Fame, Fortune, and Flour

Genevieve Kashat’s bid for Kids Baking Champion

By Cal Abbo

When Genevieve Kashat was 3 years old, she watched with awe as her mother made a rich, delicious, and familiar banana bread for her family to enjoy.

Years later, this moment would blossom into something much greater: a budding baking career and a shot at Food Network stardom. The road from mom’s banana bread to the Kids Baking Championship requires just the right mixture of talent, hard work, creativity, and inspiration.

At just 5 years old, Genevieve became a fan of Food Network’s KBC and dreamed of entering the competition herself. As it happens, this was also the year she learned how to use the oven and bake a cake. Just a few years after that, she was making macarons.

These two items would become the staples of her still-nascent career, although Genevieve would soon excel in many different areas of baking. After all, she needed to be well-rounded to compete for the title of Kids Baking Champion.

One of Genevieve’s key inspirations is her aunt and godmother, who recently became a Chaldean Sister. “She’s just awesome,” Genevieve said.

This season of KBC was much different than others in the past, and according to Genevieve, it was more difficult. The main addition to the show was an entrepreneurial theme – Food Network now required that the kids have a burgeoning baking business in order to compete. KBC featured challenges and twists that blend baking and business acumen.

How does Genevieve have a business at the young age of 11? It all started with Sister Rose.

“My aunt had a little gathering in 2020,” Genevieve said. “I made macarons for fun. That’s when I was learning.” During the event, she got outstanding reviews from those who attended the gathering and numerous suggestions that she should sell her baked goods. “If my aunt didn’t have the gathering, I wouldn’t have started the business,” she said.

Through her business, Gen’s Kreations, Genevieve focuses on macarons and cakes, but she can make “literally anything you want.”

While Genevieve usually sells at her local church, she has also served at a Birmingham coffee shop, communions, baptisms, and other major events. 10% of every order goes to charity, specifically a Chaldean orphanage in Iraq.

Genevieve was contacted by the KBC production team to go on last season. Her family, however, had planned a vacation for the same time the show would be filmed. “It was my aunt’s last time before she goes to the convent so we wanted to spend that time with her,” Genevieve said. “I thought I might not be able to go to KBC.”

Thankfully, Genevieve was invited to the competition again this year, and her business experience qualified her for the tough competition. She entered the competition when she was 10, one of the youngest competitors, and competed against some kids who were already 13 years old.

The show itself is filmed over several weeks and sectioned into several episodes. In each episode, the kids get to work at their own kitchen toward a specific goal designed by the judges, in competition with one another.

The competitions are designed differently. In some episodes, the show will eliminate some kids in an individual competition. In other designs, the contestants split into teams and accomplish a goal together. Genevieve played a leading role in some of these competitions. She won half of the show’s first eight episodes and advanced to the top four kid bakers before being eliminated.

One of the show’s two judges, Duff Goldman, is one of Genevieve’s baking idols. She first found him on YouTube, when she was much younger, and has been a fan of his informational and entertaining baking videos ever since. It was only once she went on KBC that she got to meet and learn from him directly.

“It was just so cool,” she said. “I was speechless. My own kitchen, with my own name there … I got to make the kitchen as messy as I wanted to and I didn’t have to clean it.”

Genevieve also emphasized the importance of the community of young bakers that she was thrust into so suddenly. “All of us have the same love for baking,” she said. “Some of us were better than others at other things so we kind of taught each other at the same time. But since we all love the same things, it was really easy to communicate with each other.”

She also commented on the importance of her family, not only as taste testers, but as a support system. Her mother manages her social media and helps coordinate her publicity; her siblings will try anything she bakes, hoping that she’ll improve it next time.

The taste testers play a very important role for Genevieve, especially when it comes to her macarons, which are some of her best desserts to make, because Genevieve can’t taste them herself. “I’ve never really tasted my macarons,” she revealed. “I’m allergic to almonds. The shell of the macaron, the main part, is made with almond flour. But I’ve tasted the filling before.”

Genevieve’s future is full of potential, and she has some ideas she wants to pursue as well as some dreams to share. “I want to have a big bakery with a nice garden in the back,” she said. “It has a seating area and all that stuff.” Without a doubt, her dreams are big.

But now, since she has competed on a baking show, she really wants to judge one someday. With any luck, we’ll see her on the big screen, this time from the other side.