This Philly baker can’t stop winning TV baking competitions
Cake Life Bake Shop co-owner Lily Fischer has already won “Cupcake Wars” and “Winner Cake All” — and made Beyoncé’s birthday cake, twice.
As if baking Beyoncé’s birthday cake twice weren’t enough, Cake Life Bake Shop co-owner Lily Fischer has added another feather to her cap: She’s won yet another TV baking competition, her third in 13 years.
Fischer appears on the first episode of Hulu’s new Cookie, Cupcake, Cake series, bingeable on the streaming service as of this morning. The show’s format is comparable to Chopped, a four-contestant, three-challenge face-off featuring — you guessed it — cookies, cupcakes, and cake.
Though Fischer has also won episodes of Cupcake Wars and Winner Cake All, this was her first win competing solo. It gave the former preschool teacher an occasion to reflect on how far she’s come in the years since she left teaching to go to pastry school at the Art Institute of Philadelphia.
Fischer and business partner Nima Etemadi opened Cake Life in Fishtown in 2016, but “I still have impostor syndrome,” she said. “So [the Cookie, Cupcake, Cake win] was this cool experience to be like... ‘I do know what I’m doing and I have been doing this for 15 years.‘”
For their desserts, Fischer and her co-contestants had to channel beach-day vibes, making luau-themed cookies, tropical-drink-flavored cupcakes, and a showstopping display cake. Fischer whipped up pineapple-, palm tree-, and Spam musubi-shaped iced cookies; lime-in-the-coconut cupcakes filled with lime curd and edged in toasted coconut; and a two-tier chocolate cake with vanilla bean mascarpone and a raspberry-syrup soak, decorated with isomalt waves and a surfboard.
A seasoned TV competitor, Fischer deployed personal touches and extra-mile embellishments to play to judges Buddy Valastro and Samantha Seneviratne. For her lime-in-the-coconut cupcakes, she made tiki-style drink umbrellas using edible wafer paper, while her chocolate cake was inspired by one that her mom, who died weeks after Cake Life opened, used to bake for Fischer when she was growing up in Chestnut Hill.
“It’s cool that she gets to be a part of this thing, because she always was my No. 1 fan,” Fischer said.
Winning Cookie, Cupcake, Cake didn’t come with the biggest payday — all the contestants took home the same amount of money, Fischer said — but it brings further exposure. Fischer’s appearance on Cupcake Wars kick-started her professional baking career and eventually paved the way to her partnership with Etemadi, a college friend. The Cupcake Wars episodes (she competed in two champion face-offs) also spurred two of Cake Life’s best-selling cake flavors: hot cocoa and whipped cream and honey lavender (the flavor of Beyoncé’s 2017 birthday cake).
Fischer said there is genuine overlap between the produced antics one sees on TV baking shows and what goes on in the actual bakery. “We make a lime-coconut cupcake — I’m taking components from things we’re already making,” she said before adding a caveat.
“I’m not gonna make handmade umbrellas,” she said. “Although for the right price, yes, I will.”