Catherine Zhang: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Catherine Zhang won season 2 of Zumbo's Just Desserts.

When Zumbo's Just Desserts returned for its second season in November 2019, the field of ten dessert makers included a 19-year-old who looked like the youngest person in the room because she was. Catherine Zhang went on to win the whole thing, surviving the Zumbo Tests and beating runner-up Simon in the final. She has since built one of the most successful post-show careers of any Australian baking champion. Here is where she is now.

The win

Zhang took the season 2 title at Adriano Zumbo's dessert factory, a result that made her victory one of the show's best stories: an amateur barely out of her teens outlasting older and more experienced competitors in a format specifically designed to break people on technique. The season later reached a global audience on Netflix, which is where most international fans discovered her.

From champion to full-time creator

Rather than opening a shop, Zhang went digital. She built her recipe site, zhangcatherine.com, into a serious dessert destination, focused on the East-meets-West flavors that defined her run on the show: mochi, matcha, ube, yuzu, and other Asian-inspired bakes given classic pastry treatment. By her own site's accounting, the audience grew into the hundreds of thousands, with over 700,000 Instagram followers, around 800,000 on TikTok, and a large YouTube and Pinterest presence on top. Among Zumbo alumni, nobody else comes close to that reach.

The cookbook

In late 2022, Zhang published Mochi, Cakes and Bakes, a cookbook of 60 desserts fusing flavors like ube, lychee, hojicha, and miso with familiar formats like macarons, tiramisu, and palmiers. It is exactly the book you would expect from her feed, approachable technique with flavors most Western baking books skip, and it cemented her transition from reality show winner to food author. She has supplemented it with digital recipe collections, including a mochi ebook for her online audience.

Where things stand now

Zhang today is a full-time recipe developer and content creator, and her win has aged into a footnote on a career that no longer needs it. That is the healthiest possible outcome for a competition alum: the show opened the door, and the work she published afterward is what people actually follow her for. Some coverage has mentioned additional food ventures beyond her creator business, but her site and book remain the well-documented core of what she does.

She is also half of a neat trivia answer, since the show crowned only two champions before ending. For the other half of that answer, and the full story of both seasons at the dessert factory, our Zumbo's Just Desserts guide covers the run, and the season records live on the show hub.