NJKBCFan

FYI - looks like Linsey from Season 4 will be on The Kitchen this Saturday morning on Food Network! https://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/the-kitchen/episodes/fun-family-favorites Fun Family Favorites The Kitchen is serving up quick dishes the whole family will love. Jeff Mauro combines two family favorites in his Pizza Stuffed Chicken, and Katie Lee's Sesame Cauliflower is a takeout fakeout with no guilt. Geoffrey Zakarian ups his grilled cheese game with his Iron Chef Grilled Cheese, and the hosts share stress-free hacks for organizing snacks. Then Kids Baking Championship winner Linsey Lam stops by to bake her Ice Cream Cupcakes and sticks around to help judge a treat throwdown with amped-up pudding cups!

in the first 5 seasons, the winners have all been the oldest (mostly 13, Season 3 winner was 12, but that was the oldest that year). Season 6 winner (Paige) was 11. But I wasn't necessarily referring to their actual age, just their physical maturity.

Wasn't able to see the premier episode until today. Great group of bakers! Like last season, they started off with a pretty simple challenge, and all but one got through without much drama. As others have said, even the girl who went home seemed to have a pretty good sense about what was going on. My early bet on the Final 3 are Trevin, Taylor, and Tori. None were in the top 3, but all seem like they are talented and will get their sea-legs under them as the season goes on. One thing I noticed; with the exception of Sophie and Brady, all of the bakers seem a bit more mature (physically) than in seasons past. Anyone else think this? In prior seasons, most of the kids seemed solidly pre-pubescent, but not so much this season. IMHO, of course.

Lots of kids from the south!

I believe Meadow was only 10 years old, whereas Davis was 13 and Paige was 11. As I said above, with another year or two of experience, Meadow would have done much better.

In the context of former contestants, am curious how people here think the previous winners and finalists stack up with each other? My favorites over all of the seasons are Linsey (winner) and Yashimabet (finalist).

This would be fun just to see what these kids look like after they hit puberty 😂

Congrats to Paige on a well deserved win! Going into the episode, I definitely thought it would have been one of the other two (and I was rooting for Meadow), but about halfway through it felt like everything was going Paige’s way. Even the omg moment where she had forgotten to add the pretzels to her buttercream quickly turned around into a non-issue. Decorating-wise, I liked what she was going for. All she had to do was make more and bigger chess pieces for that middle layer (like Davis’ dancers) and it would have been great. Taste-wise, Paige’s cake was probably amazing! I did have the feeling Davis was going to fall short. He’s very talented, but as I’ve said before, he only had one time the whole season where everything went well (the tart challenge), and I just had the feeling that he wasn’t going to have everything go well here. As soon as I saw how he was making his top tier, I knew it wasn’t going to be his day. And not working the cherries right was the knockout blow. That said, he attempted a lot of cool stuff, and I enjoy his decorating skills! Meadow, very hard to believe she was one of the youngest bakers on the show. Great poise, talent and resourcefulness. I would guess that if she was on the show 2 years in the future, she would easily be the winner. Add 2 years of experience to what she made tonight and I think it would be amazing. The challenge for this finale was decent. I liked how they tied it to a kid’s school activity, and it did open the opportunity for some good creativity. overall, a good season! The kids were likable, maybe not as super-skilled as the promos tried to paint, but good enough to enjoy seeing what they produced. Looking forward to the next season!

Actually, Aiden from season 3 was the only winner to have been in the bottom once during the season. Hollis, Rebecca, Linsey and Natasha all were never in the bottom. (I guess Linsey was technically in the bottom once, but it was the semifinal where they picked Alex as the winner and then had the three remaining bakers as the bottom; but Linsey was clearly not in danger of being eliminated in that episode.)

Interesting perspective. I actually feel like they’ve heard some criticisms that not enough boys do well on the show, so they have been trying to engineer the cast to get better boys on the show. So far this season, it feels like they’ve made mostly the right choices for elimination.

That I’m not sure. There have been kids in previous seasons who made cookies who had extra dough which came in handy. At a minimum these kids have probably watched the previous seasons and knew having extra dough would be a good idea.

Forgot to mention: the twist seemed kind of pointless in this episode.

