The Way the Cookie Crumbles

I’m at the end of my second week in Paris, which basically means that, at this point, I’ve eaten my weight in baked goods. From pain au chocolate to tartelette au citron to an amazing Breton pastry called kouign-amann (which is basically just sugar and butter with a little bit of dough in between, just to give it some shape), I’ve run the gamut of sweet delights. And one night this week, I kid you not that I almost devoured an entire baguette on my own. I just couldn’t stop.

All these baked goods made me think about a strange trip I took several years ago in 2018. At that point, I, like many people who had fallen in love with The Great British Bake-Off, had become obsessed with baking. From bread to tarts to pastries to hot-water crust pies, I had been trying my hand at many different varieties of sweet and savory baked yummies and had gotten quite good at it. I especially loved decorating cakes. Mixing the science of baking with the art of cake decoration satisfied both the academic and artistic parts of my soul, and it all brought me a lot of joy. Hardly a week passed by without my experimenting with some new thing—and my waistline had definitely expanded in testament to this new pastime.

For a couple of years, one television network produced some shortened holiday versions of the show in the United States, but they were all focused on Christmas desserts and were not nearly as complex as the British version of the series. Eventually, however, the producers of The Great British Bake-Off decided to expand overseas to create a full season of The Great American Baking Show (the word “Bake-Off” has apparently been copyrighted by Pilsbury in the United States). A friend of mine knew one of the casting directors for the new American spin-off and passed along my name and contact info to them. Tibi and I were in London for a quick work trip, walking through the streets of the city, when I received a phone call from a member of the casting team, asking if I was interested in being considered for the show. Given my love of the British version, I said that that could be fun.

In response, the person asked if she could give me a little quiz on my baking knowledge as a kind of pre-test to see if I knew my stuff. One of my greatest childhood achievements was winning the county quiz bowl several years in a row, so I’ve always loved a trivia quiz. And I was excited that I knew most of the answers. The questions weren’t too tricky. They asked about the traditional way to start a cake batter, for instance. (Creaming the butter and sugar.) I got a little worried when they asked for the name of the part of the macaron that touches the baking sheet, and I couldn’t think of the French word pied, so I just said, “I can’t remember, but it’s the French word for ‘foot.’” It turns out they were just looking for the English word.

The quiz went well, so they asked me to fill out a form with biographical information they would send to me, then to compile an online folder with photos from all the things I’ve baked. It was fun to go through my camera roll and relive the things I’d made. (I definitely left out a few photos of things that didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped.) I sent it all along, and then I waited. When I didn’t hear anything for a couple weeks, I figured that they had moved on and decided against taking me. Maybe my baked goods weren’t quite as pretty as I thought? Maybe I didn’t actually get so many questions right on their quiz?

Just when I’d moved on and resigned myself to my fate, however, I received a phone call from a producer saying that they wanted to invite me to Los Angeles for the semi-final stage of the audition. They would fly me out to LA in just a few days, and they asked me to bring with me three things: a cake of my choice, a pastry of my choice, and a loaf of bread based on a recipe they provided (mimicking the technical challenges on the show, in which contestants receive some ingredients and a bare-bones recipe and have to try to produce something they’ve possibly never seen or tasted before).

I immediately wondered how I was supposed to make a transcontinental flight with three baked goods in tow. That seemed like an impossibility, especially if I wanted to show my best. So I called my dear friend, Brittany—who has not one, but two, of her own fantastic Substacks: Yeah, I’d Hang Out with Her and How to Act in a Restaurant. Brittany was living in LA at the time in a beautiful little cottage in Echo Park. Or at least I think it was in Echo Park. I’ve never been a fan of LA and have, therefore, really not learned much about its layout. I asked Britt if I could co-opt her kitchen the day before the audition to spend the day baking, and she very quickly and generously agreed!

It didn’t take too long to develop a plan for what I wanted to prepare for the audition. Given the importance of travel in my life, I wanted my two baked goods of choice to be inspired by travel. For the cake, I decided to make something inspired by a trip we had taken two years earlier to South Korea. We were visiting my sister, brother-in-law, niece, and brand-new nephew, who were all stationed in an army base outside of Seoul. One afternoon, my sister, Kacie, drove us all to a beautiful temple in a rural area of South Korea. I was enraptured by the colorfully painted wooden beams of the temple, which included these vibrant depictions of lotus blossoms. Based on this visit, I decided my cake would be inspired by this image and the flavors of South Korea. The cake itself would be matcha flavored with a yuzu curd filling. Then I would frost the whole thing with a smooth layer of white, cream cheese frosting, and top it with a colorful gum paste lotus blossom like the ones on the temple beams.

For the pastry, I didn’t want to attempt something I hadn’t tried before, so I decided against puff pastry or something super complicated like that. I had had some experience with choux pastry, however, so I decided to make eclairs. Rather than traditional eclairs, however, I wanted these to be based on one of my favorite flavor combos: a gelato that they make at our favorite gelateria in Venice called crema del doge. This gelato has a soft orange-vanilla cream base, then mixed in are pieces of dark chocolate and candied orange peel. For my eclairs, I would give the pastry cream filling a slight orange flavor, add a chocolate glaze to the éclair, and sprinkle candied orange peel bits on the top.

