Holiday Baking Championship Season 9: Recap, Bakes and Winner

Spoiler note: this recap names the Season 9 winner and covers how the season played out.

Season 9 rounds out the middle stretch of the Carla Hall era, with Delaware baker Dru Tevis taking the title in a season that, based on currently available public records, had a smaller documented finalist field than most other years of the show. The full season by season record lives on our Holiday Baking Championship show hub.

Season 9 at a glance

The finalists

Dru Tevis, from Delaware, won the season. The runner-up on record is Aishia Martinez.

How a Holiday Baking Championship episode works

Season 9 followed the same two-round structure the franchise has used since its debut: a preheat challenge opens each episode and tests a narrower skill, and a bigger, holiday-themed main heat closes it out and decides who is eliminated. Bakers work against the clock in a shared studio kitchen, with the judges tasting and critiquing every dish before sending someone home.

Notable moments of Season 9

Season 9 continued the established Jesse Palmer, Fuller, Goldman, and Hall lineup that had been in place since Season 7, with no changes to hosting or judging this year. As with several mid-run seasons of this show, detailed contestant biographies for the wider cast are thinner in the public record than for standout seasons like the ones that produced bakery-opening winners, which is why this recap focuses on the confirmed facts from the show's own record rather than filling in undocumented details.

What is well documented is the format itself: an eight-episode run built on the same preheat and main heat structure that has carried the franchise since 2014, now firmly in its ninth consecutive holiday season on the air.

What was at stake

The show's cash prize, reported at $50,000 in its early seasons, remained the central reward on top of the title for Dru Tevis's win, the same stakes structure the franchise has used every year since 2014. Nine seasons in, the format had become close to a genre unto itself within Food Network's schedule, airing every autumn alongside its spring and kids-focused siblings. By this point the network had also spun off a Halloween-themed entry using the same bones, which meant a competing baking bracket was airing on Food Network in some form across most of the calendar year, not just the holidays.

This was also a season with a smaller documented finalist field than most, which meant less contemporaneous press coverage than a season like the one that followed, where local outlets covered the winner's story in far more detail. That gap in available sourcing is worth noting for anyone trying to track down deeper biographical detail on this particular cast beyond what the show itself confirmed.

Where to watch and what to read next

Season 9 is generally available to stream on Discovery+ and Max, alongside periodic reruns on Food Network's own broadcast schedule. 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 8 came before this one, and Season 10 crowned a winner who went on to open her own Texas bakery.

Duff Goldman's run as one of the two permanent judges is covered in our Duff Goldman profile. If the show's precise technical rounds have you wanting more control in your own kitchen, a food scale takes the guesswork out of measuring for a holiday bake.