Melanie Bjork-Jensen‘s time on Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship” started with a series of unfortunate events that led to her lying down on the floor in a self-described “meltdown.”
Her time on the show also ended on the floor.
But this time around, the tears were happy.
On Monday night, the baker from West Jordan, Utah, became the Season 11 champion and claimed the show’s $25,000 prize after wowing with a cake that actually moved the judges to tears.
Utah baker Melanie Bjork-Jensen wins ‘Halloween Baking Championship’
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 previously told the Deseret News. “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.”
The Utah baker decided to lean into that concept for her final challenge in the competition.
The “Bake for your afterlife” challenge tasked Bjork-Jensen with creating a cake that depicts being crushed to death.
Although her two-tier, black Victorian-style Lambeth cake did feature a little gore — namely some blood and a hand trying to push the cake up — the crushing came not from an external source, but from a message written in bright red at the top: “You are not enough.”
Bjork-Jensen got emotional as she shared with the judges how she’s been crushed by self-doubt throughout her life, believing she was deserving of major trials, including brain cancer and divorce.
“The stories that you’ve told us with your food have been incredible,” pastry chef Zac Young said with emotion. “It’s just been incredible to watch, and even more incredible to eat.”
Bjork-Jensen’s chocolate peanut butter cake — one of her most popular wedding cakes, she said — won the judges over and beat out her fellow finalists from North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Mirroring her start on the show, the Utah baker broke down in tears and fell to the floor as the judges declared her the Season 11 winner of “Halloween Baking Championship.”
‘I’m so proud of myself’
Competing on “Halloween Baking Championship” was 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.
She 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,” Bjork-Jensen previously told the Deseret News.
The baker believes she was a good fit for “Halloween Baking Championship,” citing how her nursing jobs (one in hospice and the other in labor and delivery) equipped her with stories that often make her friends and family a bit queasy.
“I have too much of a stomach for the gore,” she said.
Once she got on set, though, the 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 after meeting 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,’” she said.
But that didn’t happen.
And slowly, throughout the course of the show, Bjork-Jensen began to believe she did in fact belong in the competition. As a busy mom of two who doesn’t get a lot of time for herself, being a part of “Halloween Baking Championship,” she said, “was like getting dunked into 10 years of therapy.”
“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,” she previously told the Deseret News.
“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.”