Melanie Bjork-Jensen can sum up her debut on Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship” in three words: “Everything went bad.”
The baker from West Jordan, Utah, knew early on things weren’t going to go great when she wound up having to use a pear for her featured fruit in the season premiere dessert challenge (she really doesn’t like pears).
She hated pears even more after she accidentally cut herself and drew blood.
And the chaos didn’t end there.
Her cake batter didn’t have the right look, and her buttercream didn’t have the right smell. It didn’t take long for her to figure out the problem: She had forgotten the sugar.
It was at this point Bjork-Jensen fell to the floor in her self-described “meltdown,” which is featured prominently in a teaser for the season premiere.
“I lost my mind,” she previously told the Deseret News. “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.”
To her genuine surprise, Bjork-Jensen advanced past the first round of the competition. And the second. And the third.
Now, the Utah baker is one of four bakers competing for the $25,000 prize in the season finale, which airs on Food Network Monday night.
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.
‘I’m so proud of myself’
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,” Bjork-Jensen said.
The baker believes she’s a good fit for “Halloween Baking Championship,” citing 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.
“I have too much of a stomach for the gore,” she previously told the Deseret News.
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.
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.”