When it comes to picking her favorite pop culture icons, E has been dragged along with her brothers to everything Avenger and Star Wars. It’s not a surprise that when she picked a princess to be for Halloween it was Princess Leia and that she was Spider-Man one year.

E was the only one who wasn’t disappointed when Frozen turned out to be a princess movie, and not, as we thought, about a snowman and a reindeer. That trailer had us all fooled. By the time she was entering her “cartoon phase,” the Wonderful Husband and I were so over Caillou that whatever she wanted to watch, we were fine with as long as we didn’t have to watch it with her.

Then for a while she was into the 800 or so interchangeable preteen dramedies on the Disney Channel. The only thing I took away from that was the catch phrase “Hey Jessie!”

I do have to admit, I was a little captivated by the whole Descendants saga, but, once you see the movies once, they don’t exactly hold up to repeated adult viewing.

While we can agree on a few of the Disney princess movies, she’s much more into Anna and I’m much more into Belle. So, for a long time, it seemed like sitting on opposite ends of the couch, watching our own movies on our tablets was destined to be how we spent a lazy afternoon. Until E found the baking shows on Netflix.

The first one she found was “Sugar Rush.” Finally, something we could bond over. We love spending time in the kitchen, baking cookies, cakes, brownies and other treats. Watching a competitive baking show that was based on cupcakes was something we could watch together!

The premise behind “Sugar Rush” is a competition between teams of professional bakers to create three things, sharing some kind of theme: the first usually being a cupcake, the second some sort of confection, and the final challenge, an elaborate cake. The winners take home a $10,000 prize.

The teams usually consisted of co-workers or business partners or spouses. By the end of the show, you were usually able to figure out who was the business brains and who was the creative talent. The success of the projects usually depends on how well these teams can perform under pressure. The internal squabbles are just as much fun to watch as is the evolution of the elaborate baked items, which presumably taste as good as they look.

Along the way, we get introduced to elaborate ingredients and learn little tips and tricks that we can incorporate into our own baking fun. This is a fun show and it didn’t take us long to devour the two short seasons that are currently available. Along the way, we argued about why we liked different cakes or laughed about how silly some people could be. We also compiled a list of things we wanted to try to make ourselves.

After we ran out of Sugar Rush episodes, E tried to get me to watch “Nailed It!” The premise behind “Nailed It!” was also a competitive baking show with a $10,000 prize at the end. Only this time, the producers scoured the ends of the earth to find people who billed themselves as “amateur” bakers. E and I agree that most of these people have probably never seen the inside of a kitchen, and that’s about as far as we get agreeing on anything in this show.

Each contestant gets an elaborate treat and needs to replicate it. There are two levels of challenge, the first usually being something fairly simple like a decorated cookie or cupcake. The second level is something more elaborate, usually a fancy cake. The contestants are provided with a recipe and turned loose in the kitchen.

During one recent episode, a novice baker made the comment that she’d learned the hard way that eggs had to come out of their shells before they went into the mixer. Most of the other comments from the “bakers” are along those lines. I find this show physically painful to watch. E finds it hilarious. I suppose it’s because her 9-year-old baking skills far exceed those of most of the contestants.

I’m struggling with the two contests being equal in prize money. For one thing, the team must share the prize, and these contestants are truly talented. In “Nailed It!” they just have to be the least bad at what they’re trying to do. Most of the recipes start off with “4 cups of cake mix.”

At any rate, E and I have finally found our common ground in pop culture: cheesy baking shows. I still prefer the hours that we spend together actually baking in the kitchen and poring over recipe books together, but since we can only eat so many treats, this is a good substitute. Unlike PAM, which one “Nailed It!” contestant tried to use to stick two cupcakes together, instead of butter cream frosting, like the recipe directed.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.