Ruiqi Chen ’20, ’20 MS took up baking in the hopes of recreating a Costco cream puff. “[During the pandemic] I was staying at home [in Nashville] with my parents and living in my childhood bedroom,” she says. “[That] made me nostalgic … so I [tried] to recreate [the] store-bought pastry that I [loved when I was] a kid, and that sent me down a spiral of learning how to make pastries.”
Little did she know that spiral would lead her to victory in The Great American Baking Show.
A news editor at LinkedIn, Chen applied to be a contestant on the American spinoff of The Great British Baking Show in 2023 after her friends urged her to “do something with my baking [besides] just me feeding them,” Chen says. After several casting calls and in-person taste tests, she was cast alongside seven other amateur bakers on the show’s fourth season.
Ruiqi Chen. Credit: The Roku Channel
To prepare for the competition, Chen baked before and after her work shifts at LinkedIn. “If I was practicing for Bread Week, I would prepare some dough … and then go through my workday,” she says. “And [after work] I would keep baking and tweaking my recipes and doing a thousand grocery runs for eggs, butter and milk.”
Across the season’s five episodes, which were filmed over three weeks in England, Chen baked more than 15 cakes, breads, pastries and other treats for judges Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood. Like the show’s British counterpart, each episode features three bakes related to that week’s challenge: a signature bake that contestants can prep for ahead of time, a technical baking challenge where they must execute a bake without complete instructions, and a showstopper bake — a last chance to impress the judges.
“The showstoppers are always supposed to be very over the top and frequently structural,” Chen says. “The Cookie Week showstopper is truly when I thought I’d be going home, because they wanted a cookie sculpture of a childhood toy that … had to have some kind of interactive element.”
For her showstopper challenge, Chen recreated a piggy bank she had as a child. Despite struggling with the cookie structure during her practice bakes — “it succeeded never,” she says — she pulled it off in the competition.
Chen’s favorite bake of the season? Mini versions of Gâteau St. Honoré, an elegant French dessert consisting of puff pastry, cream puffs and caramelized cream. “Because there were so many pieces, it felt like I was playing multiple levels of a game and then putting it all together,” she says of the Pastry Week technical bake.
For her final showstopper, Chen made a “topsy turvy” birthday cake: a three-tiered concoction with lopsided layers of chocolate and Boston crème pie–flavored cake. Chen’s win was announced at a picnic that brought together contestants’ family and friends — and former contestants — to sample the final bakes.
“When they actually [said] my name, I was very much in shock because I didn’t think I was going to win at that point,” Chen says. “It didn’t really register for a long time, and maybe still hasn’t.”
Since her win, Chen relocated from Washington, D.C., to New York City. She has been baking movie-themed cakes and sharing them on social media. “I realized during the competition that cakes [are] the most fun for me,” she says. “[That’s] also nice because I have endless friends’ birthdays to make cakes for.”
All episodes of The Great American Baking Show are available now on the Roku Channel.
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