Arielle Yang says she discovered baking when she was “a little kid,” around 3 or 4 years old. “My mom would make me and my brother birthday cakes and cupcakes, and I would like to help out,” she said.
Yang, who’s now 11 and lives in Sandy, said she also got into watching baking shows, and eventually saw online videos of people piping frosting into flowers.
“So I did it one day, and they weren’t the best. They were kind of floppy and messy,” she said. “But it sparked an interest in baking that I’ve never had before.”
People across America are watching the results of Yang’s growing interest in baking. She’s one of the 12 contestants on the current season of Food Network’s “Kids Baking Championship.”
She’s made it to the top 4, the semifinals, and the season’s final two episodes that are scheduled to air Monday night. (The competition show airs Mondays at 6 p.m. Mountain time on DirecTV and Dish, and 9 p.m. Mountain time on Comcast. It streams on Max, starting the following day.)
Update, May 3: Yang excelled in the semifinals, landing in the top 2 with her cookie birdhouse. In the finals, her chocolate cake — decorated with bears, forests and mountains — came up short behind the series winner, Micah Parsons of Stephenville, Texas.
(Rob Pryce | Food Network) Arielle Yang of Sandy, Utah, is one of the contestants on season 13 of Food Network's "Kids Baking Championship." The final two episodes of the season are scheduled to air Monday, March 3, 2025.
Each week, Yang — a sixth grader at Waterford School — and the other contestants are given challenges to create a tasty and visually appealing baked confection. One by one, contestants are eliminated if their work isn’t up to the standards set by hosts and judges Duff Goldman and Kardea Brown. The season winner gets a prize of $25,000.
The challenges this season are all animal-related, prompting the contestants to make macarons with creature faces, desserts with paw prints and a layered trifle meant to look like a terrarium — with icing decorations of insects and flowers.
Yang won the first week’s challenge, wowing the judges with a lime tart made to look like a chameleon, with a peanut butter-cookie tail.
“I was a little surprised,” Yang said about the win in an interview this week. “It gave me a confidence booster, and it showed me that I can bake and I deserve to be on the show.”
The following week, on the macaron challenge, Yang was one of the two contestants on the bottom, because her macarons were underbaked. The third week, she and another contestant won a team challenge to make a cake inspired by the movie “Dog Man.” (The product tie-ins are abundant. Other challenges have been inspired by the Disney Cruise Line, Animal Planet’s “Puppy Bowl” and the upcoming “Smurfs” movie.)
Yang said her favorite among the first eight challenges — the network won’t let her talk about shows that haven’t aired yet — was in episode 7, where the young bakers were tasked with making cakes that resembled a pet’s favorite food. (The challenge took a page from one of Yang’s favorite baking shows — the Netflix series “Is It Cake?,” where bakers create cakes that are disguised to look like common objects.) Yang’s cake, made to look like a slab of Swiss cheese, landed her in the top two that week.
(Food Network) Arielle Yang, left, from Sandy, Utah, works with fellow contestant Ella Hayek on a team challenge — making a cake that looks half like a dog and half like a human — in an episode from season 13 of Food Network's "Kids Baking Championship." The final two episodes of the season are scheduled to air Monday, March 3, 2025.
In last week’s episode, Yang was one of the two contestants on the bottom, because her trifle didn’t have enough cake layers — and Brown said the cake’s chocolate flavor didn’t mesh well with the lemon and passionfruit flavors of her cream layers.
The competition is fierce, and the young bakers show techniques that most home bakers don’t usually encounter. For example, Yang’s trifle included a layer of “diplomat cream,” a mix of pastry cream and stabilized whipped cream.
One of the things Yang likes about baking, she said, is “it’s really precise. You have to get the exact measurements.”
Unlike competition shows with grown-up contestants, where there’s lots of yelling and sometimes swearing, the competitors on “Kids Baking Championship” are nice to each other, she said.
“We all kind of just became friends as soon as we met,” Yang said of her fellow contestants, who were between the ages of 10 and 13 during filming last June. “I think we all bonded over baking, and some of us also shared different hobbies.” For example, Yang said she and another contestant both took dance lessons.
(Food Network) Arielle Yang, right, from Sandy, Utah, and fellow contestant Piper Lowe confer about dome cakes, in an episode from season 13 of Food Network's "Kids Baking Championship."
The judges, Goldman and Brown, are “really nice,” Yang said. “They’re really funny, and they’re also really talented. They’re people to look up to. I think you just really want to impress them.”
Even surrounded by nice people, though, baking on television can be tough. “It certainly is really nerve-wracking,” Yang said. “You have a lot of cameras following you, and the time limit is also really stressful. But I think, actually, baking calmes me down. So if I ever feel stressed, I just keep baking, and then I’ll feel calm.”
Yang’s mother, Grace Dong, said that “during filming, I actually feel like she dealt with stress better than I did.”
“Just watching her was a lot more stressful than her just doing the thing that she loves,” she said. “I was super-impressed by how she deals with any obstacles that come her way, and then finds a way to solve it.”
Yang isn’t the first Utahn to compete on “Kids Baking Championship.” In 2019, in season 7, Sophie Tate of Stansbury Park made it all the way to the finals. Last season, Henry Muranaka of Bountiful was one of the contestants.
Yang said she and her family have seen the finished episodes as they’ve aired, along with everybody else — so even though they know how the final challenges turn out, they’ll be watching Monday night along with the rest of America.
“Just seeing myself on TV is really cool,” Yang said. “It’s just cool to see how everything pans out and turns out OK. When I’m baking on the show, I’m usually focused on myself and what I’m baking, right? I don’t really focus on what the other people are doing. …
“I’m always judging myself when I’m baking,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Oh, I should have done this,’ or ‘I should have done that.’ But in the end, I’m really proud of what I did.”
