During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
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Inside the Great British Bake Off
An insightful essay about the behind-the-scenes of what it takes to get into the Great British Bake Off. During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or…
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2025 Dark Sky photography winners
2025 Dark Sky photography winners. The cool thing about this collection are the technical details in the locations about the photos.
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The logistics of feeding Alaska
Feeding the population of Alaska is a logistical endeavor, only made harder by all of the tariffs. Getting fresh food to Alaska has been a challenge since the first settlers began scratching in the creek beds for gold. It was just too far from the continent’s more populated areas, separated from the contiguous United States…
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The perfect grocery store shopping list app does not exist
Planning a grocery shopping list seems like a thing technology could solve. But the complex the needs of meal ingredients, family budgets, how grocery stores are set up differently everywhere… It’s a recipe for insanity.
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Setlist.FM changing concerts
Setlist.FM has been around quite a while. For music in concert nerds, it’s an awesome way to follow an artist as they tour. And it’s changing how artist put together their setlists. For musicians who regularly change their set list, it allows them to check what they last played the last time they were in…
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Axolotls are nifty
Axoltls are weird, alien and fascinating creatures that can regrow limbs. Biologists have long been fascinated by the ability of salamanders to regrow entire limbs. Now Harvard researchers have solved part of the mystery of how they accomplish this feat—by activating stem cells throughout the body, not just at the injury site. In a paper…
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Father Pete leads the masses at Notre Dame
Thirty seconds into the video, the camera shows Father Pete — to call him anything else is to barely know him — striding into the Basilica. He’s as identifiable by his buzz cut and black-rimmed glasses as he is by his perpetual smile. Sunlight follows him through the doors. That’s when the student section loses…
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Teens start banned book club
After books were banned, what better way for teenagers to rebel than to start a banned book club? “It was really difficult for our first year,” Gooblar-Perovic added. “We couldn’t be like an official club with our school, because it would be, legally, iffy.” The group persisted. After the part of the law that affects…
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The rise of chatfishing
ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing. Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left…