Calling the bread recipe they gave me a recipe would be generous. It was really a list of ingredients, some of which (but not all) had amounts next to them. This list was followed by the most minimal instructions possible. Something along the lines of: “Mix ingredients. Knead. Bake until done.” I was not at all a bread expert, but I wasn’t too terribly worried about this one. I felt like I was going to be able to figure it out.

Along with my clothes and toiletries, I packed with me some specialty decorating tools, along with the gum paste lotus blossom, which I decided to make ahead of time and carry on with me. When I arrived in LA, I stayed in a hotel that the production had booked for me. Then, the next morning, Britt picked me up and drove me to the grocery store to pick up some last-minute ingredients. I couldn’t find any yuzu, so I had to change the curd to a normal lemon curd, which wasn’t ideal, but would have to do. After driving to her beautiful little bungalow, I got set up to start destroying her kitchen. Thankfully, Britt had other plans for the day so she didn’t have to stay around and watch me make a mess of everything.

It’s always a little strange cooking in someone else’s space, of course, but all things considered, the day went pretty well. The hardest part by far was the bread. When I mixed the amounts of flour and water the recipe told me, the dough just seemed far too wet. I couldn’t mix it without it absolutely covering my hands. I would later find out that this was the point. They wanted to see what we’d do with such a wet dough. I made the wrong decision and ended up just adding more flour, which was not ideal, making the bread far too dense. But the cake looked really beautiful in the end. And I decided at the last minute to change the eclairs to cream puffs so that it was more of a little burst of flavor, and they turned out absolutely perfectly. I was so proud.

The next morning, I packed my things up, and Britt drove me to Pasadena to a culinary institute where the auditions were taking place. Some production assistants took my baked goods away, then put me in a room with a couple other potential contestants, where we sat and waited, chatting nervously, until we were called in, one by one. When it was my turn, I was escorted to a separate room, where a woman was waiting for me. Next to her were my cake, cream puffs, and bread, each with a small piece cut off, and each of those pieces with a single bite in it. Apparently, she had tasted them all before I came in. The woman then proceeded to bluntly criticize everything about my baked goods. The cake was dense and the flavor of the matcha was overwhelming. The eclairs were fine, but I hadn’t gotten the bread right. She said nothing about the gum paste lotus blossom I had meticulously constructed over many hours. She said not a word about the flavor combination of my crema del doge cream puffs. She didn’t ask about my inspiration for the desserts at all. Instead, she just started asking me a list of questions about kinds of desserts I’ve made: “Have you worked with gelatin? Have you made puff pastry? Have you baked macarons? What about a savory pie?”

I had never felt so deflated in my life. My favorite part about baking was making something beautiful and then giving it to others to enjoy. And, until that moment, no one had ever responded to that effort so negatively. This is likely because, before the auditions, my baking had always been passed along to friends and family—people whom I loved and who loved me in return. My baking was given and received with love and happiness in a balanced equation of gratitude and affection. But this producer eating my cream puffs didn’t give a shit about me or the hours I spent conceiving and baking those cream puffs—the memories of that perfect gelato from Venice, which I had attempted to distill into that single pastry. She only wanted to know what I could do for her show and how well my baked offerings would stand up next to those other contestants, many of whom had been doing this for much longer. Any excitement I had about the potential to join the show completely evaporated in that moment. For some reason, however, the part of me that loves competition and validation felt like I needed to continue. And so I did. I listened to her cuts and questions, pathetically answering each with what I hoped would please her most. No matter that I thought my cake was beautiful and my cream puffs delicious. She was the expert, and it was her opinion that mattered most.

She finished with me and sent me away to wait some more. Discouraged, I waited to be told to go away, to head to the airport and go home. Somehow, however, a production assistant appeared and told me that I was advancing to the final round. I was flummoxed by this news. It felt like it had gone so terribly wrong. How was I still in the running for this?

I was taken to a final waiting room, where I joined a group of others who were already seated there. Many of them were absolutely full of nerves. I remember, in particular, a blonde woman in her late forties or early fifties. She was a stay-at-home mom from the Midwest, and it was clear from the jump that she cared about this way more than anyone else in the room. She had auditioned for all the previous holiday editions of the US version of the show and had made it to the final round twice before. She was determined to get on the show this time. Making conversation, I asked her what the final rounds were like when she did it before. She looked at me sternly and said that she couldn’t possibly tell me that, as it would give me an unfair advantage. Clearly, she needed this a lot more than I did. I found myself both feeling sorry for her and, in some dark part of my ego, wanting to beat her.

After a while, a producer came into the room and explained to us that, for the final round of the audition, we would be tasked with doing a technical challenge. They would provide us with a barebones recipe, and we would have one hour to bake the dish. All along, we would be filmed by a film crew, replicating what the actual show would be like. They wanted to see how we looked on camera and how we performed under pressure.

