Recipes are always lying about how long they take. Forty-five minutes to prep a lasagna. Twenty minutes to caramelize some onions. Fifteen minutes to bake cookies. Except in the case of cookie baking speedrunners, that’s actually not as outrageous as it sounds. In fact, it’s way longer than it took Twitch streamer QTCinderella to make a batch of 12 chocolate chip cookies. She completed the task in under four minutes earlier this week, throwing the cookie baking speedrun leaderboard into chaos in the process.
“I AM THE CURRENT SPEED RUN RECORD HOLDER FOR A DOZEN COOKIES,” she tweeted on May 14. A snapshot of the Speedrun.com leaderboard showed recent players shredding the previous records, many of which were in the double digits. So how did QTCinderalla, a popular stream who has frequently incorporated baking into her content, including last year’s Master Baker Twitch competitions, manage to bake cookies in under four minutes?
The record-breaking run required a few significant time-saving tricks. The first was having all of the ingredients pre-measured, including oil substituted for butter. The second was having the oven and baking sheet pre-heated and extra hot. Finally, QTCinderalla used her hands to mix, a cookie scoop to quickly get blobs of dough on the cookie sheet, and then a second cookie sheet smooshed on top to expedite the baking process. It took roughly two minutes to get the confections in the oven and just 96 seconds to cook them to, well, maybe not perfection, but something surprisingly close. “Still moist, not raw, bitch,” she told her stream. “And they taste good!”
This was all in keeping with the loose rules of the speedrunning challenge, a niche IRL offshoot of the Cookie Clicker PC game category. In addition to being completely baked through, the cookies were also more than big enough at over three inches wide each. But not everyone was pleased with the record-setting breakthrough. Shortly after celebrating her victory, Speedrun.com decided to re-evaluate the category. “We are temporarily archiving the IRL baking category in order to reevaluate the rules and come back with a more cohesive and comprehensive set of rules,” moderator TheStrahl wrote on the website. The new rules would codify things like which tools could be used and which cookies would pass the “baked” test.
“They are afraid of me,” QTCinderella tweeted in response.
“We’re not afraid, just trying to make the rules better before the inevitable shit storm of shitty speedruns you just sent my way,” TheStahl later responded. QTCinderalla wrote back,” Oh so I shouldn’t try to do a speed run on ? Fuck me right? The fun part of speed running is that ANYONE can do it. I think it’s COOL to draw attention to an unknown category. There is no reason to be rude.”
According to TheStahl, the speedrunning leaderboard gets swamped with spam, trolling, and other nonsense when niche categories blow up like this. New rules for the 12 cookie baking speedrun challenge have already been floated and they include things like contestants having to measure ingredients during the challenge rather than beforehand and making sure the finished cookies are circles and “as close to round as possible.”
Things get even more intense after the run is complete and the cookies are tested to make sure they’re properly baked. “First the runner will pick up a cookie to show it is structurally sound,” the new proposed rules read. “The aforementioned cookie must not completely break apart as a result. Show the bottom of the cookie to show that it has browned. The cookie will be broken in half to show that the cookie is cooked internally. Eat cookie.”
These draft rules may still be revised but they would certainly disqualify QTCinderalla’s existing record. It’s unclear if once they are settled she’ll return to protect her legacy and reclaim her title. What I do know is that the next season of The Great British Bake Off needs to include a speedrunning challenge just like this one.