Review: 41393 Baking Competition
Posted by benbacardi,
The five main protagonists in the Friends line are clearly talented girls; they each seem to have many different occupations, and clearly live an exciting life of luxury filled with fancy hotels, restaurants and exotic holidays.
In 41393 Baking Competition, Stephanie is once again demonstrating her excellent culinary skills, but this time on TV! We haven’t seen a TV studio set in the Friends line since 2016’s 41117 Pop Star TV Studio, but this return to the small screen promises to be bigger and better than before.
Box and contents
The box artwork is standard fare for Friends sets; primarily purple, with the Friends logo and the five Friends in prominent position. The front shows the full set with a backdrop of television studio lighting, and as usual the three included mini-dolls are called out in the bottom right; Lillie, David, and Stephanie.
The rear of the box highlights many of the play features, such as rotating cake stands, the modularity of the set, and the spinning cake dial atop the main stage. There’s certainly a lot going on!
Inside the box, as may be expected by the theme, there is a fairly extensive sticker sheet containing 18 individual stickers. While many adult fans of LEGO may bemoan their inclusion, preferring printed parts instead, I think many children actually find the stickers fun to apply - perhaps we need to learn to put aside our need for them to be perfectly straight!
Unique parts
There are a couple of interesting new parts in the set, which LEGO call Design Plate 4X4, W/1.5 Hole and Design Plate 2x2, W/1.5 Hole - more sensibly named by Bricklink as Frosting for Cake.
For both parts, you get one of each of the two available colours of Reddish Brown and Aqua, and the 4x4 versions are unique to this set. The Aqua 2x2 is also available in 41401 Stephanie's Play Cube - Baker, so it’s availability is also limited, though not as much. The parts look fantastic, accurately replicating cake icing when placed on top of a round brick of matching dimensions.
As you’ll see below, the majority of the mini-doll parts are also unique to the set.
Mini-dolls
We’re treated to three mini-dolls, only one of which belongs to the usual groups of five Friends. Stephanie has been joined by David (making a return appearance since 2015’s 41109 Heartlake City Airport), and Lillie, the chef from last year’s 41379 Heartlake City Restaurant - who better to judge a baking competition?
As contestants on the show, Stephanie and David are wearing white aprons which are identical on the bottom half, but differ on the top. Stephanie’s features a yellow banana and badge, worn over a yellow sleeveless top, and David’s a green apple and badge, over a green sleeveless top. These prints (along with the apron’s bottom half, in white) are unique to this set.
Lillie’s wearing striking pink trousers and gold shoes, and an impressively detailed double-breasted chef’s jacket with gold highlights - clearly the wardrobe department on the show had a high budget! This outfit is also unique to this set, although she has borrowed the chef’s hat she wore in her restaurant last year.
The reverse of the clothes are relatively plain; the apron straps are printed on top of the coloured t-shirts for David and Stephanie, and Lillie has no additional printing - although I do like the inclusion of moulded pockets on the trousers.
The build
The instruction manual follows the new design for this year, which seems to be being trialled in a few Friends sets, including features like a progress bar, whimsical appearances of the characters, and other fun additions. You can read a little more about this new approach in my review of 41391 Heartlake City Hair Salon.
The first build we put together is a small kitchen build for our first contestant, Stephanie. It's got a very striking yellow theme, matching her apron, and a yellow tile with a sticker identifies this as the banana team. This reminds me very much of old television cooking competitions such as Ready Steady Cook, where contestants belong to one of two brightly coloured food-themed teams and compete for the prize.
On the work surface sits a blender containing a strawberry-printed tile, and a chopping board with some half cut strawberries on top. The strawberry theme continues with an extremely large two-tier cake sitting on a free-spinning turntable, which is decorated with aqua icing and strawberry tiles. This must be the result of Stephanie's efforts in the Baking Competition!
At the end of the counter, a pair of scissors, a frying pan, and a fork hang from a set of clips.
Behind the counter we find space for Stephanie to stand, next to a simple cooker made from a mailbox with a sticker. A simple but effective sink is set into the other end of the counter.
