Most bake-offs actually happen as fundraisers: school events, charity days, county fairs, community groups. That’s the .org reading and it’s where the volume is. The word is a format rather than a description. Competition baking became one of the most durable formats in television and one of the most reliable ways to get a community to turn up for an event. It has a second life in technology, where a bake-off is a head-to-head comparison of competing products or standards, run formally by engineering organisations.