‘Halloween Wars:’ Mobile cake artist in frightful Food Network series - AL.com

Anyone watching the recent season opener of the Food Network’s “Halloween Wars” saw a lot of emotion from Shayla Barnes-Holloway: Humor, intensity, love of her craft, frustration, shock, dismay. Behind the scenes of the sculptural cake challenge, she said, there was more.

“I was in the background cussing like a sailor,” said the Alabama cake artist, who’s based in the Mobile area. “It got pretty rough.”

Barnes-Holloway’s three-woman team, the Cake Coven, was one of four given seven hours to build a cake based on the concept of a haunted toy. Their vision, inspired by the parental anguish of stepping on Lego blocks in the dark, was ambitious -- a dad being chased by a towering block monster swirling up out of a toy box. Among other elements, they had to sculpt the dad out of modeling chocolate, build the monster out of cake and crank out scores of candy blocks.

It didn’t help a bit that midway through, host Zak Bagans -- the star of “Ghost Adventures” -- hit the teams with a surprise requirement that they had to include lights.

“I am literally two second from just giving up,” Barnes-Holloway said as that sunk in. “It’s not the right time for lights. It’s not the right time for any changes, let me just say that.”

The level of competition was high: All four entries were impressive, with the fear factor ranging from whimsical to downright creepy. The members of the Cake Coven seemed genuinely surprised by the judges’ decision at the end, and genuinely upset on behalf of the team eliminated.

That was “absolutely” the case said Barnes-Holloway. “Because they worked so hard and again, their design was so beautiful. So many different elements, so many different sugar pieces. You feel bad for everybody because you know they’ve been right there with you throughout the whole experience. You really hate to see anybody go. You don’t want to go yourself, but you hate to see anybody leave.”

The structure of the show meant that the Cake Coven, wasn’t featured in the season’s second episode, which aired Sept. 26. They’ll be back in action for the episode being broadcast Oct. 3.

Will they make it all the way to the finale on Halloween and the $25,000 prize? Barnes-Holloway, of course, cannot reveal such details. But she was able to share a lot about how she came to be on the show in the first place.

She was born and raised in McIntosh, north of Mobile, and attended the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science and Spring Hill College. She moved to Rhode Island in 2000 and that’s where she and her husband Josef Holloway, who’s from Mobile, married and started their family before moving to Miami a few years later.

Barnes-Holloway worked in education, becoming executive director overseeing a three-state region for the Princeton Review, a company that offers test preparation, tutoring and related services. The time she spent traveling as an executive came to be a burden, and in 2010 she quit to focus on her three children.

“My first project as super-mom was to plan a birthday party for my sons, who were turning 1 and 5, to me that’s milestone years,” she said. “I am a cake snob, have always been a cake snob, love cakes, has to be a fabulous cake, can’t just be some buttercream roses.”

She needed a small mushroom-shaped cake to go with a Mario Brothers theme. She planned to surround it with cupcakes. “All store-bought, I ain’t makin’ nothing,” she said of her plan.

But the bakery wanted $50 for the mushroom. “This was back in 2010,” she said. “$50? I was just outraged. … Two weeks later and hours and hours and hours of YouTube University and probably $250, I figured out how to make this cake. And I got the bug. I just literally got the bug. It was just so much fun, so interesting, learning about baking and cake artistry. I just got hooked.”

In 2011 she began making cakes for friends and family. The parent of another kid in her daughter’s daycare ordered a birthday cake for her fiancé, who turned out to be a Miami Heat player. That lucky break put her handiwork in front of a high-profile clientele of Miami athletes and socialites. Her business exploded. It wasn’t long before she was working out of a commercial kitchen, which in turn helped her cater to major corporate clients.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove the family’s decision to move back home to Mobile a little over a year ago, moving away from the clientele she’d built up in Miami to be closer to family.

“It was difficult professionally but personally it was no question,” she said of the move. “It was something we had to do.”

“Halloween Wars” isn’t her first taste of reality-TV exposure. Back in 2017 she appeared on Season 3, Episode 2 of the Cooking Channel’s “Cake Hunters,” a challenge titled “Orange You My Cake.” In 2019 she competed in Netflix’s “Sugar Rush,” winning the $10,000 prize in Season 2, Episode 1.

“The big difference with this show is you don’t get to choose your teammates,” she said of Halloween Wars.

Her allies in the Cake Coven are Christy Seguin of Austin (cakesrocktx on Instagram) Brooke Taylor of Fort Worth (www.instagram.com/bunnysbakerytx). While Barnes expressiveness seemed to catch the camera a lot, Barnes-Holloway said the team is “definitely three equals.”

The reality competition concludes on Oct. 31, 2021. — For the opening episode of Season 11 of "Halloween Wars," the Cake Coven crafted a father pursued by a block monster emerging from a toybox. From left are Christy Seguin, Brooke Taylor and Shayla Barnes-Holloway.Discovery

The show was produced during a three-week stay in Park City, Utah, in early summer. Barnes-Holloway figured out early on that the bar was going to be high: She was in the hotel where cast and crew were staying and recognized someone she had seen on other shows. I thought she was a judge because I know her work and I know she’s a phenomenal cake artist,” she said. She assumed the other woman was a judge, but it turned out she was part of the competition.

The premiere episode showed four teams working smoothly with no evident squabbling. The other teams produced a disturbing doll, a haunted record player and a slightly demonic piggy bank with a trove of candy coins hidden inside. “I was very impressed myself with the level of skill of the contestants,” said Barnes-Holloway.

To the viewer, it looked like the Cake Coven ran a tight ship, touching up final details as the last minutes ticked off the clock.

“That was so not the case,” said Barnes-Holloway. “We were working to the final second.”

“We went very big,” she said, and the team opted to build its monster out of cake rather than a more easily built substrate such as Rice Krispy treats.

“That comes at a cost. That cost is time,” she said. Things needed to chill and set. “That really hurt us in the long run.”

Barnes-Holloway said the team didn’t feel that confident as the judges made their rounds.

“We really had a tough time completing our design,” she said. “I have to say it wasn’t exactly as finished as we would have liked it. So that part had me a little concerned.”

Looking around, she said, “Everybody had a phenomenal design. Everybody’s cake was innovative and creative and scary.”

She hints that it doesn’t let up. The first episode started with four teams and ruled out one. The second featured four more teams and also knocked out one. The third will bring the six remaining teams together, kicking off a four-week run to the finish on Oct. 31.

Viewers can expect “some really big, phenomenal cakes,” she said. “This is a cake show more than anything.” (Past seasons also featured pumpkin-carving, but that’s not the case this time around.)

They also can expect more mid-episode challenges, like the requirement to include lights. “Every episode there is kind of a surprise element,” she said. “You literally find out about that in the moment.”

Back in Mobile, things aren’t exactly quiet. The pandemic continues to throw up challenges. Barnes-Holloway said that her 11-year-old son recently experienced a frightening bout of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, a rare but potentially deadly side effect of COVID exposure.

And she continues to develop the newest iteration of her business. (Samples of her work can be found at www.instagram.com/thebuttercreamery, and full information at buttercreamery.com.

Rebuilding her business in a far smaller market is a challenge, but it has its upside: She can rebuild it with the benefit of experience. “It’s given me an opportunity to reimagine what the Buttercreamery Sweets Boutique can be,” she said.

“Just look out for the Buttercreamery in 2022,” she said.

New episodes of “Halloween Wars” are broadcast at 8 p.m. Central time on Sundays. New episodes also can be purchased via Amazon Prime or seen on Discovery+.

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