WHITMAN – She’s in the finals.
Whitman baker Justine Rota wowed the Food Network’’s Holiday Baking Championship judges Carla Hall and Nancy Fuller on Monday, Dec. 11 with her Kwanzaa-inspired plantain upside-down cake.
“This is another challenge where I have no idea what I’m doing, but [in] those challenges, I’ve been hovering in the top two, so I must be doing something right,” Rota said as she got to work on her cake. As she said that she is adept at upside-down cake, she opted to basically not try to fix what wasn’t broken.
Her sugar cookie kinara with the traditional red, black and green candles depicted on them for her preheat challenge, drew Hall’s special raves. The dessert had to depict the kinara in some way.
“You sure have done a good job,” Fuller said. “The upside-down cake, oh, my word – the carmelization and that battah…”
“The kinara sugar cookies? Perfect,” Hall said. “They’re so clean, the drips, the flames, the movement. Beautiful.”
They liked the taste even more.
“That carmelization that you’ve got on those plantains and into this cake is absolutely amazing,” Fuller said.
“What I love about your whole dessert, [is] it gave us all these different textures,” Hall agreed. “You get this chewiness from the plantains [and] then your cake is a dense cake that’s still moist with big crumbs, and then you finish with your sugar cookies … it’s really well done.”
Rota was the winner of the preheat challenge.
But, as sometimes happens with the advantages in such victories, Rota and her selected teammates Kevin Conniff of Alberta, Canada and Javier Trujillo of Chicago in an extra challenge to create an edible “ornament,” ran into production problems that cost them a win – and a loss of 10 minutes in the final – a Christmas-tree themed pull-apart pastry with a complimentary dipping sauce.
Celebrity baker Duff Goldman returned from his absence in time to judge the final challenge.
Rota picked raspberry for the filling flavor in her pull-apart pastry tree with an orange carmel dipping sauce.
“Last time I made a blitz puff pastry I did not bake it enough,” Rota said of an earlier challenge in the competition. This time, Goldman had a question for her.
“I don’t understand what happened.” he dead panned. “I leave for a couple weeks, I come back and all your pastries are amazing. What did you do with Justine? I’m kidding. This is really out of this world.”
“I think it’s bautiful,” Fuller said. “The colors are absolutely gorgeous. It’s so cohesive. I’m very impressed.”
Hall’s main criticism was that the trunk of Rota’s tree was a bit thick, limiting the size of the pull-apart branches, she also thought the sauce was a little acidic as a dip for a raspberry pastry.
“Delicious,” Fuller said as her eyes widened.
In the end, Rota was the second-place contestant, after Coloradan Thua Nguyen, with both of them, along with Conniff and Ashley Landerman of New Braunfels, Texas, head to the final round of baking challenges next week.
Holiday Baking Championship. Food Newtork. 8 p.m., Monday, Dec. 18.
The top prize in the contest is $25,000.