Over the last six weeks, TV viewers have watched Utah’s own Melanie Bjork-Jensen create creepy-looking cakes and other treats as she fought to make the finale of the Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship.”
As the show prepares to air its last episode, the nurse from West Jordan with a wedding cake business on the side said she faced something more terrifying than spiders or ghosts or Pennywise the clown.
“Imposter syndrome was the theme the whole time I was there,” Bjork-Jensen said in a Zoom interview Wednesday, before the reality-competition show’s season 11 finale aired on Monday. (Update: Bjork-Jensen won the final, and the $25,000 prize, with a chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake that was inspired by the fear of being crushed to death.)
After trying to figure out how to make a living in Utah with a degree in interior design, Bjork-Jensen said she changed course, watching YouTube videos and teaching herself to bake.
“Then I pivoted into wedding cakes,” she said, “because that’s something that’s a little more marketable in Utah.”
She quickly found that baking custom cakes though her business, Cakes By Melanie, worked with her idiosyncratic nature. “I love it when brides that I work with want to be weird,” she said. “I love a weird bride.”
One of her weirdest jobs, Bjork-Jensen said, came from a client whose wedding had a “Star Wars” and “Jurassic Park” theme. The cake reflected both, with the bride and groom wearing Jedi robes and the officiant in an inflatable dinosaur costume.
Her gigs ultimately paid for nursing school, she said. She now works full-time as a nurse, both in hospice care and in labor and delivery.
“I get to be part of birth, which is such an honor and such an amazing experience,” Bjork-Jensen said.
“Then I get to do wedding cakes, so there’s a big central part of your life. And then, getting to be a part of hospice, I get to make sure the family is OK” at the end, she said. “It’s emotionally draining. … I cry in my car quite a bit, but I am just so honored to get to just be a witness to these really special moments.”
(Food Network) Salt Lake City baker Melanie Bjork-Jensen is one of the contestants on season 11 of Food Network's "Halloween Baking Championship." The finale is scheduled to air on Monday, Oct. 27, 2025.
Bjork-Jensen said she first applied online for the show years ago, “and completely forgot when I did it.” When producers initially reached out, she told them it was a bad time — because she was going through a divorce. “I thought that was the end of it, that I missed my chance,” she said.
Instead, the producers called her back a year later, and she was ready.
The casting process is rigorous, she said. There were many interviews, and Bjork-Jensen said they made her do a baking challenge over Zoom — so they could see her actually bake, rather than trust a set of Instagram posts.
She also had to learn to bake other things, because “I had to show that I couldn’t just do cake,” she said. “I had to start throwing out breads and macarons, just to see that I could do it.”
Why did she get picked? “One of the producers said after an interview that I was, and I quote, ‘a hoot,’” she said, “which is my new favorite thing, and I want to put it on a T-shirt.”
That came through in one of her early challenges, where Bjork-Jensen pulled three cake layers out of the oven but said they didn’t look right. Something was missing, and she soon realized what she left out: Sugar.
She reacted by lying on the kitchen floor for a moment, drawing the attention of her competitors.
Audience reaction, via social media, was swift. Some liked her talkative personality, while others thought she was faking that effusiveness.
“I learned that I am the human equivalent of cilantro, where there are no neutral feelings,” she said.
Bjork-Jensen has responded to some of her critics on Instagram, where she usually shows off her cakes. In one video post, inspired by the cue-card scene from “Love, Actually,” she said, “I’ve heard all your concerns about me on the show. I want you to know that, in your claims that I’m too much, I hear you. I’m just not listening.”
She plans to spend Monday night watching the “Halloween Baking Championship” finale with her two children and her parents. Her family will see, she said, how being on the Food Network has provided her with a massive dose of self-confidence.
“To push forward and feel slowly like I deserved to be there was like 10 years of therapy,” she said. “It was like being dipped into therapy, like a chocolate strawberry — just dipped into the trauma and come out therapized.”
The finale airs at 9 p.m. Eastern time (7 or 10 p.m. Mountain time, depending on where you watch the Food Network on cable or satellite TV).
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