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A Danville middle schooler is celebrating her run on the 13th season of “Kids Baking Championship” and bringing her talents to local consumers following the season finale of the show that finished airing earlier this month, in which she took fifth place.
After keeping her participation on the show a secret for months after filming, and being limited in what she could say about the production and her placement while the most recent season was broadcasting, Aria Karayil is now finally able to share her experience on the show with friends and the greater community.
“For a few months we had to keep our mouths shut, and I’m not the best at keeping secrets, so that was really hard for me,” Karayil said.
However, Karayil’s passion for baking wasn’t a secret to anyone at that point. Like many, her mother Neethi Palliyath found herself spending more time in the kitchen during lockdowns in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately inspiring her then-7-year-old daughter to join her and develop her own baking skills.
“I used to watch her and admire her, and then slowly after a few months I started getting into baking, and then I just fell in love,” Karayil said.
It was also during this time that Karayil began watching “Kids Baking Championship” herself, and drawing inspiration from the young contestants who came before her.
“I was watching the show during quarantine, and I found it really fun because all these kids were making a bunch of different things, and I’m like, you know I can bake, and I think I can bake as well as these bakers,” Karayil said.
“I’m like so I’m just going to apply, you know – I didn’t expect a lot to come out of it,” she continued. “So I did a lot of interviews, and a lot of thinking, and then one day I came home and I just see ‘Congratulations! You’re on the show!’ and I’m like oh my God, I made it.”
While keeping the secret for the ensuing months was difficult, Karayil’s existing interest in baking gave her some plausible deniability in sharing her work with friends and family as she prepared to film the show.
“We needed taste testers, so we would be like ‘oh, she’s just trying out a new recipe. Do you guys want to give us feedback?'” Palliyath said. “And oh man, that was an interesting year until November.”
Karayil and the rest of the cast were announced by the Food Network on Nov. 20, 2024, along with the season’s theme, “Amazing Animals”, allowing her to finally share the news with friends near the end of her first semester in sixth grade at Diablo Vista Middle School.
“I was finally able to spill everything – why I was gone forever in the summer instead of saying oh, I just went camping, I could be like ‘I was filming the show! You all can see it,'” Karayil said.
“It took a few days for her friends to really understand what it really meant to be on the TV show,” Palliyath said. “And then we started sending them clips and stuff and they’re like, ‘oh, it’s real.'”
The season premier on Jan. 6 marked Karayil’s TV debut, showcasing her talents alongside her fellow contestants weekly on Monday evenings until her elimination in the eighth episode on Feb. 24.
Following the season premiere, Karayil found herself garnering attention locally from people she’d never met.
“We were at Safeway, and this guy is like ‘Aria, is that you?’ And I’m like who’s this?” Karayil said. “It just did not register in my brain that living here in Danville people will recognize you if you’re a competitor from the same time.”
Her run on the show also garnered recognition from school and district officials, as well as her own teachers, for whom her participation has been a point of pride – and a source for recipe exchanges and baking tips.
It also served as a talking point among her classmates at Diablo Vista.
“Tuesday morning I’ll come to school and they’ll be like ‘I watched your show; I saw you make that,'” Karayil said.
While participating on “Kids Baking Championship” was a dream come true for Karayil, she’s continuing to look ahead toward new opportunities to hone her skills and share her baking, currently focusing on intricately decorated cakes for her online business, with proceeds going to local nonprofits including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano.
While Karayil has made a name locally and internationally as one of the San Ramon Valley’s most prominent young bakers, she said she did not want potential customers or others to underestimate her due to her young age.
“As a perfectionist, I’m not going to sell someone a cake that they’re going to regret buying from me,” Karayil said. “I want people to come back and be like, ‘this is the baker who made that awesome birthday or celebration cake.’ I don’t want to be known as that kid baker who has lots of talent and is just baking from our kitchen.”
Now a veteran of the show, Karayil is aware of her role inspiring other young bakers.
“I’d tell them to just follow your passion,” Karayil said. “If you really put in the hard work into it, I promise it will take you somewhere.”
