Last year’s winning team created a gingerbread boat (edible, save for a rudder and other necessary aquatic ingredients), which then delivered a bevy of desserts (definitely edible), by way of a water channel to a panel of judges.
And now the Culineering Challenge is coming back around, for another roster of fledgling engineers and chefs enrolled in career technical education programs across the Mountain State.
“Bake and Quake” is the theme of the third annual event, which is sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Education and hosted Oct. 23 at Mountwest Community and Technical College in Huntington.
A team from the Marion County Technical Center is among nine schools that qualified for the 2024 competition.
Teams are made up of two chefs-in-training, two engineers-in-training and one social media influencer: all vying to design, bake and build an edible structure, at least 40 inches tall.
A culinary caveat has also been stirred into the recipe, as evidenced by the above winning example.
Said structure, like the best souffle, must also be able to stand up and not fall to a buffet of obstacles — which, it can be said, don’t normally appear in a cookbook or YouTube how-to video.
The West Virginia competition is patterned after the Netflix series, “Baking Impossible.”
One of that show’s inaugural winners, Sara Schonour, in fact, is serving as a judge for the West Virginia event in October.
Schonour graduated from Penn State with an electrical engineering degree — but she’s just as home in the kitchen as she is with the kilowatts.
She grew up learning to cook from her mom and aunts, she told her alma mater after being on the team that won the inaugural season of “Baking Impossible” in 2021.
Both of her culinary and clinical natures blended in perfectly with the challenges of the show, she said.
There were the Rube Goldberg machines that had to look good enough to eat — because they also had to be, well, good enough to actually eat.
How about those cake-skyscrapers served on a table designed to shake and shimmy like an earthquake?
The problem-solving components of it all were especially delicious, Schonour said in an interview with the news division of Penn State’s College of Engineering, as she recounted her time on the show.
Out of the built-in constraints that were part of the “Baking Impossible” exercise, her team came up with a hypothesis — which, of course, meant tweaking the recipe — a lot — to finally make it work.
“It’s like how do you take these ridiculously difficult challenges and boil them down into something I can do with Rice Krispies?”
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