Vallery Lomas: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Vallery Lomas won her season of The Great American Baking Show.

No winner in the entire Bake Off franchise has a stranger victory story than Vallery Lomas, and few have built a better career out of a worse hand. She won season 3 of The Great American Baking Show in 2017, but almost nobody saw her do it, because the finale never aired. Here is the whole arc, from a pulled season to one of the most acclaimed baking books of its decade.

The win nobody watched

Lomas was a lawyer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, living in New York and baking on the side, when she earned her place in the tent. Two episodes into season 3's December 2017 run, ABC pulled the season from its schedule following sexual misconduct allegations against judge Johnny Iuzzini, and announced that the remaining episodes would not air. Instead of a televised crowning, Lomas was declared the winner in a press release on December 21, 2017.

It is hard to overstate what that took away: the finale moment, the audience, the publicity bounce that launches most winners. She also made history as the first Black winner across the Bake Off franchise, a milestone that deserved a broadcast. The season sits as the strange asterisk in the full list of Great American Baking Show winners, and Lomas spent the years afterward proving the title was earned.

Life is what you bake it

Rather than fade, Lomas leaned in. She left her legal career for food full time, and in September 2021 published her debut cookbook, Life Is What You Bake It, blending recipes from her Louisiana upbringing, her time in Paris, and her adopted New York with the story of the win that vanished. The book landed on best-of-the-year lists from outlets including the Boston Globe, Food Network, and The Washington Post.

She also became a genuine food media presence: hosting the digital series Vallery Bakes Your Questions for Food Network, making regular television appearances, and building an audience that found her precisely because of, not despite, the way her season ended.

Where things stand now

Lomas remains one of the franchise's best success stories, a working cookbook author and baking personality based in New York. Among American winners, only a handful have converted the title into a lasting food career, and she did it with the least help from the show itself. If the tent's history interests you, her chapter is the essential one: the season that nearly broke the American edition produced its most enduring champion.

The takeaway for fans

You cannot stream her victory, which still feels wrong, but you can cook from it. Life Is What You Bake It is the closest thing to the finale that never aired, and it is a better legacy than a broadcast: proof that the baker mattered more than the show around her.