I enjoyed this challenge, but I do kind of wonder if the kids were coached on how to do it. That they all did the same thing in using stencils seemed unlikely without some coaching. Congrats to Davis, that Mona Lisa was seriously impressive! That said, I did think that Meadow should have won given that hers tasted better and met the challenge of being a puzzle a little better (IMHO). And yes, while her whipped cream and his ice cream were extra, hers was more successful there, too. All that said, I don't have a problem with Davis winning this. It was pretty obvious that Jaxon was going to lose when his cookies didn't work out as a puzzle. When he was trying to trim the cookies, you could see that it was way too crumbly. And yes, his decorating was a bit of a disaster. I wasn't a big fan of Paige at the start of the season, but she has grown on me. I think Davis will win the whole thing, although I think Meadow might be the better baker. Would be fine with any of these three winning, tho Paige is the dark horse.

It's actually $25,000.

I’m not saying they need to do anything different. But for example, the kids in season 2 didn’t have so many examples to get ideas from as they do in season 6 (I’m assuming all the current kids probably watched most of the prior seasons before coming to the show). And as a viewer, as soon as the kids got the taco challenge, I had a pretty good sense of how all the kids would do their imposters.

You could argue that Abby in Season 4 had a better looking cake, but Linsey won because hers tasted better.

One comment about the Imposters challenge. It does seem like with this being the 6th season with this challenge, a lot of the ideas of how to make things (like using crumbled brownies for ground beef, shredded coconut with green food coloring for lettuce, blondies for turkey/chicken, cake pop shapes for fried items, etc) are pretty well-known now. I remember watching past seasons and feeling amazed at the creativity, but this episode felt a little too familiar.

So far, Davis does seem like he's head and shoulders ahead of the other kids in terms of his creativity and thinking, but it also seems like he hasn't had a week where everything really came together (other than maybe the tart challenge). So I don't think it's quite the slam-dunk for him to win. Like we've seen in previous seasons, semi-finals have had some front-runners stumble and get eliminated. That said, it sounds like with the nature of next week's challenge being so focused on decorating, it does seem likely he gets through to the finals.

Wasn’t able to watch this week’s episode until tonight. While I appreciate that Davis had the best taco shell and creatively attempted the most things, honestly I didn’t think his was the best “imposter”. For me, Meadow had the most successful imposter, followed by Paige. Jaxon and Nyah both definitely struggled the most, and while I agree with Nyah’s elimination, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was Jaxon who was sent home. As far as the challenge overall, this was a pretty good one, although this is supposed to be a baking championship, not a deep-fry championship.

Season 5 marathon on all day today!

After 2 weeks of challenges that I found very interesting, I was pretty disappointed with this week's challenge. Count me among the people who had no idea what Monkey Bread was. And yes, that they used canned biscuits was really uninspiring. I would have to imagine that many (most?) of these kids had no idea what Monkey Bread was either, so the producers must have given them some instruction on it. And the dry ice thing was pointless, too. Based on all of that, I really have no idea how to judge how the kids did. It really felt like "cut up some canned biscuit dough and throw it in a pan with your given fruit, put it in the oven." Decorating-wise, it was all pretty lazy. Even Davis, who seems to have some drawing skills, basically made some coating-chocolate shapes and threw them all on top. It didn't look very pretty. Happy that Meadow won and bummed that Madison got the boot, but all in all a boring challenge/episode. Of the kids remaining, Davis seems to be a front-runner, but IMHO it's more because none of the other kids has really shown real baking skill; for some reason, most of them feel like they do not actually have much baking experience. Nyah in particular feels like she is winging it and getting lucky. Who actually wins will depend on how complicated the challenge is. All the hype before the season started was about how good these kids were. But I think they are proving to be weaker overall than in most of the previous seasons.

Season 4 marathon on now!

mlp I totally agree. Paige really held it together well and did herself proud. Also loved how the other kids came to help her with time running out. This is the second week in a row where I really enjoyed the challenge and the creativity the kids used in their creations. And I think this week in particular showed how critical the time-management piece of this competition really is. Davis definitely deserved the win this week and Karthik was the right one to go. Of the remaining bakers, I see Davis and Jaxon as the frontrunners at this point and Nyah as the dark horse who could surprise everyone.

I think over past seasons Duff and Valerie do tend to reward taste and fulfilling the challenge over presentation. The only exception I can remember was in the Season 2 finale where Yashimabet appeared to definitely win the flavor/moistness thing but Rebecca won with a more ambitious presentation.

The boys from the previous seasons were not like this.