We were led into a large kitchen with multiple stations, and each of us was assigned to a table that had some ingredients, a few tools and utensils, and a piece of paper with the recipe, turned upside-down so we couldn’t see it yet. Just before the challenge started, a producer came over to the group where I was stationed and said to us, “OK. We’re about to begin. Have fun, and remember your character!”

My what? What character? I’m not a character. I’m a person. But before I could overcome the shock I was experiencing from this instruction, someone shouted, “Go!” I flipped over the paper and saw the task at hand. It was a simple, yellow cake with white buttercream frosting. Nothing fancy at all. The most difficult part, I knew from the beginning, was the fact that none of us had a stand mixer. We’d have to mix everything by hand. Which seemed ridiculous, given that everyone has a stand mixer on the show. Still, I got to work creaming my butter and sugar to make the cake batter.

As we made our cakes, camera operators and producers went from person to person, filming us work and asking us questions about ourselves and our baking styles. I was amazed at how much the other contestants seemed to have taken the “remember your character” remark to heart. It was as if they suddenly transformed into television characters rather than actual people. When the camera came to one woman, the producer asked her if she ever sang or danced in the kitchen. The woman said yes, so the producer asked her to do it. Like a monkey being queued by the winding of a street organ, the woman began dancing and singing a song from the Hugh Jackman movie The Greatest Showman at the top of her lungs. I was instantly ashamed on her behalf. (I mean, one of us had to be embarrassed at this display, so if it wasn’t her, I was happy to fill that role.)

I was now dreading the moment the camera came my way, terrified they would ask me to sing the next few bars. Before long, as I was cracking some eggs to put into my bowl, I looked up to find a camera in my face. I jumped in shock, looking straight down the barrel of the camera like a deer caught in headlights. “Don’t look at the camera! Look at me!” the producer yelled. I turned to her as I started whisking the eggs into the batter.

“What kind of baker are you?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure. I just enjoy baking to kind of relieve stress.” I responded.

“Are you a messy baker? Or are you kind of OCD?” she said.

Without thinking, I replied, “Well, I’m literally an OCD baker. Like, I have OCD.” Which is true. I was diagnosed with a pretty mild case of OCD years ago. It flares up sometimes, particularly when I’m stressed, but I mostly manage it with meditation and a set of tools I learned through cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Of course, for this television audition, there was no room for a nuanced discussion of my anxiety disorder. Instead, the producer quickly decided to make it “my thing.” The previous woman’s thing was singing and dancing. My thing was now OCD. Every time I went to wash my hands, the cameras swarmed around me. No matter that my hands were actually covered in raw egg or powdered sugar. I was now the OCD guy, and the OCD guy washes his hands compulsively. I could actually see in my head how they were going to edit together the footage to make it look like I was washing my hands every 30 seconds. One time, the cameras missed a handwashing session and asked me to go back and do it again. And I actually did it. I have no idea why. But I certainly learned something about why people do the most insane and embarrassing things on reality television. There is something so disarming about the camera and the pressure in the room that it makes you feel like you just have to listen to whatever the producer says.

As the clock started winding down and my hands were absolutely cramped from trying to whisk a smooth buttercream frosting with no electrical aid, I had a moment to think to myself. And as I looked around at this group of people scrambling to bake a cake that would impress, I realized that I was feeling no joy or excitement. I just felt kind of depressed. And a little icky. Baking had always been something that relieved stress, but this version of baking just caused more stress. Here, I wasn’t baking for myself. I was baking so that strangers would like me. And those strangers weren’t interested in who I really was as a person. They were only interested in what I could offer them as a character…this fictional, two-dimensional thing that comes up on their screen and whom they have to decide if they identify with or feel for or love or hate so they know how to react when that character advances from one week to the next.

I finished my cake. I even piped some pretty little frosting roses on the top to make it extra pretty. But then I packed my things up and headed for the airport to go home. I called Tibi from the terminal and told him about the experience. And I said that I don’t think I want to do it, even if I get selected.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to make that choice, because it turns out that the producers decided my performance of “OCD Guy” was not intriguing enough to make the final cut. For a while, I was curious to watch the show when it came out. I was especially interested to see if that Midwest mom had gotten cast. She wanted it so badly, I really hoped that she did. But then, several months later, I saw a news article that Johnny Iuzzini, the American pastry chef who was judging the show alongside Mary Berry, had been condemned by several women during the #metoo movement for sexual assault, and the whole season was trashed. They filmed it but never aired a single episode.

I don’t bake as much now as I used to, though sometimes the baking itch returns, and I spend a day in the kitchen whipping something up. But the audition really tainted my experience of baking in an enervating way. From that point, I’ve only wanted to bake when it would really be a joyful and relaxing experience. I didn’t want to do it out of obligation or a desire for validation. And that’s really as it should be. Julia Child once said, “The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.” In this case, it took a reality show audition to remind me of that lesson.

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