Kids Baking Championship

Duff Goldman's favorite ingredient is revealed in this season's kick-off challenge -- bacon cupcakes! The 12 young bakers must make a cupcake featuring bacon and an assigned ingredient like maple, chocolate or cherry.

Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli take the 11 young bakers on a safari of sweetness as they challenge them to create mini cheesecakes with colorful animal prints, from tiger and zebra stripes to leopard and giraffe spots.

Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli raise the eternal question: Which are better, brownies or blondies? To settle the debate, they divide the 10 young bakers into teams for the brownies vs. blondies challenge.

Macarons are a wildly popular dessert, and macarons decorated with faces are a definite trend. Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman challenge the nine young bakers to create macarons decorated with both happy and sad faces.

The eight young bakers work in teams to each make half a cake that combines with their teammate's half-cake to make a whole cake representing an opposites theme like fire and ice, night and day, land and sea or big and small.

For the freaky flavor tarts challenge, Duff Goldman and Valerie Bertinelli ask the young bakers to create a large tart featuring a freaky flavor like jalapeno, goat cheese, yuzu, pink peppercorn, anise, blue cheese or curry.

The bakers have to turn packaged biscuit dough into monkey bread volcanoes.

Dessert impostors come in all shapes and sizes, so Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman challenge the five young bakers to make sweet dessert tacos that look like the real thing.

To earn a spot in the finale, Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman challenge the four remaining young bakers to make sugar cookie puzzles in assigned flavors like raspberry, butterscotch, spice or lemon.

The three remaining bakers compete for the grand prize and title.