A technic pin protrudes from one end, suggesting that we'll soon be connecting this to another part of the build.
Next, two smaller builds are constructed; a trophy and a cheque for 100,000 (the currency is not indicated, but this is clearly a large amount of money for a baking competition!) and a studio camera. Although constructed if only a few pieces, it is quite effective, and seems well proportioned for a mini-doll (although any camera operator will have to be supplied from your own collection.)
Afterwards, we come to the main stage of the set. Like the counter before, the base is built with white bricks sandwiched between purple plates, which raises the build off the ground and gives the impression of a TV studio set situated in front of a live audience. This is further reinforced by the angled A-shaped plates to which the counters connect at either end, giving the audience a better view of the entire set.
A small table sits centre stage, which currently only holds a lone mug, but is intended instead for the winner's cake once the competition has been judged (shown alongside the camera and trophy, above.)
The rear wall is a very striking shape, made primarily of curved pink bricks, and flanked by a pair of studio lights. I'm not sure they'd be in such a prominent position on a real television set, as they would constantly be in view of the cameras, but they help reinforce the premise here. Along the bottom there are two sets of drawers and cupboards, housing cake decorations and ingredients; banana and eggs on Stephanie’s side, and apple and milk in David’s. On the next shelf up are placed further ingredients; a chocolate bar, some cherries, and, rather unusually, a fish. Not what you'd expect in a cake baking competition, but we'll see why this is included in a minute! The instruction booklet actually makes a point of calling out the fish's unsavoury aroma.
One more shelf up and there's room for a yellow packet of sugar and a green bag of flour. Hopefully the contestants can share - a cake without one of those ingredients would be a poor cake indeed!
The crowning pinnacle of the set's backdrop, however, is the large pink and white cake atop a spinning wheel decorated with various types of cake. Here the reason for the fish becomes clear - it seems that the type of cake each contestant must bake is determined by spinning the wheel, and one of the cakes is topped by a fish! I had thought a fish cake was a totally different type of food…
The dial can be spun so that one of the cakes stops at the front, indicated by the upper point of a star just below (which is also the competition clock.) The cake on top spins with the dial, and it is quite satisfactory to give the cake a twist and watch the wheel spinning below it.
Finally, David's food preparation counter is constructed in a near identical way to Stephanie's, but this time green and apple themed. He has the same setup (a cooker and a sink), but his choice of utensils; a whisk, saucepan, and rolling pin are provided. The rolling pin is particularly well-designed for such a small model!
David's cake is chocolate instead of strawberry, and features cookies dotted amongst the icing. He has cherries on his chopping board, and a broken egg on the counter top. However, his biggest problem seems to be that he has accidentally set alight to something on the cooker, judging by the rather large flame! Luckily, he is equipped with a fire extinguisher, so he can hopefully resolve the situation speedily. His expression does not look too concerned, anyway.
The completed model
To finish the model, the two counters are attached to either side of the main stage, and the set is complete. It makes for an impressive display; colourful, and with lots going on.
My one- and three-year-old children absolutely loved the large cakes; they were the first thing that disappeared from the set and we had to hunt them down (the youngest has a habit of hoarding and not relinquishing the things he loves.) There is a lot of play value to the set; older children would be occupied for some time acting out the television show, and three mini-dolls are a decent amount for play. It’s also always nice to see a new (or infrequent) character, and male mini-dolls are relatively few and far between. The inclusion of a film camera, and the trophy and cheque, along with the story suggestions (such as David’s kitchen disaster), only add to the fun.
At £34.99 / $39.99 / 39.99€, 41393 Baking Competition feels reasonably priced for what it offers, and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending adding it to your or your children’s collections!
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18 comments on this article
For a hot second, I thought Brickset was going to hold a Baking Competition. Nice review nonetheless
@BeauBricks me too : )
All it needs is some guy in a suit talking about his uncle in Japan, only to lift open the cover of a box of secret ingredients while yelling about something random like applesauce...
Very nice. But neither of them appear to have done their icing neatly.
Many Friends sets look less like a traditional Lego set and more like a playset you'd find in other toylines.
