At this point, Melanie Bjork-Jensen isn’t allowed to reveal much about competing on Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship.”
The baker from West Jordan, Utah, is one of 10 competitors featured on the newest season, which premieres Monday night. Over seven episodes, the Halloween-loving bakers put their skills to the test as they face challenges and time crunches in a spooky mansion.
Bjork-Jensen can’t divulge how far she makes it in the competition — or if she made it all the way to the end and claimed the show’s $25,000 prize — but she can share this much: She has a meltdown.
She’s confident she can share this because her meltdown has already been featured prominently in a trailer for the season premiere.
“Everything went bad,” she told the Deseret News on a recent Zoom call.
The meltdown
Bjork-Jensen knew early on things weren’t going to be great when she wound up having to use a pear for her featured fruit in the season premiere dessert challenge.
To say she’s not a fan of pears is putting it mildly — and she’ll go on a diatribe to back that up.
“I hate pears with a passion,” she said. “I am passionately anti-pear.
“It just tastes like sandy water, and they’re stupid,” she continued. “You call somebody pear-shaped, they cry. If things have gone pear-shaped, everything has gone wrong. And I have to make this into a treat? I panicked.”
The pear immediately got the best of her — she accidentally cut herself and drew blood.
From there, amid the stress of the lights and cameras, the chaos intensified: Her cake batter didn’t have the right look, and her buttercream didn’t have the right smell.
Another significant complication: After being diagnosed with spindle cell oncocytoma, a form of brain cancer that was slowly growing on her pituitary gland and led to another diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease in 2021, Bjork-Jensen now maintains a gluten-free diet.
So she can’t really taste her own cakes (she’ll sometimes take little bites and then spit them out).
In the “Halloween Baking Championship” season premiere, it took only a small bite for Bjork-Jensen to figure out the problem with her cake: She had forgotten the sugar.
And, as she says in the trailer, she didn’t have enough time to bake it again.
It was at this point Bjork-Jensen fell to the floor in her self-described “meltdown,” needing a moment to regroup.
“I lost my mind,” she said. “I chose to stare at the ceiling with my emotional support tasting spoon, and then this big camera went right over my face and started zooming down. And then I decided my meltdown was done and I would just stand up.”
Monday night’s episode will reveal if Bjork-Jensen moves past the meltdown and advances to the next episode (one baker gets eliminated).
But no matter the outcome, competing on “Halloween Baking Championship” has been a treat years in the making for Bjork-Jensen, a single mom of two who works two full-time nursing jobs and doesn’t often get to do something for her own enjoyment.
A case of imposter syndrome
Bjork-Jensen actually applied to be on “Halloween Baking Championship” a few years ago but withdrew from the process because she was going through a divorce.
Food Network kept her application and, to her surprise, contacted her last year about being on the show.
“It was a way better time,” the Utah baker said.
The application process included a number of interviews and baking challenges, and took about a year to complete.
Producers want to be sure the contestants are a good fit for the show’s Halloween theme, and Bjork-Jensen — who has skulls on her bathroom wallpaper and a skeleton named Cam hanging above her living room mantle — said she passed that portion of the application with flying colors.
“I have too much of a stomach for the gore,” she said with a laugh, noting how her nursing jobs (one in hospice and the other in labor and delivery) have equipped her with stories that often make her friends and family a bit queasy.
When she finally made it on the show and arrived on set, Bjork-Jensen, a self-taught baker who learned the art of making wedding cakes primarily through watching videos on YouTube, said she had a case of imposter syndrome.
Although she’s had an at-home cake business since 2015, which she initially started to help pay her way through nursing school, Bjork-Jensen doubted she belonged on the show once she met her fellow competitors.
“Every single moment I thought, ‘OK, they’re going to realize that I am not supposed to be here, and they’re going to send me home, so I’m just going to enjoy being here while I can.’ That was just in my head the whole time: ‘Just soak this in. Soak this in.’”
Filming on set felt “completely otherworldly,” Bjork-Jensen said, like she had been dropped into a different universe.
“And then you get plopped back out here in the real world, and you’re not allowed to talk about it, and it feels like a fever dream,” she said. “I’m not even 100% sure that it actually happened.”
But there’s a group chat that reminds Bjork-Jensen she did in fact compete on “Halloween Baking Championship.” She regularly keeps in touch with her fellow competitors and calls them her “forever friends.”
The biggest reminder that she did actually compete on the show, though — aside from the trailer that prominently highlights her meltdown — is her own self-growth.
‘I’m so proud of myself’
Bjork-Jensen has a tattoo on her arm that reads, “I’m worth the effort it takes to be happy.”
“I put it there so I can remember, but I forget all the time,” she said. “My inner voices are not nice to me, and it’s been that way since I was a little kid. Mental health is a thing.”
As a mom of two, ages 10 and 8, Bjork-Jensen’s focus is providing for her kids. The whole reason she got into baking to begin with was to pay for nursing school, and to be able to make her kids’ birthday cakes.
And as a nurse — Bjork-Jensen is currently taking online classes to further her nursing degree — her focus is providing care to her patients.
The busy schedule doesn’t leave Bjork-Jensen with much time to focus on herself. Being on “Halloween Baking Championship,” she said, “was like getting dunked into 10 years of therapy.”
“I was able to recognize eventually that I am worth this effort to be here, and I’m good at things, too,” she said. “I was just so proud to realize that it’s OK for me to do things that are just for me — because nobody benefited from me being on the show except for me.
“I’m so proud of myself — which I don’t say ever — for doing something that was just for me,” she continued. “To feel like that was OK took a while. I’m just so proud of myself.”
Season 11 of “Halloween Baking Championship” premieres Monday at 10 p.m. MDT on Food Network. Episodes are available for streaming the following day on HBO Max.