A Little Happier: A Career From Baking & Engineering

On TV, my daughters Eliza and Eleanor love to watch a baking show, and they love to watch a competition show, and they especially love to watch a baking competition show.

Over the holidays, they discovered a new show they love, called Baking Impossible on Netflix. A description of the show explains that “Top bakers and engineers team up to build edible creations that must taste delicious and survive intense engineering stress tests.”

So contestants, called “bakineers,” are asked to create things like an edible robot capable of navigating a candy-covered obstacle course while carrying a dessert inside; or a delicious, watertight boat that must sail 20 feet in 45 seconds; or an edible car that must travel 100 feet before smashing into a steel wall at 25 mph, all while protecting the crash test dummy inside.

It’s a fun show.

Eliza told me a little about Andrew Smyth, who is an executive producer and judge on the show. He’s an aerospace engineer who was also a finalist on the wildly popular show, the Great British Bake Off.

Now, Eliza is a recent college graduate, so, like many young people, she’s trying to figure out what she wants to do for her career.

What caught Eliza’s imagination was that here was a guy who loves engineering, and who loves baking. And he figured out a way to become a “bakineer” – a term he created to describe incredible engineering feats made in edible form.

Who would’ve thought that such a combination would be possible? And yet here is a way!

It made Eliza–and me–happy to think about this kind of unexpected career fulfillment.

If you mashed up two of your favorite pursuits, what would you come up with? Mine would be a combo of reading and writing, which is exactly what I do—but not in a way that I ever would have expected.

Sometimes, it’s possible to combine our interests in improbable but exciting ways. It’s worth thinking about.

Here’s a trailer for Baking Impossible.

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