I can't imagine you'd ever see a baking competition in City, for example. We'd get a bakery instead.
This type of set certainly opens up play that we haven't seen as much of.
There was a TV studio set just last year in 2019: Andrea's Talent Show 41368 https://brickset.com/sets/41368-1/Andrea-s-Talent-Show
which has a stage, judge Chloe, TV camera, judge's buzzer, dressing room, Prize, etc. It also captures in brick form an episode of a talent show on one of the LEGO Friends animated shows (which is where Chloe first appeared).
$100,000 prize? I've got to enter that baking competition!!!
@DarthWalle said:
"$100,000 prize? I've got to enter that baking competition!!! "
I'm assuming it's more like $1000 considering the smallest denomination of Lego banknote is itself marked "100". Still not a shabby prize, especially for high-school aged characters like in Lego Friends!
“Nailed It!”
Those icing pieces are great. Plus I’d like to see the size of the Lego chickens that laid David’s egg..
So this is essentially the Great Heartlake City Bake-off? Nice.
Except for David the pyromaniac.
This is one of the most interesting and creative Friends sets I've seen. I'd almost be tempted to buy it myself. Price feels a hair steep, but it's such a creative setup that offers a few layers of story opportunities -- reminds me of my old love of the Studio theme.
This is a delightful set, and given the popularity of cooking shows, I can imagine it being quite successful! I love the different creative storytelling possibilities it introduces with the varied assortment of ingredients and utensils, not to mention the little elements of tension like the countdown clock, burst of flame, and unpredictable wheel of recipes.
Seeing Lillie make a return as Heartlake's resident culinary expert is a great bit of continuity, and I love her glitzy new cooking show host outfit, as well as the contestants' coordinated aprons. I'm really impressed that Stephanie and David have printing on the back of their torsos — that's a pretty rare feature among mini-dolls, and the black outlines on the straps are honestly more detail than I'm used to seeing!
The new cake decorating parts are also very cool. I wonder if it would be possible for those frosting parts to be recolored in Transparent Light Blue for a fountain. I could also picture recolors of those pieces showing up as toppings on a brick-built burger for a restaurant sign, or as toxic sludge in more action/adventure oriented themes.
Before reading this review, I didn't realize that the clock and the wheel of recipes had their movement synced. Pretty cool! I also like how carefully the designers have created places for each of the accessories in order to keep things organized. That said, one accessory I don't see here that might've been a good improvement is a piping bag for the frosting. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to create a brick-built piping bag with some type of cone piece. Still, that's not difficult for buyers to add on their own if they're so inclined!
Thanks for the review!
It's a nice looking set, but as with many other Friends sets - too fragile and too much small pieces and mini build to lose.
@Lyichir said:
" @DarthWalle said:
"$100,000 prize? I've got to enter that baking competition!!! "
I'm assuming it's more like $1000 considering the smallest denomination of Lego banknote is itself marked "100". Still not a shabby prize, especially for high-school aged characters like in Lego Friends!"
The smallest denomination of LEGO is actually the $10 coin. It came on the same plastic spruce as $20,30,and 40 coins.
I love the premise of this set, and I also love that there is finally a System counterpart to the Duplo cake frosting that's been around for two decades.
I was surprised by the price tag, until I looked closer and realized that the structure wasn't all that substantial. But I don't even have a problem with that. It's a baking competition playset, with actual cake frosting parts. What more could I ask for?
As someone who's a bit into baking I looked forward to this set when I first heard about it, but to date I couldn't convince myself to actually buy it even if it's on permanent discount here in Germany. It just looks very mundane and boring and only rehashes the same builds you see with pretty much every "stage" themed Friends set. The only real novelty are indeed be the new "dripping icing" pieces.
For me, this was a no-brainer to buy, primarily because of the cakes. I just had to borrow a few candles from a Harry Potter set, and my daughter could finally organise a decent birthday party for her dolls.
And I also appreciate the unique boy headpiece as well.
This will be a must buy for my daughter. She loves baking shows of all kinds. Simple enough build and like others the cake pieces will create all kinds of parties for her minidolls and minifigs