Inspired by my own Dutch article about how I watched the Meg 3 times. It’s a nonsense pop culture PSA.
Baking Shows
Honestly, I don’t know why I love them so much. I feel like in life there’s two types of people: People who love to cook and people who love to bake. Occasionally the two overlap into a perfect storm of culinary hobbies, but usually it’s one of the two.
I bake maybe once or twice a year, and when I do I almost always make these amazing salted coffee brownie cookies, or scones. And scones is very little work when you just buy the lemon custard and cream.
Which I do.
Baking is too exact for me, I like to faff around and throw in things while I cook. Cooking is more suitable for improv and the type of person who only realises she is missing half of the ingredients so she has to swap white wine vinegar for balsamic, honey for sugar and flour for another type of flower. Aka me.
But MAN, do I love watching baking shows!! I don’t know why, I just find it so relaxing and interesting to watch. NOTHING is at stake, because if a merengue flops over or a cake is too dry that is obviously not great, but nobody dies and everything will be exactly as it was anyway.
These are my favorite ones.
They’re also the only ones.
Nailed It! (3 seasons)
Most people on the Internet know the ‘NAILED IT!’ – concept, and I think the best example of it is on one of the funniest sites ever: Cakewrecks. (I can’t stop laughing over their latest post over International Cat Day) These atrocities are just so hysterical to me and I think someone was right on the money by making a baking show out of it.
I honestly think this is the best one, because it’s the funniest and because it has the best host. Nicole Byer is really, really fun and has great comedy and conversational skills, and obviously this concept is really hilarious.
The episodes are short and sweet, and with these cool themes and guest judges. A really fun crossover episode is the one where the fab five from Queer Eye join the fun and make popcakes!
Sugar Rush (2 seasons)
This show makes the baking more interesting by adding the element of time management . In the first 3 hours the bakers have to make a cupcake (round 1) and a confection (round 2) and in the second 3 hours the team has to make a cake (round 3 and finale). The quicker they work in round 1 qand 2, the leftover time gets added to their 3rd round, which can be really helpful when you have to assemble a ginormous cake to win the 10.000$ that’s at stake!
They start out with 4 teams of 2 bakers (usually people who already work together in some capacity or are family) and after each round the worst team gets eliminated.
The fun thing about this show is that they are all excellent bakers, but they have to work under time pressure. The presenter Hunter March is…decent, and the judges are pretty fun and watchable.
Zumbo’s Just Desserts (1 season – 2015; Netflix commissioned season 2 in 2018)
Zumbo is apparently some dessert-patisserie badass Down Under (I hadn’t heard of him until Sugar Rush) and in this baking competition 12 dessert makers compete for a huge price: 100.000 dollars and to have their dessert in Zumbo’s stores.
Out of all the baking shows, this is the most like Bake Off (nothing will be better to watch than the Great British Bake Off and nothing will convince me otherwise) but what’s fun is that all 12 dessert makers who have to make something according to the brief, but only the two worst ones have to face off in the ‘Zumbo Test’, where they have to recreate a difficult Zumbo dessert for the two judges, Adriano Zumbo and Rachel Khoo.
It’s really beautiful, colourful and fun to watch them create desserts and I cannot WAIT for a new season of this Aussie-based dessertshow!
So yeah
I figured I’d share my knowledge so you too can start binging the baking shows that Netflix has to offer.
My greatest wish is that Netflix will buy Bake Off, but that’s probably not going to happen. Oh well.
Happy Sunday!
