Renay Zamora (right) with Halloween Wars teammates Rebecca Wortman and Doug Goodreau
Renay Zamora of Sweetface Cakes doesn’t hesitate to inform you, when asked, that she prefers the title of cake artist to that of baker. And the Nashville-based master of the dessert arts tells the Scene she takes the “artist” part of her job seriously.
“I prefer not to just say baker, not that I’m fooling anyone by not saying it,” she adds with a laugh, “but I prefer the creative side of it over just the baking.”
Zamora’s creativity will be on full display this Sunday, Oct. 4, 8 p.m. when the new season of Food Network’s Halloween Wars kicks off. Zamora will be a contestant on this year’s four-episode season of the perennial fall fan favorite, facing off against four other teams of three in a contest of will, determination and fondant.
The teams, each consisting of an expert pumpkin carver, a cake decorator, and a sugar artist, are all competing for a grand prize and the title of Halloween Wars champion.
While all the teams are sure to be intimidated by the notion of never knowing what the show has in store for them, Zamora quickly realized at the very beginning that she was much less prepared than the other captains.
She explains, “Having the feeling from seeing past seasons of the show that you will be going up against people that have done this before, it sets an advantage from the beginning over you, that they have been on that set and know what to expect from the challenges. I’m going in blind, and have no idea what is coming up at all.”
That disadvantage was made even clearer by the production team not allowing the contestants have any say on who would be standing by them during the competition. Viewers watching at home may assume that the members have all worked together in the past, but Zamora says they were strangers who quickly became a solid squad through trial by fire.
“I didn’t have any say in who was on my team,” Zamora says “For all I know I was just put on a random team. I have no idea how the production company paired us up, I don’t know what the criteria was that they used, but I found out who was on my team the day that filming started. I didn’t know them beforehand, but since then we’ve became really great friends.”
For all of the spikes in blood pressure the show might have caused her, seeing behind the scenes of a competition cooking program is what Zamora sought out. From the licensed workspace inside her Mt. Juliet home she had watched peers appear on reality-based cooking shows and wanted to try her hand at it. To hear her tell it, the failure of one casting session may have indirectly led for to the show she is promoting today.
“I like to tell people that it comes down to a mantra I’ve been telling myself: You don’t get what you don’t ask for,” she explains. “What happened was that I had contacted a different production company about a different show, and they had asked me to submit an audition video. Then I saw that Halloween Wars was casting at the time for contestants, and I have a friend in Knoxville who actually won the third season, Sarah Ono Jones.
"I reached out to them and they asked to see a video, so I sent them a copy of the original one that I had submitted to the other show. In the meantime I reached out to that original show to see where we were, and they let me know that they had already cast it. Two hours later Halloween Wars called me to let me know they wanted me on the show.”
She adds with a laugh: “I went from the depths of disappointment to joy. From there everything has just happened so fast.”
This weekend begins a four-week run of episodes that will prove whether the goal of bringing her concept of cake art to the small screen works or not.
The cake Zamora made for Jack White's Thrid Man Records
While she has handled high-concept orders in the past (the cake she produced for Third Man Records on the occasion of their third anniversary and the release of Jack White’s Blunderbuss album was so ornate it required working with the company’s graphic design team), it remains to be seen if Zamora can pull off a victory in front of the camera. One strength she holds over her competition, however, is her seamless melding of different styles of art into her cake creations.
“I’ll be honest, I have a pretty eclectic aesthetic to my design work, and I like to do a little bit of everything. I like to paint, sculpt, just all of these types of things that most people would only consider doable with clay or acrylics. The difference is I get to do them in edible form. All of these edible mediums act just like all of those other mediums that would be used in the art world. Of course, they don’t last very long, because everything gets eaten, but it wasn’t that hard of a transition for me. It was just a lot of fun to use the canvas they gave me.”
