'Nailed It!' Season 4: Underdog Stephanie defeats her twin sister Stacey and Shane in sports-themed bake-off
The fourth episode of 'Nailed It!' Season 4, Nicole and Jacques had planned a sports-themed bake-off for participating home bakers. The episode featured three amateur cooks — Shane, Stacey, and Stephanie. Shane, a certified personal trainer described himself as ready and willing to try and do anything and a specific example of this was when he recently made a run to the food store to get some grass seeds but came back with ducks. He mentioned that whether it's a cake or a cookie, he is determined to nail it.
The next baker was Stacey Blanet, a medical student. Stacey mentioned that she is usually successful in planning and executing other aspects of her life but when it comes to baking, her experience is "crapshoot" but she can whip out a mean chocolate chip cookie.
The third baker was Stephanie, a therapist working at the mental health clinic. Her main purpose to compete on the show was to get better at baking and in addition to that she wanted to look at her twin sister in the eye and go "told you so." Her sister was none other than fellow competitor Stacey.
Three-time gold medalist, Gabby Douglas joined Jacques and Nicole on this episode as a guest judge.
For the first challenge, the bakers had to recreate sports medal cookies. Nicole warned them that it was going to be an onerous task and not a cakewalk as the bakers will "have to climb a treacherous terrain of flour" while surfing "the crashing waves of sugar" and chop their way through sticks of butter to make those cookies. Each cookie had a different sport on it — climbing, surfing and karate. The cookies had to be baked first, dipped in white chocolate, coated with royal icing and in the end painted with a metallic color depicting the colors: bronze, gold, and silver.
The contestants head into the challenge with 45 minutes in hand. They all face a lot of struggle but Stephanie has it the worst since she loses a lot of time figuring how to measure ingredients as she's not well versed with it while her sister Stacey is going ahead with a lot of ease. With less than 15 minutes left for the challenge, Shane decides to improvise and instead of dipping the cookies in white chocolate, he pours it on them and later wraps them up in gold, bronze and silver sheets of edible paper, which the judges think is very smart. There's also a sister's squabble that happens during the challenge with Stacey poking fun at Stephanie and Shane is caught in the crossfire.
The stressful and equally chaotic round ends and its time for the judges to examine. Jacques mentioned that they saw the very good and the very bad in this challenge and declared Stacey as the winner as her cookies were the best looking of the lot and tasted good as well.
For round 2, they had to recreate a winner artistic swimming cake, with the swimmers made out of modeling chocolate placed in a pool of blue piping gel. The bottom layer had waves that were thinly rolled out of fondant and on top of the cake sat a waffle cone with flame-shaped fondant strips and while presenting the cakes, the bakers had to light it up using alcohol and a blow torch. They had one hour and 45 minutes to complete this herculean task. This time around, Stephanie was going through the challenge with much ease while her opponents were struggling.
At the end of the challenge, Stephanie's cake turned out to be better looking than the other two and she also managed to outdo the other two in the flavor department and the underdog went home with the winner's trophy and ten thousand dollars.
'Nailed It!' Season 4 is now streaming on Netflix.
