Holiday Baking Championship Season 5: Recap, Bakes and Winner

Spoiler note: this recap names the Season 5 winner and covers how the season played out.

Season 5 sits quietly in the middle of the show's run, a season without a major cast shakeup or viral moment, which in its own way says something about how settled the format had become by this point. Four years and five seasons in, Holiday Baking Championship had its rhythm down: preheat, main heat, elimination, repeat. The full season by season record lives on our Holiday Baking Championship show hub.

Season 5 at a glance

The finalists

Douglas Phillips, from Ayer, Massachusetts, won the season. The runners-up, both listed as co-finalists, were Lerome Campbell and Sarah Lucia Tafur. As with several mid-run seasons, detailed biographical coverage of the wider cast beyond the confirmed placements is limited in the public record.

How a Holiday Baking Championship episode works

The franchise's two-round format anchored this season the same way it had every year since 2014: a preheat challenge opens the episode and tests a narrower baking skill, and a bigger, festively themed main heat decides the elimination. Contestants bake against the clock in a shared studio kitchen, and the judges taste and critique every dish before sending a baker home each week.

Notable moments of Season 5

Season 5 continued the seven-episode format introduced the previous year before the show settled back into eight episodes starting with Season 6. The judging panel, Nancy Fuller and Duff Goldman with Lorraine Pascale in the third chair, remained unchanged from the season before, giving the show a stability that would hold for one more year before Pascale's run ended and Carla Hall took over starting with Season 7.

With less public documentation available on this particular cast than some other seasons, the clearest throughline is structural: this is the last season before the franchise settled into the eight-episode, Carla Hall-judged format that would define the show through the early 2020s.

What was at stake

The show's cash prize, reported at $50,000 in its early seasons, remained the main draw for contestants this year, on top of the title itself, a different reward structure from The Great British Bake Off, which offers no money at all. For a franchise built on working bakers and pastry professionals as much as talented amateurs, that kind of prize can be the difference between a hobby and a business, which is exactly what it became for several winners covered elsewhere in this recap series.

Five seasons in, the show had also settled into a reliable November-to-December broadcast window that let it serve as Food Network's seasonal centerpiece year after year, a scheduling pattern the network would later replicate with its spring and kids-focused spinoffs, each anchored to its own season of the year rather than competing for the same viewers at the same time.

Where to watch and what to read next

Season 5 is generally available to stream on Discovery+ and Max, and reruns cycle through Food Network's own broadcast schedule as well. The complete champion list across all twelve seasons is in our Holiday Baking Championship winners roundup, which also covers the current host and judging lineup in full. Season 4 introduced host Jesse Palmer the year before, and Season 6 is the last season with Lorraine Pascale on the judging panel.

For the judges themselves, our Duff Goldman profile covers his run as one of the show's two permanent judges. If the season's festive main heats have you wanting to decorate your own centerpiece, a set of cake toppers is a simple way to finish a home bake with the same polish the show's bakers chase every week.