“The Great British Bake Off” is a smash hit, so it didn’t take long for spin-offs to pop up. The Hallmark Channel recently debuted its own take on the wholesome concept, “Baked With Love: Holiday.”
A married pair of Wahoos, college sweethearts, won the first episode with their take on a classic holiday confection: the yule log.
Gravatt and Zomorodi are college sweethearts who married in December 2022, partly due to their love of Christmas. (Image provided by Hallmark)
“We present to you our dark bark and snow yule log,” Saman Zomorodi, a 2014 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, announced to the judges.
“To complete it, we’ve got the Iranian pistachios,” added Susan Gravatt, who graduated the same year from the College of Arts & Sciences.
Then the judges dug in. “I love that,” said Vaughn Vreeland, with The New York Times’ NYT Cooking website. He noted how the mascarpone filling cut through the bitter, dark chocolate used to mimic tree bark texture.
For the show, Hallmark recruited 10 pairs of bakers, including Gravatt and Zomorodi. After deliberating, the other judge, acclaimed Irish chef Anna Haugh, had an announcement of her own: “We think that there is one team in particular that stood out,” she said. “It is Susan and Saman. We felt that Susan and Saman captured the festive feeling, the festive flavors. They really showed a lot of skill.”
Gravatt and her UVA bestie, Shravya Kovela, pose on the Lawn. Kovela introduced Gravatt to Zomorodi. (Photo contributed by Gravatt)
“We felt incredibly grateful and proud to have not just made it through the first round, but to have won it,” Gravatt said. “We were surrounded by such talented bakers from the very beginning, so winning while all the teams were still in the competition felt like a huge and unexpected accomplishment.”
How do you get on a baking show?
The story of how the couple, married in December 2022, came to be on Hallmark’s “Baked” is as suspenseful as that first bake off. Gravatt developed a love for baking during the COVID-19 pandemic and posted photos of her beautiful creations on her Instagram account. A producer for the show saw them and invited her to come on the show. The only twist was that she had to be part of a pair.
