A trio of Edmonton-area bakers is set to be featured on televisions across the country this fall as a cake-making team on Season 2 of Food Network Canada‘s The Big Bake: Halloween show.
Andrea Brousseau and Danielle Power, both bakers at Sherwood Park’s Confetti Sweets, and Marilou Honrado of Edmonton’s Cloud Cakes by Auntie Lou make up the trio.
“We actually were approached on social media by a casting company to be on the show,” Power said. “We submitted our application, we did some Zoom interviews… and in the beginning of January this year, we were selected to be on the show.”
The three travelled to Toronto to compete in the show, which challenges teams of three bakers to create big, bold cakes with a Halloween twist. The winner with the most ambitious and delicious cake goes home with a $10,000 prize.
The bakers were delighted when they found out the competition would be Halloween-themed.
“We’re all huge fans of Halloween, so it came naturally to us to do something spooky,” said Brousseau. “So that was a really fun opportunity for us, to do something we were passionate about and really get behind.”
The teams are sworn to secrecy about what happened on the show, but did say the experience was like nothing else in their baking career so far.
“It gets very messy,” Power said. “We were very messy at the end of it.
“We had icing pretty much from head to toe.”
“It goes by really fast,” Brousseau said.
The pair also noted it was hard at first to get used to being on a reality program, but once they got focused there wasn’t much time to think about anything other than the project at hand.
“You’re just putting your head down and baking, and doing what you know needs to get done and trying not to look at the clock but sneaking a look at it every once in a while,” Power said.
“They give you a tour of the kitchen and the set beforehand — but just to figure out where everything was, what we needed, where we were each going to work. But after about an hour or so we kind of got in our groove, and the cameras were just there,” Power said.
“They moved with you, they followed you, they just kind of made it all work.”
Confetti Sweets made headlines in 2015 when its cookies were featured at the Oscars in Hollywood. The bakery was invited back again to supply cookies for the awards in 2016.
The episode that features Brousseau, Power and Honrado will air on The Food Network on Sept. 27 at 7 p.m. MT.
You can also watch the episode once it is released using the new Global TV app.
–With files from Moises Canales-Lavigne, Global News