How Maya Rudolph Found Happiness Through Hosting Baking It - Exclusive
The arrival of the holiday season creates a great opportunity for people to spend time with those they're closest with — and an even better reason to celebrate with dishes and treats saved just for the festive season. That's exactly the premise of Peacock's new holiday competition, "Baking It." The show features eight teams made up of two home bakers creating masterpieces for a panel of grannies who eventually name a winner by the series end. Yet, hosts Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg found more meaning in the competition than just great food and an ultimate champ at the end of it all.
When Rudolph and Samberg spoke with Mashed about the show and a few of their favorite holiday traditions, there was one facet of "Baking It" that came up that made them both particularly happy — and that was the fact that they got to spend some quality time together.
Amy Poehler brought the Baking It hosts together again
Busy careers and lives haven't allowed Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg to spend as much time together as they did on the "Saturday Night Live" set; they only appeared in two seasons together, per ET Online. So the friends were more than happy to step out of their typical casting work to be a part of "Baking It" on Peacock.
"Being reunited was a joy," Rudolph said to Mashed. Samberg felt the same way: "Yeah, it was awesome. For me ... being asked by Amy [Poehler] and [being] told I would be working with Maya was kind of the whole reason I wanted to do it. And it turned out to be the right call, 'cause we hung out for a lot of time and caught up and it was really fun," he said. The show takes place on the set of the DIY series "Making It," which Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman host together. But because it's that duo's "off-season," Poehler set up the premise of "Baking It" by pretending to go on vacation and asking Rudolph and Samberg to watch the cabin for her.
Because Poehler knows just how much fun it can be to work with a former co-star on a set like this, inviting Rudolph and Samberg to do the same was something of a holiday gift to the co-hosts, too. "Amy's so smart in that way, because of her work on 'Making It,' she knows that it's a time where she gets to work with a friend that she loves and she finds [there] to be just enjoyment in the creative [process] with someone that you know so well," Rudolph said. "So she really set us up for nothing but joy."
Stream all six episodes of "Baking It" on Peacock now.