Baking Impossible Winners: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post names the winning team of Baking Impossible season 1.

Baking Impossible was Netflix's oddest baking experiment: pair a baker with an engineer, then demand desserts that float, drive, or survive an earthquake table. It ran for a single season, premiering on October 6, 2021, and because it is a team show, its title belongs to two people equally. Baker Rodolfo Goncalves and engineer Sara Schonour won it together, with Cindy Ngar and Taylor Tabb as the runner-up team. Here is where both champions went next.

Rodolfo Goncalves: the baker

Goncalves came into the show from New York City, and his post-win path has stayed rooted there. He runs Goloso by Rodolfo, his French-inspired cake brand, which ships cakes nationwide, and his profile as a cake designer climbed noticeably after the season. One commission he has highlighted was a hyper-detailed high-heeled boot cake for the tenth anniversary of the fashion brand Schutz in New York. In late 2023 he added a second, more grounded role, becoming general manager of Berimbau Brazilian Kitchen in the city, balancing restaurant leadership with the cake brand. He remains active as @rodolfocakedesigner.

Sara Schonour: the engineer

Schonour is the show's best answer to "what does an engineer get out of a baking show?" A Penn State architectural engineering graduate from the Boston area, she spent 16 years at the architecture firm CannonDesign, where she built its lighting studio, before striking out on her own. In 2023 she founded Luxsi, her lighting design and creative consulting practice, and she has become a familiar voice in her industry through podcasts and conference appearances. She has also leaned into the "bakineering" identity the show invented, speaking through the Society of Women Engineers, whose podcast featured her as the Baking Impossible winner.

The reunion tour

The two did not simply collect the trophy and part ways. In October 2022, Goncalves and Schonour reunited at the Society of Women Engineers' WE22 conference in Houston, building showpieces that put their bakineering skills back to work, including an edible landscape and a space-themed creation. For a show that never got a second season, its winners have done an unusually good job of keeping the concept alive.

Where things stand now

Both halves of the winning team converted the show into momentum in their original fields rather than chasing television. Goncalves has the growing cake brand and a New York restaurant role; Schonour has a lighting startup and an industry speaking career. It is a fitting outcome for the format: the baker kept baking, the engineer kept engineering, and the Netflix season remains the strange, wonderful collaboration in the middle.

For what the show actually was, how the baker-engineer pairings worked, and whether it deserved more seasons, our full write-up is at Baking Impossible on Netflix, and the season record lives on the show hub.