'They are afraid of me': Mastermind speedrunner bends the rules of a meme contest and bakes 12 actual cookies in under 4 minutes, forces site mods to make a whole new category

pcgamer.com:

There's a rule you'll have likely observed if you've been on the internet long enough—namely, if someone starts to do something as a joke, it's only a matter of time before it's taken very seriously. 

Well, it's happened again—there is now a shockingly competitive, potentially fire-hazardous any% speedrun to bake 12 cookies. In real life.

The category initially started out on speedrun.com as a sub-category on Cookie Clicker—a highly popular web browser game that helped popularise the idle game genre back in 2013. However, in response to the runner we're concerned with here, the category had to be shut down and reopened—requiring the creation of «an entire IRL section for all IRL speedruns … thus moving forward, all IRL Cookie Baking speedruns will be submitted in the IRL section.»

In case you're wondering how this sort of thing is moderated—for example, what constitutes a 'done' cookie—there's a google doc outlining the fresh Cookie Baking Ruleset. I'll summarise the requirements:

Competitors must not use electrical mixing appliances, convection ovens, or microwaves to bake their cookies. There's also a list of speedrun-sanctioned tools available—in which «hands» is included. 

Each cookie has to be «as close to a circle as possible», and at least 3 inches in diameter. Your batch has to be cooked, both «internally and externally,» and «edible»—so you can't just flash-burn stuff to a carbonised crisp. In terms of prep, contestants are allowed to array their ingredients as they choose and pre-open them, but they must remain in their original packaging.

There's also an ingredients list, which might be the first time in history that a recipe is pulling double-duty as a ruleset, outside of hyper-specific cooking shows.

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The run itself started out humble enough. If you look at the leaderboards, you'll notice that most times—mostly performed around three years ago—lie at