Pear challenge triggers a meltdown for Utah baker Melanie Bjork-Jensen on Halloween Baking Championship

Food Network’s Halloween Baking Championship season 11 premiered on Monday, September 15, 2025, at 10 pm MDT, introducing 10 contestants ready to compete for a $25,000 prize in a spooky-themed baking mansion.

Among them is Melanie Bjork-Jensen, a baker from West Jordan, Utah, who works two full-time nursing jobs and runs a small cake business.

In the season premiere, Bjork-Jensen faced a challenge that highlighted both the pressures of televised competition and her own story.

She was assigned a pear as the featured fruit for her dessert, an ingredient she openly dislikes. “I hate pears with a passion,” she told Deseret News, calling them “sandy water” and “stupid.”

This dislike set off a chain of problems: she cut herself while preparing the fruit, her batter looked off, and her buttercream smelled wrong.

Because she follows a gluten-free diet due to health issues, she could only taste small amounts of her cake.

In the trailer for the premiere, Bjork-Jensen is shown saying she had forgotten the sugar and had no time to rebake, culminating in a “meltdown” moment on the floor.

Monday’s episode shows whether she moves past the mistake or is eliminated.

Baking under pressure: Pears, forgotten sugar, and a televised “meltdown” in Halloween Baking Championship

In the Halloween Baking Championship season premiere challenge, each baker was assigned a featured fruit. Melanie Bjork-Jensen drew pears and immediately voiced her frustration.

She said, “I am passionately anti-pear,” explaining that pears symbolize things going wrong.

The ingredient threw off her focus. While cutting the fruit, she accidentally cut herself and needed to regroup.

The stress built under studio lights as her cake batter “didn’t have the right look” and her buttercream “didn’t have the right smell.”

Because she maintains a gluten-free diet after a 2021 diagnosis of spindle cell oncocytoma and Hashimoto’s disease, she couldn’t fully taste her cake.

Taking a small bite, she realized she had forgotten the sugar but lacked time to bake again. In the trailer she is heard saying there was “not enough time” and then falling to the floor, holding her spoon while cameras zoomed in.

She later described this as her “meltdown” moment, when she “lost [her] mind” but then decided to stand up and finish.

The episode showed how she responded to these setbacks, while one baker is eliminated at the end.

From application to self-growth: Bjork-Jensen’s path to Halloween Baking Championship

Bjork-Jensen had applied to the Halloween Baking Championship years earlier but withdrew due to a divorce.

Food Network kept her application and invited her back last year, leading to a year-long selection process with interviews and baking challenges to ensure a good fit with the Halloween theme.

She has decorated her home with skulls and a skeleton named Cam, matching the show’s aesthetic.

Although self-taught through online videos and running an at-home cake business since 2015, she felt “imposter syndrome” when meeting her fellow contestants.

“Every single moment I thought, ‘OK, they’re going to realize that I am not supposed to be here,’” she said.

Filming felt “completely otherworldly,” like a “fever dream” she couldn’t discuss afterward.

Still, she calls the experience “like getting dunked into 10 years of therapy,” realizing she was “worth this effort” and that it was acceptable to do something “just for me.”

She keeps in touch with her fellow competitors in a group chat she calls her “forever friends.”

Monday’s episode marks the start of her on-screen journey, showing how she balances personal challenges, professional skills, and televised pressure.

Stay tuned for more updates.