(From left) The baking teams of Linda Carney and Cheryl Filion, Sebastian Huyhua Quispe and Richmond baker Kristen Gardner, Sarah Belote and Molli Dowd appear on Food Network's "Holiday Baking Championship." The episode featuring Gardner airs tonight at 9 p.m. (Photo courtesy Food Network)
Kristen Gardner can’t share how she and her teammate fared on Food Network’s “Holiday Baking Championship: Gingerbread Showdown,” which airs Monday at 9 p.m. on the network, but she is finally willing to admit she’s found her true calling.
“I tried to shake it and tried to run from it, but now look at me,” Gardner says, pointing to her second appearance on a Food Network competition and the recent opening of her bakery, Joy Jr. Treats, located at 9070 W. Broad St. in Tuckernuck Square.
Gardner is a licensed cosmetologist — “I’ve been doing hair, nails and makeup since high school,” she says — but baking is in her genes.
She grew up in Lynchburg and worked alongside her mother, Tarsha Joyner, in her bakery, Mrs. Joy’s Absolutely Fabulous Treats, which is nearing a decade in business. In 2015, Joyner won Food Network’s “Christmas Cookie Challenge,” and in 2019, when she was approached to appear on the network’s “Haunted Gingerbread Showdown,” Gardner joined as her mother's assistant.
Gardner also paired with her mother on Food Network Canada’s “Project Bakeover,” which aired in February, but only north of the border. “Nobody here could see it, not even us,” Gardner laughs. (The show is now available to Hulu subscribers.)
Gardner’s experience with “Gingerbread Showdown” was different, she says, because this time, she was a full participant working with a partner. Initially, a customer of her mother’s who is a gingerbread artist approached Gardner to be her baking partner for the show’s auditions. In the end, Gardner alone was selected; she was then paired with California baker Sebastian Huyhua Quispe, whom she knew only through Instagram.
“I’m good, and I can get anything done and make it look good, but [Quispe] was the gingerbread artist, and I was the baker,” she says. “This time [on a show], I actually had to bake something.”
The five-episode series features three two-person teams competing each week to fulfill a specific challenge in which gingerbread is the main component. Gardner and Quispe’s instructions were to create a holiday memory snow globe in gingerbread. The winning team each week receives “$10,000 worth of festive prizes,” according to the network, which declined to provide information about other compensation for the contestants.
Filming occurred in Knoxville, Tennessee, in June, but the teams prepared some elements of their final creations in advance. “We weren’t able to physically be together, but we video-chatted before and after,” Gardner says. “[The Food Network] had very detailed guidelines. Now that they’ve done this for a while, they know what to tell people.”
There are dual stressors of competing on a televised baking show, Gardner notes: the baking and the showmanship. “When I did [“Haunted Gingerbread Showdown”] with my mom, I realized it’s about being on TV, not baking. I was nervous. You’re asked to say things a different way. And working under pressure is a hard thing. Mom and I are what you call ‘procrasti-bakers’; we’re good about working under pressure. You manage pressure by using the confidence you have in yourself. When you say to yourself, ‘I got this,’ you don’t worry about the clock, about who’s watching you. You know you’ve got it. That comes from experience.”
Gardner says she uses her Instagram to show people the truth of baking: the good, the bad and the ugly.
“A lot of times, people see videos that look easy because [the bakers] have been doing it for a while," she says. "I pretty much post everything I do; it’s not an average Instagram where everything looks perfect [in process], because that’s not how it goes. I like to post videos so people can see the real thing. I want to show how long it takes, how difficult it was.”
Gardner is eager for more television opportunities, noting that her ultimate goal is to have a baking show with her mother. Just like in her own bakery, she’s ready for a leading role.
“I had to follow [Quispe’s] vision,” she says of her partner in the latest gingerbread competition. “It’s definitely hard to be an assistant when you’re not used to being one.”
