Former Houstonian makes it to finals on ‘The Great American Baking Show.’
Amanda Nguyen had the best baking teachers a young girl could want. Her mother and grandmother, she said, schooled her in the ways of cookies, cakes, pies, biscuits and bread from the time she was in grade school.
“We baked all the Southern stuff you see in Texas — peach cobbler, snow biscuits, dropped fudge, pecan pie,” said Nguyen, a resident of Tahoe City, Calif., who grew up in Houston. “They passed down a lot of recipes to me.”
She no longer has the guiding hands of those two important women in her life. But she’ll always have the know-how they taught and the recipes they imparted.
And, to be sure, a lifelong love of baking. That passion is one of the reasons Nguyen was chosen as a contestant for Season 4 of ABC’s “The Great American Baking Show,” which concludes Thursday with two hours of programming where the remaining contestants face their final baking challenges.
Nguyen isn’t allowed to say how far she gets on Thursday’s show. But on previous episodes, she’s demonstrated the kind of baking chops that landed her on the amateur baking competition — the American adaptation of the BBC hit, “The Great British Bake Off.”
Perhaps some of her friends from the Bear Creek suburb in west Houston will remember the former Amanda Bird, who graduated from Langham Creek High School in 1993. Bird attended the University of Houston through her junior year and moved to San Francisco with her husband, Bill Nguyen, and completed her degree in microbiology from San Francisco State University.
Today, 44-year-old Nguyen is a stay-at-home mother of three boys, ages 14, 10 and 5. Her eldest son, Jacob, encouraged Nguyen to make videos from the recipes she baked on “The Great American Baking Show.” There are currently seven YouTube videos for Bake Along with Amanda Nguyen (videography courtesy of Jacob) and more on the way.
Nguyen said her degree in microbiology is actually useful in the science of baking. Upcoming content on Bake Along will actually delve into the science ingredients play in recipes. It’s one of the take-aways from her time on the cooking show.
“I learned that I really love understanding what each ingredient does in a recipe,” she said. “Why do you use whole eggs with egg yolks in a custard? What’s the science behind that?”
She’s come a long way from the fifth-grader who would come home from school and whip up something like French eclairs. While she can master the fancy stuff, her baking is very much grounded in the things her mother and grandmother excelled at — coffee cake, pecan pie, cinnamon rolls, sugar cookies, dinner rolls — that make up the content of her YouTube tutorials.
That includes her grandmother’s recipe for Dropped Pecan Fudge, cooked in a cast-iron pan and dropped by the spoonful onto a surface to cool. It’s one of her favorite things to make this time of year.