Adam Monette: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Adam Monette won his season of the Holiday Baking Championship.

Adam Monette is one of the more quietly grounded champions to come out of Food Network's Holiday Baking Championship. He won season 8, which ran from November 1 to December 20, 2021, a baker and educator from St. Albans, Vermont who was already teaching the craft for a living when he stepped into the holiday tent. Here is what the record shows about his run and where the trail leads since.

The win

Monette took the title on the December 20, 2021 finale, beating a field of twelve bakers for the $25,000 grand prize and a feature in Food Network Magazine. His clinching showpiece was a "gift wrapping party" cake layered with chocolate and peanut butter icing that, according to local coverage of the win by WCAX and the St. Albans Messenger, actually incorporated real working holiday lights. It was the kind of technical swing that reads well on a finale, and it paid off.

The baker behind the win

Unlike the home bakers who arrive on these shows as amateurs, Monette came in with a professional foundation. Local reporting at the time of his win noted that he trained at the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier and had worked in high end hotels, inns, and restaurants across Vermont and New Hampshire before moving into teaching. By the time he competed, he was a culinary instructor at the Northwest Career and Technical Center in St. Albans, where coverage described him teaching food service, baking and pastry, and restaurant management in the culinary arts program.

Where things stand now

Monette's public footprint is centered on that teaching career rather than on a splashy media run, and that is worth stating plainly. As of the reporting around his 2021 win, he was an instructor at the Northwest Career and Technical Center, and he framed the show as a chance to bring attention to his students and his program rather than as a launchpad into television. Detailed public updates in the years since the win are limited, which is common for winners who go back to steady work rather than chasing more screen time. What is well documented is the win itself, the prize, and the classroom he returned to.

If you are trying to place him among the other champions of the show, the full run of names lives in our guide to every Holiday Baking Championship winner, and a useful contrast is Dru Tevis, the season 9 professional pastry chef who won the year after Monette.

The takeaway for fans

Monette's story is a reminder that not every baking champion is angling for a cookbook deal and a show of their own. Some are working teachers who take the trophy home, hang it in the shop, and go back to the students who watched them win. The layered cakes he built on the show start with the same basics anyone can practice at home, and a set of dependable cake pans is where most of that work begins. For more on the franchise he won, the Holiday Baking Championship hub collects the seasons in one place.