Halloween Baking Championship: The Full Fan Guide

Every autumn, while the Holiday Baking Championship warms up in the wings, Food Network hands its studio kitchen over to fog machines, fake cobwebs, and bakers who can make a cake bleed on command. The Halloween Baking Championship is the spooky branch of the network's baking-championship franchise, and it has quietly become one of the most fun entries in the whole genre. Here is how it works, who runs it, where its champions ended up, and what else to watch once you are hooked. The complete season record, with every verified winner, lives on our show hub.

The format

The bones are the same as the other Food Network championships. A bracket of bakers (a mix of professionals and skilled home bakers) faces themed elimination rounds until one champion remains. Most episodes run in two parts: a smaller opening challenge, then a main heat where the real damage is done and someone is sent home. The winner takes a $25,000 prize, and in recent years a feature in Food Network Magazine has come with it.

What sets the Halloween edition apart is the brief. Where the holiday version asks for cozy, this one asks for creepy: haunted houses in gingerbread, realistic severed-finger cookies, cakes that look like something out of a monster movie but taste like something out of a patisserie. The judges reward bakers who commit to the horror without letting flavor slide, and the best moments come when those two goals fight each other.

A show that kept growing

The series premiered on October 5, 2015 as a compact four-episode event and has aired every fall since. The season has stretched as the show found its audience: season two ran five episodes, season three was the first at six, and recent years run seven to eight, with 2025 marking the eleventh consecutive season. That longevity puts it in rare company among seasonal spinoffs, and it now anchors Food Network's October schedule alongside the rest of the network's Halloween programming.

Hosts and judges through the years

The hosting chair took a few seasons to settle. Richard Blais fronted the first season, comedian Jeff Dunham took the second, and John Henson arrived in season three and has hosted nearly every season since, with one notable exception: in 2020, judge Carla Hall pulled double duty and hosted season six herself.

The judging panel is where the show found its identity. Carla Hall has judged every single season, making her the one true constant of the series, and her early panels included names like Ron Ben-Israel, Sherry Yard, Sandra Lee, Damiano Carrara, Lorraine Pascale, and Katie Lee. Pastry chef Zac Young joined in season three and never left, and Stephanie Boswell completed the modern trio in season six. Since season seven the lineup has been locked: Henson hosting, with Hall, Young, and Boswell judging. That stability is a big part of why the show feels so comfortable in its own skin; the three judges have a genuine, well-worn rapport, and Young in particular treats the Halloween theme as a personal holiday.

The winners

Eleven seasons means eleven champions, from Rudy Martinez, the Queens home baker who took the very first title in 2015, to Melanie Bjork-Jensen of West Jordan, Utah, who won season eleven in 2025. The full list, with hometowns and air dates for every season, is in our roundup of every Halloween Baking Championship winner.

Where the champions are now

One of the more interesting things about this show is how little its winners resemble each other afterward. There is no single Halloween Baking Championship career path. Some opened storefronts within weeks; some went back to the job they already loved. Here is what the record shows for the champions whose post-show trails are well documented.

Rudy Martinez, season one (2015)

Martinez is the show's first champion, a self-taught home baker from Queens, New York who won the compact four-episode debut season in October 2015 and took the $25,000 prize. He sealed the title with a cinnamon cake with fig buttercream, and his win set a template the show has never abandoned: it has never cared whether your training came from a culinary school or a home kitchen.

At the time he ran a custom cake business, Man Bakes Cake, focused on custom celebration cakes, and reporting since confirms he has kept it going. The bigger surprise is what he added to it. In the years since the show, Martinez has poured increasing energy into performing, appearing in local theater productions including In the Heights and Our Town, and more recently starring in a production of Waitress, the musical set in a pie diner, in Arvada, Colorado. He marked the run by baking a series of creative pies. Coverage of his post-show life describes baking as one half of a life built around celebration rather than his sole focus, with pastry and performance sharing the billing. There is no widely documented brick-and-mortar bakery under his name and no hosting or cookbook deal; the custom cake business plus the stage appear to be the whole, rather happy, picture.

