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Ruiqi Chen did not think she’d win “The Great American Baking Show.” During the first challenge of the finale, she made a mistake that she thought sealed her fate – her meringues were all cracked.
“At the time I thought, ‘I know that I’m not going to win at this point because my Signature (competition) was a disaster. Let me just do something that can end this experience on a good note,’” she said.
So when she was declared winner of Season 4, she was “completely shocked.”
“The Great American Baking Show” is an American adaptation of “The Great British Bake Off,” a British baking show which gained massive popularity in the U.S. around 2018. Judged by celebrity chefs Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, both shows star home bakers completing three challenges per episode. The Signature challenge showcases the bakers’ signature recipes, while the Technical gives contestants a pared-down recipe without prior knowledge of what they’re making. The Showstopper ends each episode with a visually impressive creation.
Chen’s passion for baking began during the pandemic when she returned from college to quarantine in her childhood home in Nashville, Tennessee. During that time, she craved store-bought desserts from her childhood and decided to try and recreate them.
“The thing that got me into actually baking pastry was specifically these Costco cream puffs that my family used to buy,” Chen said. “I was having a craving for them, so I tried making cream puffs. After that, it weirdly gave me unearned confidence, and I immediately went to macarons.”
She enjoyed baking for friends and family as a hobby and, at the encouragement of her friends, applied on a whim for “The Great American Baking Show.” While she didn’t hear back for that season, a casting agent reached out the following year encouraging her to apply again. She made it to the final round of casting before ultimately being cut.
“I had gotten to meet a lot of other really amazing bakers through the process, so I figured I might as well do it one more time to try and meet other people,” Chen said.
The third time was a charm, and she was picked for the show. While Chen now lives in New York, she was living in Palo Alto at the time of casting and filming. She has fond memories of volunteering at the Palo Alto farmers market and taking pottery classes at the Palo Alto Art Center.
Chen purposely did not tell her friends that she had been cast, preferring to keep it a surprise until the trailer dropped. But she couldn’t keep it a secret from her parents, who would definitely be suspicious of her monthlong stay in London to film.
“Interestingly, my parents actually were not super thrilled I was going to do it at first, because I don’t think they understood what kind of show it was. I think they probably thought I was going on like ‘Love Island’ or something,” she said with a laugh. “But then once they realized that it is ‘The Great American Baking Show,’ which is the most wholesome show in the world, they were like, ‘OK, we’re more on board with this now.’”
A lot of preparation went into being a contestant, Chen said. For two months last year, Chen balanced a full-time job at LinkedIn with “boot camp,” time spent preparing and perfecting the recipes for 10 challenges.
Not only did she have to ensure she could complete each challenge in the allotted time, she also had to write up each recipe for producers to flag for potential issues once she arrived in England.
“For example, for cookie week, I wanted to do my cookie sculpture out of sugar cookies that contained cream cheese,” she said. “I submitted that recipe, and they were like, ‘Just so you know, British cream cheese is very different from American cream cheese. This recipe might not work. You may have to rework it once we get there.’”
The experience in England began in July 2025 with a week of testing recipes with British ingredients, followed by two days of filming, then two days off, for three weeks.
Chen made a strong first impression on the very first day of filming.
“I actually got two handshakes in the first episode, which apparently was the first time in 16 years that Paul Hollywood’s ever done that,” she said.
In the show, a handshake from Hollywood is a rarity, and if a contestant is lucky enough to receive it, it means their bake is perfect. Chen’s black sesame Thai tea cake and her lemon raspberry cake both earned her the prestigious handshake.
“I think I completely blacked out during both handshakes,” she said. “It just felt very surreal and out of body.”
Other top moments of the show for Chen include the Technicals (“I really masochistically loved Technicals because they felt like little puzzles to me,” she said) and the close friendships she made on the show.
“After really long filming days, we would all gather in one person’s apartment and get takeout and just chat about the day and eat our food,” she said. “Those evenings were so much fun.”
Of course, the ultimate highlight was taking home the glass cake stand trophy, the prize for winning the show. Ironically, it was the belief that Chen thought she couldn’t win the show that helped her win, she explained.
“Because I thought I wasn’t going to win, I took that pressure off of myself, and I was like, ‘OK, I can just be in the moment and have fun now, and just enjoy these last two bakes in the tent,’” she said. “And when you’re not stressed about something, it’s just much easier to focus and get things done well.”
Chen had to keep her win a secret until the show aired in May nearly a year later. She laughed while recalling that her friends unknowingly touched the cake stand trophy multiple times while helping her unpack during the move from Palo Alto to New York.
“I had just draped a sweater over it, and all of my poor, oblivious friends were touching it and moving it out of the way, and putting things next to it or on top of it without realizing what it was,” Chen said.
Now settled in New York, Chen plans to continue baking as a hobby with a renewed confidence in her baking skills. She said that before the show, part of her thought that compliments on her baked goods were just out of politeness. But winning the show made her more sure of her abilities.
“I think the fact that we all made it through (boot camp) was a testament to how much you can do when put under pressure,” she said. “That gave me more confidence just around handling challenges in day-to-day life too.”
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