Kids Baking Championship

It's no secret that Valerie Bertinelli loves lemon, but Duff Goldman's favorite ingredient is revealed in this season's kick-off challenge -- bacon cupcakes! Each of the 12 young bakers must make a cupcake featuring bacon and an assigned ingredient like maple, chocolate or cherry.

Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli take the 11 young bakers on a safari of sweetness as they challenge them to create mini cheesecakes with colorful animal prints, from tiger and zebra stripes to leopard and giraffe spots.

Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli raise the eternal question: Which are better, brownies or blondies? To settle the debate, they divide the 10 young bakers into teams for the brownies vs. blondies challenge.

Macarons are a wildly popular dessert, and macarons decorated with faces are a definite trend. Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman challenge the nine young bakers to create macarons decorated with happy faces and sad faces.

Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman put the eight young bakers in teams and challenge them to each make half a cake that combines with their teammate's half-cake to make a whole cake representing an opposites theme like fire and ice, night and day, land and sea or big and small.

Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli are cooking up something unusual in the science lab ... it's the freaky flavor tarts challenge! Each of the seven young bakers must create a large tart featuring a freaky flavor like jalapeno, goat cheese, yuzu, pink peppercorn, anise, blue cheese or curry.

Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman know that sometimes you can make something extraordinary out of ingredients you have at home. They challenge the six young bakers to turn packaged biscuit dough into dramatic and delicious monkey bread volcanoes.

Dessert impostors come in all shapes and sizes, so Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman challenge the five young bakers to make sweet dessert tacos that look like the real thing.

It's always a puzzle to determine which three bakers will make it to the finale, and this season, Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman are making it a sugar cookie puzzle. The four remaining young bakers must make sugar cookie puzzles in assigned flavors like raspberry, butterscotch, spice or lemon to earn a spot in the top three!

Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman are hosting the ultimate bake sale for the finale. They challenge the remaining three young bakers to create cakes using bake sale items like toffee, rice cereal treats or chocolate-covered pretzels, but the cakes also have to illustrate a common bake sale theme like Drama Club, Dance Club or Chess Club. Only one baker will win $25,000, a spot in Food Network magazine and the title of Kids Baking Champion.