Holiday Baking Championship Season 8: Recap, Bakes and Winner

Spoiler note: this recap names the Season 8 winner and covers how the season played out.

Season 8 is the second full year of the Carla Hall era, a period where the judging panel and the show's rhythms had fully settled back into place after the previous year's pandemic disruption. Vermont baker Adam Monette took the title in a season that ran without any major behind-the-scenes changes. The full season by season record lives on our Holiday Baking Championship show hub.

Season 8 at a glance

The finalists

Adam Monette, from St. Albans, Vermont, won the season. The runners-up, both listed as co-finalists, were Sabrina Coombs and Jody O'Sullivan. As with several mid-run seasons of this show, detailed public profiles beyond the finale result are limited for the wider cast, which is typical for years that did not produce a winner with a follow-up bakery or a crossover television career.

How a Holiday Baking Championship episode works

The two-round format stayed exactly as it has been since Season 1: a preheat challenge to open each episode, testing a narrower skill, and a bigger, holiday-themed main heat to close it out and decide the elimination. Bakers work against the clock in a shared studio kitchen, and the judges taste and critique every dish before sending someone home each week.

Notable moments of Season 8

With Carla Hall now a season into the role, the judging panel had regained the consistency the show had before the pandemic-forced change the year before. Nancy Fuller and Duff Goldman, the two judges who have been on the panel since Season 1, continued anchoring the show alongside her, and Jesse Palmer's hosting had by this point spanned five straight seasons without interruption.

This season sits in the middle of a run of eight-episode seasons that would continue through Season 12, the format Food Network ultimately settled on as the standard length for this show after early experimentation with six- and seven-episode runs.

What was at stake

The show's cash prize, reported at $50,000 in its early seasons, remained the central reward this year on top of the title, a structure that has stayed consistent across every season of this franchise since 2014. That steadiness, in prize, format, and by this point judging panel, is part of why the show has been able to run a new season every autumn for over a decade without needing a major reinvention.

Eight seasons and two hosts in, Holiday Baking Championship had also proven durable enough that Food Network built an entire calendar of similar competitions around it, with spring and kids-focused versions running on their own separate schedules using the same preheat-and-main-heat format this season relied on. Adam Monette's win added another Vermont success story to a winners list that, by this point, spanned nearly every region of the country, from California and Wisconsin in the show's early seasons to New England entries like this one.

Where to watch and what to read next

Season 8 is generally available to stream on Discovery+ and Max, with reruns also airing periodically on Food Network's own broadcast schedule, especially in the run-up to each new holiday season premiere. 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 7 came before this one, and Season 9 follows the next year.

Judge Duff Goldman's own path from cake artist to television is covered in our Duff Goldman profile. If Adam's Vermont-style bakes have you wanting to build your own showstopper, a full cake decorating tools kit is the fastest way to get from a plain layer cake to something finale-ready.