Spring Baking Championship: Who Won Each Season?

Spoiler note: this post names the winner of every Spring Baking Championship season.

Spring Baking Championship is Food Network's pastel-and-flowers answer to the tent, running every spring since 2015, with challenges themed around Easter, garden parties, and warm-weather entertaining. Below is the complete list of champions, pulled from our Spring Baking Championship show record, where every winner is verified against a cited source, followed by what the best-documented winners have done since.

Every Spring Baking Championship winner

A franchise that keeps casting north of the border

Two of the last two champions, Steven Tran and Priya Winsor, both came from Canada rather than the United States, a pattern that shows up across Food Network's whole baking championship lineup as casting has widened its net in recent seasons, the same trend that shows up in the Holiday Baking Championship's own most recent winner. Season 1 winner Andy Chlebana is also worth knowing: he came in as a trained pastry chef and instructor, and his win helped set the template for a franchise that regularly mixes credentialed professionals with talented amateurs in the same bracket.

Who runs the show

The host chair has rotated more than the judging panel has: Bobby Deen opened the show in seasons 1 and 2, Ali Khan and Clinton Kelly split hosting duties through the show's middle seasons, Molly Yeh took a turn in season 8, and Jesse Palmer, who first hosted back in season 3, has held the job since season 9. The judging panel, meanwhile, has centered on Nancy Fuller and Duff Goldman throughout, both of whom also anchor the Holiday Baking Championship panel, giving the two shows a shared identity beyond the format alone. The third judging chair has rotated through several pastry professionals over the years, refreshing the panel's perspective season to season.

What the challenges actually look like

Spring Baking Championship leans into its season the way its siblings do into theirs. Preheat challenges tend to riff on Easter and Mother's Day themes early in a season's run, while main heat challenges push toward garden-party centerpieces, layered cakes with fresh floral decoration, and lighter, brighter flavor profiles than the show's autumn and winter counterparts ask for. Contestants are scored on the same two axes as the rest of the franchise, taste and technique, but the visual bar for a spring-themed showstopper tends to run higher than a typical weekly signature bake, since so much of the round's brief is built around presentation.

The finale is almost always a wedding-cake or celebration-cake brief, which is why so many champions' final showpieces look alike on paper: Andy Chlebana closed season 1 with a wedding cake, Jaleesa Mason took season 8 with a spring wedding cake, and Cory Barrett won season 5 with a cake and gift box.

The prize

Like the rest of Food Network's baking championship franchise, Spring Baking Championship pays its winner $25,000 rather than the larger purses offered by some competing formats. Cory Barrett's 2019 win is documented at that figure. ScreenRant's roundup of Spring champions reported the inaugural season carrying a top prize on the higher end of the franchise's range, so the very first season may not have matched the number the show later settled on. The consistency of the $25,000 figure across Holiday, Halloween, Kids, and Spring Baking Championship in the years since is one more sign of how tightly these four shows share a production template, right down to the trophy and the studio kitchen they're filmed in.

Where the champions are now

The winners' list above is the record. What the winners did with it varies more than the show's format does, and four of them have trails clear enough to follow.

Andy Chlebana, season 1 (2015)

Chlebana was the very first winner of the show, taking the inaugural season, which ran from April 26 to May 31, 2015, and closing out the run with a wedding cake as his final showpiece. A pastry chef and educator from Plainfield, Illinois, he came in as a working professional rather than a gifted amateur, and winning the first season made him the original benchmark for the franchise.

He is a professor and pastry chef at Joliet Junior College, and teaching has been the spine of his career for years. He is also an author, having written The Advanced Art of Baking and Pastry, a technical text used in culinary programs, and his competition pedigree already included being named the American Culinary Federation's National Pastry Chef of the Year in 2008, which marked him as an elite technician well before Food Network cameras found him.

His post win chapter is one of continued professional distinction. In August 2023, as reported by Shaw Local, he earned his Certified Master Pastry Chef credential, one of the most demanding certifications in American pastry, placing him among only about ten master pastry chefs in the United States at the time. He also represented the country as part of a Coupe du Monde Team USA effort in 2022. Through all of it he has stayed at Joliet Junior College, meaning his elite competition and certification work runs alongside a steady teaching career rather than replacing it. That makes him one of the most accomplished and clearly documented champions in the franchise, and his work rewards precision above all, which is what a good food scale is for.