Michelle Antonishek, season two (2016)

Antonishek won the five-episode second season in October 2016 as a pastry chef from the small town of Cotulla, Texas. She clinched it in a finale fittingly named "Ginger Dead House," with a horror-movie take on the gingerbread house that included edible ghosts, faux flames, and what appeared to be a splatter of fake blood. It remains one of the more memorable finale showpieces of the early seasons, and it is the show's whole aesthetic in a single bake: technically sound pastry committed completely to the Halloween bit.

Where most reality champions use the exposure to launch something new, Antonishek returned to a post she had already held since 2013: executive pastry chef and lodge manager at Los Cuernos Ranch in South Texas. A decade-plus in one kitchen is its own kind of statement in an industry built on churn. She married in 2021 and now goes by Michelle Kortis, so her post-show trail appears under both names. Beyond the ranch role and the name change she keeps a low public profile, with no cookbook, no follow-up television run, and no widely documented personal bakery brand.

Jasmin Bell, season three (2017)

Bell took the third season in October 2017 as a pastry artist from Seattle, Washington. That season ran from the September 25 premiere to the October 30 finale and was the show's first at six episodes, as well as the first year of the John Henson hosting era, with Carla Hall, Lorraine Pascale, and Zac Young on the panel. Bell sealed the title with a light-up pumpkin cake, a showpiece that captured exactly what this show rewards: real engineering in service of the Halloween theme, backed by pastry that tastes as good as it photographs.

Her post-show story runs through her own business, Bells Pastries, in the Seattle area, which specializes in custom work with personality, colorful cookies, cakes, and macarons commissioned around themes from the reality show Survivor to Led Zeppelin. The business also runs baking classes, both private sessions and open group classes, which makes her one of the champions who turned television credibility into teaching as well as commissions. She married in 2018 and now goes by Jasmin Bell Smith, and she and her husband welcomed a daughter in early 2022. There is no documented follow-up competition run or national media project; the pattern is steadier than that, a working pastry artist whose local reputation a Food Network title only strengthened.

Lyndsy McDonald, season four (2018)

McDonald came into the competition with heavier credentials than most of the field: she was executive pastry chef at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Florida. Her win was less an underdog story than a professional confirming her rank on national television. She took the six-episode 2018 season, which ran from late September to the October 29 finale, in front of the era's panel of Carla Hall, Lorraine Pascale, and Zac Young with John Henson hosting, and left with $25,000 and a feature in Food Network Magazine. Local coverage in Sarasota treated her run as a hometown event from the moment she was cast, with Sarasota Magazine covering both her casting and her victory.

She got one notable television encore, appearing on Chocolate Meltdown: Hershey's After Dark, a Food Network chocolate competition, in 2021. That remains her most prominent post-championship credit. She now goes by her married name, Lyndsy Velasquez, and by her own public accounts is married and a self-described mama bear of three; one widely shared example of her home-kitchen work was the Paw Patrol cake she built for her son's birthday in 2022. Public documentation of her current professional role is thin, and the honest summary is a modest, mostly personal footprint: no cookbook, no bakery brand, one follow-up television appearance. Given she was already running a Ritz-Carlton pastry program when she won, she may simply have had less to prove than most.

Renee Loranger, season seven (2021)

Season seven ran from September 13 to October 25, 2021, and its champion arrived with the best comeback story the show has aired. Loranger, of Waveland, Mississippi, is entirely self-taught, trained on the job rather than in culinary school, and had worked her way up to executive pastry chef at the Hollywood Casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a role she earned in 2012. Then the spring of 2020 hit, the Coast casinos shut down, and she was let go. She entered the competition not as a professional with a kitchen behind her but as a laid-off chef with something to prove.

She proved it, taking the title and the $25,000 prize, with Mississippi outlets from Magnolia State Live to The Dispatch celebrating the hometown result. Then she put the win directly into bricks and mortar. By December 2021, barely two months after the finale aired, Gulf Coast station WLOX reported that Loranger had opened Sugar Pop Baking Company, a full-service bakery with custom cakes in Waveland, operating out of the town's Ground Zero Museum building. The win kept paying out beyond the shop: The Fresh Market grocery chain featured her in interviews and seasonal publications, running Bake Like a Champ features built around her recipes. Her public profile since has stayed modest and Waveland-sized, which fits everything about her. Unemployed pastry chef in 2020, champion in 2021, bakery owner by Christmas, and the franchise's cleanest before-and-after.

