CANMORE— Helping ring-in the most wonderful time of the year, a local baker appeared on the Food Network television show The Big Bake Holiday at the beginning of November.
Darci Weil, owner of KAKE by Darci, teamed up with Tracy Irwin, owner of Sugar by Tracy in Penhold, Alta. and Bo Hons owner of WolfBay Café, to compete for a $10,000 prize. While they didn't end up winning the competition, it was a great experience for all involved.
“I was actually dragged into being a competitor,” Weil said with a laugh. “My friend Tracy called me up one day and said, ‘I’ve submitted us into this contest and we just got accepted.’ ”
The team was able to meet up three times before travelling to compete in the bake-off in Toronto.
“It was a long day,” she said. “It was a blur — everything was just crazy."
The Big Bake proved challenging because they had five hours to create a one-of-a-kind cake.
It was a tight time crunch, Weil said with a grin.
The festive baking competition features three teams racing to create extravagant cakes with all the holiday fixings stood more than five feet tall and boasted decorations ranging from Santa and his elves to polar bears, the Abominable Snowmonster of the North and more, paired with incredible special effects.
It was an incredible test of her abilities, Weil said, because her team was creating cakes alongside some of the best bakers in the country.
The team had a solid plan going into the bake-off and this helped ensure they were prepared to get to work, she said, but it was still an extremely nerve-wracking competition.
Weil specializes in creating unique wedding cakes, during the summer months it can be up to 20 a week, she said, and The Big Bake was a more stressful experience.
“My style of cake is not really the same as what the TV show competitions are looking for,” she said. “I am a machine, I just output a lot of things and I can get a lot done.”
Irwin built the team based on bringing diverse strengths to the table, Weil said, explaining that she focussed on finding teammates who could complement each other’s workflow and abilities.
“Tracy [Irwin] does more of design aspects. She’s really good with moulding and detailing — really artistic things,” Weil said. “Bo [Hons] is really good with details.”
As high pressure as the competition was, Weil said, she would compete again in a heartbeat.
“It’s a really crazy piece that we put out. We put a lot of time into our special effects on our cake — we were all machines and we put out as much work as we could,” Weil said. “If you want to see a team giving their all, it will be worth seeing.”
