Sweet Victory: Dad Wins Bake-Off
A chocolate-cake-baking San Francisco area dad who began entering cooking contests to pass the time after his divorce became the first man ever to win the grand prize at the Pillsbury Bake-Off on Tuesday - a bounty that reached a record million dollars this year.
Kurt Wait, a 43-year-old business analyst from Redwood City, Calif., and the single father of an 8-year-old son, was chosen from among 100 finalists nationwide for the top award in the Super Bowl of amateur cooking fests.
A cherub-faced, bespectacled man who does sales planning for a division of Pacific Bell, Wait flashed a big smile and rocked onto the toes of his sneakers as his Macadamia Fudge Torte was proclaimed a million-dollar recipe on national TV.
Judges said Wait’s dessert - a 460-calorie-per-serving dentist’s nightmare involving devil’s food cake mix, canned sliced pears, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips and butterscotch-caramel-fudge topping - was picked out almost immediately as a top contender. Several compared it to the legendary Tunnel of Fudge Cake, which came out of the 1966 Bake-Off to launch the bundt cake craze.
Part kitsch, part chemistry, part king-sized publicity stunt, the 47-year-old Bake-Off has been celebrating home cooking for so long that it has become an American institution of sorts. Every two years, to the accompaniment of an orchestra and under the beneficent eye of the Pillsbury Doughboy, 100 amateur cooks march into a ballroom full of kitchenettes to whip up a cookbook full of recipes using products manufactured by Pillsbury and its various subsidiaries.
The competition, which generates tens of thousands of entries each time it is held, is believed to cost Pillsbury about $2 million a pop. Company officials, however, say it more than pays for itself in free publicity, and offers the company an accurate (if occasionally unsettling) core sample of food trends in the nation’s suburbs and small towns.
The Bake-Off has always carried a good-sized purse and a substantial amount of prestige. This year, however, Pillsbury generated record headlines by enticing entrants with a $1 million grand prize, unheard of in the competitive cooking world.
“I kind of have to get over the shock of this,” said Wait, who was one of 10 men in the finals. Until Tuesday, he said, his biggest prize in a cooking competition was a $500 second place in the Gilroy Garlic Festival three years ago.
But the post-Bake-Off hoopla in the chandelier-lit Fairmont Hotel in Dallas offered little respite for Wait.
“Is he married?” one reporter demanded as Pillsbury’s news conference began. No, came the reply, and he wasn’t seeing anyone.
“Well, he will be now!” yelled another, with characteristic media restraint.
In an interview just before the Bake-Off, Wait said he taught himself to cook in college and later honed his craft by reworking recipes from Bon Appetit magazine. In his 20s, he said, he cooked for a house full of male roommates, and during his marriage, he cooked the family meals.
After his divorce, he said, he found himself in the kitchen more often, “because I had so much time on my hands.” One day, after he brought a batch of brownies to an office potluck, a friend at work suggested he enter a cooking contest.
Wait said he now cooks mostly for himself and his son, who stayed in school while Dad was baking off.