Hollie Fraser, season nine (2023)

Season nine ran from September 11 to October 30, 2023, and ended with a first for the franchise. Fraser, of Port Moody, British Columbia, became the show's first winner from outside the United States, every champion across the previous eight seasons having been American. Her finale bake was pure Halloween theater: a black peppercorn buttercream cookie set inside a no-bake cheesecake coffin with a bloody cherry center, which the judges memorably praised as "Gothic funeral realness." Coverage back home from the Burnaby Now and Tri-City News celebrated the Port Moody baker whose creepy concoctions had won big.

Her business is exactly what her show persona promised: she owns Punk Rock Pastries in Burnaby, British Columbia, a bakery whose name doubles as an aesthetic statement, and it stayed her home base after the win rather than becoming a stepping stone away from it. Since then she has built a modest media layer around the shop, running a YouTube channel called Baking with Hollie, posting across social platforms as @chefholliefraser, and offering personalized videos on Cameo. None of it reads as a bid for television stardom; it reads as a small business owner smartly extending a brand the show handed her.

What the champions have in common

Very little, which is the point. Across these six there is one bakery opened on the back of the prize money, one hotel pastry chef who went home to her kids, one ranch chef who never left her kitchen, one classically local shop owner who added a YouTube channel, one teacher of baking classes, and one champion who took up musical theater. The show does not manufacture careers the way Food Network Star does. It hands a working baker $25,000 and a credential, and what happens next is entirely up to them.

How to get into it

You do not need to start at season one. The early seasons are short and a little unpolished; the show really becomes itself once the Henson-Hall-Young-Boswell lineup locks in around season seven, so any recent season is a great entry point. Watch one finale (they are reliably the best episodes, since the showpiece briefs get gloriously unhinged) and you will know within twenty minutes whether this is your kind of October viewing. For most people who like baking shows even a little, it is.

What to watch alongside it

The Halloween Baking Championship is one part of a much larger competition-baking world, and three shows in particular pair well with it.

Halloween Wars

If the Halloween Baking Championship is a bake-off in costume, Halloween Wars is a monster-movie art department with a deadline. It has aired every October since 2011 and is Food Network's longest-running seasonal hit. The key difference is that it is not a solo competition: each team is built from different disciplines working one display, classically a cake artist, a sugar artist, and a pumpkin carver, with some recent seasons folding in specialties like chocolate work. That mix is the engine of the drama, because cake needs structure, pulled sugar shatters if you breathe on it, and a five-hundred-pound pumpkin does not care about your plans.

Five or more teams start a season (the count has run as high as nine in the supersized years), one team is eliminated each week, and the finale survivors take a prize that has been $50,000 for most of the run. Episodes are built on two rounds: the Small Scare, a quick focused build on a narrow prompt that earns an advantage (in the classic era, first pick of the pumpkins), and a main round of several hours to produce a large themed display that tells a horror story, judged on artistry and on taste, because part of every display must actually be eaten.

The host chair has changed hands more than fans remember. Magician Justin Willman ran the early seasons, Jonathan Bennett became the long-term face of the show from 2016 onward, and Ghost Adventures investigator Zak Bagans took over for two seasons in 2021 and 2022 before Bennett returned. The judging table has one remarkable constant, cake artist Shinmin Li, who has judged all fifteen seasons, joined over the years by horror-effects royalty like Tom Savini and Chucky creator Don Mancini, and more recently by Aarti Sequeira. New seasons premiere each September with episodes streaming the next day; good entry points are season 7, the 2024 all-star season that brought back past champions as team captains, or simply the current year's run. The winning teams are listed in every Halloween Wars winning team, and the season-by-season record is on the show page.

Is It Cake, and its very Halloween-shaped champion

Netflix's hyper-realistic cake show is a tonal cousin to the Halloween Championship, because the skill it rewards, making sugar look convincingly like something it is not, is the same skill that produces a good severed finger. The clearest link is its first champion. When Is It Cake dropped on Netflix on March 18, 2022, Andrew Fuller, a baker from Des Moines, Iowa, outlasted the field, beat finalists Hemu Basu and April Julian, and took the season one finale and its $50,000 grand prize on top of his earlier episode winnings, leaving the season with a healthy five-figure haul overall.

