Cake Wars Christmas: The Holiday Spinoff Explained

Cake Wars Christmas is the piece of the Cake Wars puzzle that confuses people the most, partly because of what it was and partly because of when it aired. It was not a one-off special and not quite a full season: it was two separate six-episode holiday runs, aired in the Novembers and Decembers of 2015 and 2016, wedged between the main show's regular seasons. Here is how it worked and how we file it, with the complete episode record on our show page.

Same war, more tinsel

The format was pure Cake Wars in a Santa hat. Four teams of cake artists competed in each episode for $10,000, building elaborate showpiece cakes for a holiday-themed event or client. The structure, the host (Jonathan Bennett), and the core judging panel carried over from the mothership, so if you have seen a regular episode you know exactly how these play out: a smaller opening bake to test taste and theme, then the enormous final builds, then a winner crowned that same episode. As with the parent show, there was no overall Christmas champion, just six winning teams per run.

What changed was the material. Gingerbread-adjacent showpieces, winter wonderlands, toy workshops, and client events built around holiday properties gave the art direction a completely different feel from the pop-culture briefs of the main series. For a show whose visual spectacle was always the draw, the Christmas editions are arguably the prettiest episodes Cake Wars ever produced.

The two runs

The first Christmas run arrived just three months after the original season ended, which tells you how quickly Food Network knew it had a workable format. The second run landed in late 2016, overlapping the tail of the show's fourth regular season.

Why the season numbering gets weird

Here is the part that trips up databases and fans alike. Food Network aired these as separate specials, out of sequence with the numbered seasons. We fold everything into one Cake Wars record, so on our site seasons 1 through 4 are the regular runs, season 5 is Cake Wars Champs (the 2017 all-winners edition, which the show's own history counts as the fifth season), and the two Christmas editions sit at the end as seasons 6 and 7, even though they actually aired back in 2015 and 2016. The airdates in the table above are the real ones; the numbering is just how the filing works. The full map of all seven, with what each one was, is in our guide to every Cake Wars season.

Is it worth watching today?

If you like the holiday-baking genre, yes, and it holds up better than most. The judging is the same technically serious panel as the main show, anchored by wedding-cake master Ron Ben-Israel and pastry chef Waylynn Lucas, both profiled in our Cake Wars judges explainer, so the critiques stay sharp even when the subject is a sleigh made of rice cereal and fondant. And because every episode is self-contained, the Christmas runs are an easy, low-commitment way to sample what Cake Wars was before deciding whether to work through the whole series.