‘Is It Cake?’ Season 3 Was a Close Call

Is It Cake? season 3—or Is It Cak3?—dropped on Netflix at the end of March. But when the sprinkles settled, who walked away with the grand prize?

Is It Cake? is a baking competition in the tradition of The Great British Bake-Off and Nailed It!. Unlike those shows, though, the object of Is It Cake? isn’t to make the scrummiest biscuit or fail at a devilishly complicated confection. Instead, contestants have to make a cake-in-disguise that’s so realistic, judges can’t tell it apart from the real objects next to it. Oh, and the cake has to be delicious to boot.

The fun of Is It Cake? is trying to tell the difference between the cake and the real objects. The show gets some seriously talented artists to compete, so the results are usually mind-blowingly realistic, and the season 3 finale is no exception.

After eight episodes, the competition in season 3 was narrowed down to three bakers: Henderson Gonzalez, Jujhar Mann, and Timmy Norman.

Timmy started the final round off with a cake shaped like an old-fashioned water pump on top of a barrel. Timmy’s pump looked almost identical to the real water pumps next to it, and the judges had a hard time agreeing on which one to guess was cake. However, in the end, they guessed correctly.

Jujhar’s entry was a gorgeously detailed peacock. Again, though, even though they seemed impossible to tell apart, the judges correctly identified Jujhar’s cake.

Finally, Henderson’s turn was up. Host Mikey Day told him that he would win if the judges couldn’t identify his cake, but if they did, the competition would move into a sudden death round. Henderson offered up a cake shaped like a toybox, filled with some of his daughter’s favorite toys. The judges looked carefully at the fur on the stuffed animal and the gloss keys of the toy xylophone before guessing correctly which one was cake.

In the sudden death round, the judges debated the merits of each cake, looking at the details and revisiting the various flavors that the bakers had added. Although it seemed to be a hard decision, the judges eventually voted on Henderson’s toybox cake.

That made Henderson Gonzalez the winner of Is It Cak3?, taking home $50,000 plus $15,000 he’d already won, for a total of $65,000.

Will there be a season 4 of Is It Cake? Let’s hope so! Netflix hasn’t officially renewed the show yet, so cross your fingers for more eerily realistic cakes to come.

(featured image: Netflix)