when looking back at the show these days, it seems like the costume designers went shopping in someone’s 98 year old grandmother’s closet. Growing up, I thought that is just how you started to dress as you aged. Yes, I know the show started in the mid-80s and of course, fashion was different. But, the perception of older people, particularly women, and particularly women in their 50s and 60s, was that they were done, over the hill, they should stay inside and watch tv. And, to a certain extent, the fashion then, and now, reflects that. 

Golden Girls, of course, was groundbreaking in its time and did a lot to morph cultural ideas of what the lives of women over 50 look like. Simultaneously, society has not changed that much. We still live in a society that does not value the experiences of older women (women in general) and expects them to fit some sort of stereotype, fashion included.

This became much more of a rant than I expected it to. This point was mostly to say that Valerie Bertinelli is very stylish on the show. It’s simple, it has to be, but the silhouettes are good and it’s not dowdy. Honestly, my Mom, who is a similar age to Valerie, also has very good style but it is always good to see women post 50 represented decently well on TV.

4. It doesn’t matter how far ahead you see it coming or how many times you’ve seen it happen, you will always gasp when someone drops a dessert or a cake falls over. 
It’s devastating! The hand flies up to cover the mouth post-gasp! Everything stops for a moment! Help!

5. When the flavors for the challenge are announced, if you say what you want out loud, 95% of the time, you won’t get your choice.  
Murphy’s Law or something.

6. We have a lot of lessons to learn from kids. 
Depending on the competition show, helping your fellow competitors might be frowned on. (I once watched someone get yelled at on a flower design show for letting people help them.) That is not true on Kids Baking Championship. The kids are so quick to help each other most of the time. They don’t want to see anyone fail. In fact, they want everyone to be competing at their best. They are also so quick with an encouraging word. “You can do it. You got this.” is a common refrain. It is said so often because it is true and everyone wants everyone else to remember it.  

7. Sometimes you need a hug and sometimes you need a minute. 
Valerie Bertinelli is a Mom and is automatically a Mom to all the kids which really means she is ready to hug any kid who is crying. And there is usually at least one kid crying per episode. But, in some moments, she turns to Duff to see if he thinks she should go over to whichever kid is having a crisis and sometimes he says to wait and see if they can recalibrate. Often they do but if they don’t, you know Valerie is right there. 

This is a “pick your moment” and a “read the room” kind of lesson. It is so easy to want to jump to it when someone is having a hard time. Sometimes that is exactly the right choice. And sometimes, a person needs time to work through the thing first. You can watch and wait. It’ll be clear what the right response is soon enough. 

8. If you notice something is “off” or “wrong,” it will likely be easier, faster, and cause less grief later to start again. 
The amount of times that a kid says, “Oh I forgot [blank]. …it’ll probably be fine.” and then puts the item in the oven is a lot. Inevitably, when they go to take the item out of the oven, it has not done what they wanted it to do. Then, they have to start over anyway. And, at that point, they have already wasted at least an hour.

It’s painful to start again. And sometimes, it is the only choice.

9. Problem solving over despair. 
The thing that many of us don’t learn until adulthood is that there will be a lot of crises to attend to. Crises that take over your days and deplete all your energy, crises that seem like they will crash your whole life. The Pâte à Choux won’t rise, you’ll destroy your car, you’ll lose your job. Despair will paralyze you and will convince you that everything is permanent and there is nothing you can do.

Well, even when it doesn’t feel like it, everything is temporary. Now is as good a time as any to do the next right thing. It may not work but trying something, anything, is likely to, at least, make you feel better.

10. If all else fails, cry it out.
Look, crying is productive. Feel bad, wallow a bit. Whatever you are dealing with will still be there later. Might as well get the toxins out first. 

11. You can’t fail trying.
This is a saying I came up with years ago but it is illustrated well by the kids. This phrase is not saying that I believe that you, me, we can’t fail at something. It is possible, of course. I have done it many times, of course. 

Failing has a major stigma and is something else that paralyzes people from trying anything a lot of time. But, by definition, you can’t fail trying. If you have tried something…you have tried it. You win. You succeed! Do rosemary and caramel go well together? Who knows?! Give it a try and find out. Taste bad? Okay, the product failed. But the attempt didn’t fail. Add that to the success bank, a time when you didn’t let failing stop you from trying, and give it another go.

Well…those are my 11 lessons from 11 seasons of Kids Baking Championship. I watched it all so you don’t have to. But you absolutely can. Those kids are adorable.  

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