Jane Soudah, season 2 (2016)

Soudah won the second season in 2016, taking the title in the finale that aired that May. A baker based in South Pasadena, California, she came to the show with real professional pastry experience rooted in the Los Angeles food scene, and she ran her own bakery brand, Sweet Jane's Bakeshop, around the time of and after her win.

The best-documented parts of her story are that bakery and her book. Sweet Jane's Bakeshop continued after the win, and she wrote a dessert cookbook, Delightful Desserts, focused on getting big flavor into sweet treats. She has also made lifestyle television appearances sharing recipes, including on a Hallmark daytime show, keeping a modest media presence built around her baking rather than a competition-circuit career.

The honest caveat is that her public profile has been relatively quiet in recent years, and the day-to-day status of the bakeshop is where the reliably verifiable trail thins out, so it would be guesswork to describe her current operations in detail. What is solid is the win, the cookbook, and the bakery brand she built around her own name. Her desserts are the approachable, flavor-forward kind that reward good basics, so a reliable hand mixer and a solid baking sheet cover most of what her recipes ask for.

Cory Barrett, season 5 (2019)

Barrett won season 5, which ran from March 18 to May 6, 2019, as a culinary instructor out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, earning the $25,000 grand prize with a cake and gift box as his final showpiece. Local coverage from Kalamazoo outlets, including WWMT and WRKR, documented the win and his reaction to it, and his victory was framed locally as a hometown win for a working teacher.

Education has anchored his career. He is a culinary instructor at Kalamazoo Valley Community College and a graduate of Baker College's Culinary Institute of Michigan, where he taught before joining Kalamazoo Valley in 2017. That classroom foundation is central to how he presented himself around the win: a teacher first, competing to represent his program and his students.

Beyond the teaching, ScreenRant's roundup of Spring champions reported that Barrett launched his own consulting business, Chef Cory Barrett Consulting, after the win, and that he was opening a restaurant, described as Barrett's Midwest Bistro. Those developments come from that reporting rather than from primary sources, so they are worth treating as reported rather than fully confirmed, and the exact current status of the restaurant is not something to overstate. What is solid is the championship, the ongoing teaching role, and the consulting venture built around his name. Like Chlebana, he is a teacher champion: someone who wins a national title and pours it back into a classroom rather than chasing a television career.

Jaleesa Mason, season 8 (2022)

Mason won the eighth season in 2022, taking the title in the finale that aired on 2 May with a spring wedding cake. A pastry chef from Bloomfield, New Jersey, she came to the show as a working professional rather than a hobbyist, already running a bakery in Little Falls, New Jersey, with her husband, Mohamad. That meant the $25,000 win and the exposure that came with it landed on an existing business rather than launching one from scratch.

The clearest, best-documented part of her story is that bakery. Coverage of her win described her as co-owner and pastry chef of Mo and Jay Pastry on Main Street in Little Falls, and reported that the shop saw a jump in foot traffic and sales after the show aired. She spoke at the time about ambitions to expand, including a larger commissary kitchen and potentially a second location down the line. Her husband was later featured as a contestant on another Food Network competition in 2023, keeping the family on the network's radar.

The main honest caveat is the ordinary one for any small business, that expansion plans can change, so the safest framing is that Mo and Jay Pastry in Little Falls is the well-documented centre of her working life since the win. Her bakery work spans wedding cakes and fine pastry, the kind of baking that leans on a springform pan and a full set of cake decorating tools.

The rest of the field

Two more champions have documented post-show businesses: Keya Wingfield built a dessert business in Richmond after her season 7 win, and Jordan Pilarski went into resort pastry after taking season 3.

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Spring Baking Championship is one season in Food Network's larger baking-championship calendar. The winter counterpart crowns its own champions in the Holiday Baking Championship, the fright-themed sibling is covered in Halloween Baking Championship winners, and the youngest bakers get their own bracket in the Kids Baking Championship winners list. If the season's pastel showstoppers have you wanting to bake something of your own, a springform pan and a couple of well-shaped cake pans cover most of what the show's judges actually ask contestants to build.