Recipes always lie about how long they last. Forty-five minutes to make lasagna. Twenty minutes to caramelize some onions. Fifteen minutes to bake cookies. Except in the case of speedrunners baking cookies, this isn’t actually as outrageous as it sounds. In fact, it’s a lot 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, wreaking havoc on the cookie baking speedrun leaderboard in the process.
“I AM THE CURRENT SPEED RECORD HOLDER FOR A DOZEN COOKIES,” she says tweeted on May 14th. A snapshot of the Speedrun.com leaderboard showed current players breaking previous records, many of which were in double figures. How did QTCinderalla, a popular stream that has frequently incorporated baking into its content, including in last year’s Master Baker Twitch competitions, manage to bake cookies in under four minutes?
The record run required some significant time-saving tricks. The first was to pre-measure all the ingredients, including oil instead of butter. The second option was to get the oven and baking sheet preheated and extra hot. Finally, QTCinderalla used her hands to mix, a cookie scoop to quickly get clumps of dough onto the baking sheet, and then a second baking sheet spread on top to speed up the baking process. It took about two minutes for the pastry to be in the oven and just 96 seconds to bake, perhaps not perfect but surprisingly close. “Still wet, not raw, slut,” she told her stream. “And they taste good!”
This was all within the loose rules of the Speedrunning Challenge, a niche IRL offshoot of the Cookie clicker PC games category. Not only were the cookies fully baked, but they were also more than large enough, each measuring over 3 inches wide. But not everyone was happy with the record breakthrough. Shortly after celebrating her victory, Speedrun.com has decided to re-evaluate the category. “We are temporarily archiving the IRL baking category to re-evaluate the rules and come back with a more coherent and comprehensive set of rules,” moderator TheStrahl wrote on the site. The new rules would codify things like which tools could be used and which cookies would pass the “baked” test.
“They’re afraid of me,” QTCinderella tweeted In response.
“We are not afraid, we are just trying to improve the rules before the inevitable shitstorm comes from shitty speedruns you just sent me,” TheStahl replied later. QTCinderalla wrote back: “Oh, so I shouldn’t try to do a speedrun?” Fuck me, right? The beauty of speedrunning is that ANYONE can do it. I think it’s COOL to bring attention to an unknown category. There’s no reason to be rude.”
According to TheStahl, when niche categories explode like this, the speedrunning leaderboard gets flooded with spam, trolling, and other nonsense. New rules for the 12 Cookie Baking Speedrun Challenge have already been released This includes, for example, participants having to measure ingredients during the challenge rather than beforehand, and ensuring that the finished cookies are circular and “as round as possible”.
Once the run is complete, things get even more intense and the cookies are tested to make sure they are baked properly. “First, the runner takes a cookie to demonstrate that it is structurally sound,” the new proposed rules say. “The above-mentioned biscuit must not completely fall apart as a result. Reveal the bottom of the cookie to show it is browned. The cookie is broken in half to show that the cookie inside is cooked. Eat cookies.”
These draft rules could still be revised, but they would certainly disqualify QTCinderalla’s existing record. It is unclear whether she will return after the settlement to protect her inheritance and reclaim her title. What I do know is that the next series of The Great British Bake Off needs to feature a speedrunning challenge like this.
