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Bakers from one of Sherwood Park’s favourite sweet shops will soon find themselves on the small screen.
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Danielle Power and Andrea Brousseau, as well as Marilou Honrado of Edmonton’s Cloud Cakes, will be featured in a September episode of the Food Network Canada’s competitive baking series The Big Bake.
It’s been a big secret that staff at the local bakery has been dying to share for months.
“All of our customers are so excited to watch it. Of course, everyone is asking if we won, and we can’t give that away, so they’ll have to watch to find out,” Power said. “All of our families have known since they’ve been a part of it for months. Everyone who is a part of our support system is super excited.”
The episode will air on Sept. 27 at 6 p.m. MT.
Last December, Honrado was approached by the TV show’s production team about competition, but required to field a team of three people, she reached out to Confetti Sweets, as the two shops have a strong business partnership.
In January, the team was told they were officially accepted for the show, and they were scheduled to fly to Toronto to shoot. However, filming was halted by COVID.
Power noted it was an emotional up and down.
“We were planning to be there for six days; the first few days after testing was quarantining ahead of the filming day, but on the second day of quarantining, we found out there was a small outbreak of COVID on set and they were shutting down production. At that moment, it was indefinitely. Then we flew back to Edmonton. A few days after that, we got the call that production was going to go ahead with proper COVID protocols, and we flew back on Feb. 15.”
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Facing off against two other teams, competitors were told what the theme of the episode was the morning of filming: Halloween.
Power said that theme gave them a lot of creative freedoms.
“It was actually a theme that the three of us really enjoy. All of us enjoy that holiday, so we lucked out,” she said.
Before the trio went to Toronto, they spent about four days together baking and casually decorating cakes to discover what each other’s strengths were.
“We practiced stacking and tiers since we knew they would want something very big and very wide. We practiced making very sturdy internal structures and we practiced making cakes in different shapes so we would be prepared for whatever they threw at us,” Power explained.
Having signed NDAs, competitors can’t talk about the cakes they created, not even the flavour. All they can say is it was very big and they had five hours to construct it.
“The blood definitely started pumping as soon as the cameras started rolling,” Power said, adding the filming day was long from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. because it also included pre and post-interviews.
Big cakes, big drama
Power actually had to learn how to use a power tool.
“The name of the show is ‘The Big Bake’, so they want big cakes and big elements, things like fog machines, water fountains, fire, and moving parts, and you also need a sturdy base of the cake. So I learned how to drill holes,” she said.
Power doesn’t expect to replicate the same cake again in the Park, estimating the cake likely costs between $5,000 to $7,500.
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“If a client requested it, I would ask why and ask if they could scale it down,” she noted.
To commemorate the experience, the three bakers got a small tattoo of a pumpkin on their arms when they came back to Alberta.
The winning team on the episode will win a $10,000 prize.
Having recently dipped into baking cakes before the TV show opportunity, Kathy Leskow, owner of Confetti Sweets, said this opportunity puts their business on the map.
“For me, it solidifies the talent that we have in our kitchen, that we’re not just this little cookie company, that we have bakers who can compete nationally and who can make some extremely extravagant creations,” Leskow said.
Confetti Sweets hopes their TV debut will create a boost in sales and create more name recognition.
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