Fuller runs Sugar Freakshow, his custom cake business in Des Moines, and the name is truthful: his specialty is hyper-realistic cakes with a creepy twist, commissioned by clients who want to delight and mildly gross out their guests in the same bite. Coverage after the season noted he was putting his winnings toward building out a proper Sugar Freakshow studio, and the business has remained his engine since, with a large following at @sugarfreakshow across Instagram and TikTok. Winning also turned out to be the start of his streaming career rather than the end of it: he built the hot dog cakes for Unfinished Beef, the Netflix special featuring competitive eating rivals Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi, and returned to the franchise for the all-stars holiday edition of Is It Cake, competing against champions and standouts from later seasons. He has also appeared in the Food Network competition world as both judge and competitor. In September 2024 he served as parade leader for Oktemberfest in Marshalltown, Iowa, celebrated as a local celebrity in the state where he still lives and works. He did not move to Los Angeles or pivot to influencing; he went home and kept making cakes, just with a much longer waiting list. How the competition itself operates is covered in how Is It Cake works.

Buddy vs Duff

For a completely different shape of competition, Buddy vs Duff pits exactly two people against each other, and they are arguably the two most famous cake artists American television has produced. Buddy Valastro of Cake Boss and Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes spent years as the faces of rival cake empires on rival networks, and in 2019 Food Network finally put them in the same room. Each season is a head-to-head series of themed cake battles: both bakers, with their teams, build an enormous showpiece to a brief, a panel scores each build, and the scores accumulate across the season, so whoever has the higher cumulative total after the finale wins.

That cumulative format produces the show's best quirk, which is that you can win the finale and still lose the war. It happened in the very first season, when Buddy took the final cake-off but Duff's steady scoring across the earlier episodes carried him to the title. The show ran four seasons between March 2019 and December 2021: season one (six episodes) went to Duff, season two (eight episodes, spring 2020) went to Buddy in the closest finish of the series, season three (eight episodes, summer 2021) went to Buddy again along with the show's "King of Cakes" title, and the fourth season, a four-episode holiday edition in the last weeks of 2021, went to Duff and levelled the all-time series at two seasons apiece. No season five has aired, so the rivalry sits at a 2-2 deadlock, which suits both fanbases fine. The exact judges' scores, some decided by less than two points, are broken down in our who-won recap, and the profiles of Buddy Valastro and Duff Goldman cover how each got there. The season record lives on our show page.

The Great American Baking Show

If the spooky stuff eventually wears you out, the tent format is the palate cleanser. The Great American Baking Show is the official US spin-off of The Great British Bake Off, running the same Signature, blind Technical, and Showstopper structure with amateur bakers and a cake stand rather than a cash prize. It premiered on ABC in December 2015 as The Great Holiday Baking Show, a four-episode Christmas run hosted by Nia Vardalos and Ian Gomez and judged by Mary Berry and American pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini, with Lauren Katz of Ashburn, Virginia taking the first title and Amanda Faber winning season two.

Then came the season that made headlines. In December 2017 ABC pulled season three, hosted by Ayesha Curry and Anthony Adams, from the schedule after sexual misconduct allegations against Iuzzini, and the remaining episodes, including the finale, never aired. The network announced the winner by press release instead: Vallery Lomas, a lawyer from Baton Rouge, whose remarkable post-show career we cover in Vallery Lomas: where are they now. The show regrouped for season four in 2018 with Emma Bunton hosting alongside Anthony Adams and Paul Hollywood judging next to pastry chef Sherry Yard; Tina Zaccardi won that season, and Brother Andrew Corriente, a Capuchin friar, won the January 2020 finale.

The franchise resurfaced on The Roku Channel, first with a Celebrity Holiday special in 2022, then with a full civilian season in 2023 that finally gave American viewers the classic judging duo of Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, with comedians Ellie Kemper and Zach Cherry hosting. Martin Sorge won that first Roku season, followed by Mackenzie Rubish in 2024, Kim Goldfeder Clarke in 2025, and Ruiqi Chen in the 2026 season, which arrived with new hosts Casey Wilson and Andrew Rannells. Roku drops episodes in binge-friendly batches rather than weekly. The Roku seasons are the best entry point for their classic Bake Off feel and short runs; the full champion stories are in every Great American Baking Show winner, and the season record is on our show hub.