The Kids Baking Championship

There is a series on Food Network, called The Kids Baking Championship.  I am not sure the age range, but I am guessing 11 and 12 year olds.  They have a challenge, with a surprise twist and at the end somebody gets sent home.  The kids are infatuated with this show!  They love it so much that they thought we should have our own baking challenge.  Back in January we our first challenge.  The kids insisted that they compete against us.  The twist was that you had to use an ingredient with the letter B.  Here are the exact descriptions from the score card:

Today we present to you a valentine chocolate cupcake.  Our B ingredient is a banana.  For our topping we included Twizzlers and a sliced banana.  These are strawberry flavored Twizzlers and we think strawberries and bananas compliment each other well.  We garnished with sprinkles for extra love! Enjoy our wonderful treats!

Today we present to you a heart shaped bacon chocolate chip cupcake, filled with maple whipped cream, topped with maple frosting, garnished with bourbon glazed bacon pecan bits.  That’s two “B’s” Bourbon and Bacon!  

(yes we had the bacon and bourbon one)

Ima and Pops came over and scored the cupcakes as an exact tie!  The kids had a blast with it.  Today is President's Day so I have the children at home with me and they wanted to have a challenge.  Since teams weren't even and they really didn't want to work together they decided to compete against each other, yet they still really worked together.  Today's challenge was "you have to use ingredients that we already have in the cabinets!"  I left them to scour the kitchen while I separated some laundry and when I came back the first thing I see is Grant trying to smash graham crackers on a serving tray - not a cutting board!  I decided that they might need a little help.  They pretty much made the same thing and used the same ingredients but they each did their own and I only helped where needed (aka when big messes were a possibility!)  They put graham crackers crumbs in cupcake liners and then piled in peanut butter, marshmallows, a chopped chocolate bar, powdered sugar (that they insisted on sifting), sprinkles, lemon zest (because why not?!) and chocolate frosting.  They were actually pretty good.  I just followed them around with the vacuum.  They wanted me to judge honestly, so I did.  There are three categories, creativity, presentation and taste.  I tied them on creativity because they basically made the same thing.  Grant won taste and Elizabeth won presentation.  They keep pushing the issue saying that I really hadn't chosen a winner - yes kids that was exactly what I was tying to avoid! But they wouldn't give up so I finally chose Grant to go home, siting that his peanut butter was not evenly distributed (which I had helped him with, so really it was my fault!).  

This is the part when you yell "hands up!" and the time expires