After winning Cake Wars twice, Latter-day Saint Pete Tidwell knows a thing or two about baking competitions and creating confectionary masterpieces. This year, Tidwell decided to take on a new challenge, swapping his normally beautiful culinary creations for something creepy by competing on Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Throughout the Halloween season, Tidwell impressed the judges with his frightening and twisted desserts, creating slime monsters, tomb cakes, skulls, zombies, and more.
Peter Tidwell's slime monster. Image a screenshot for Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Peter Tidwell's Dia de los Muertos cake. Image a screenshot for Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Peter Tidwell's tomb cake. Image a screenshot for Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Tidwell's baking talent landed him in the show's finale, where Tidwell was tasked with creating a zombie cake with a bleeding brain. The lemon poppyseed blueberry cake received a priceless reaction from the judges when the blood started to flow.
"I loved how it turned out. It was epic seeing the reactions of the judges as the blood was flowing down the face of my zombie cake. So fun!" Tidwell wrote on Facebook.
Peter Tidwell's zombie cake. Image a screenshot for Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Despite Tidwell's impressively disgusting zombie, Karl Fong took home the title of Halloween baking champion with his bleeding heart zombie cake made of devils food cake and blood orange curd.
Karl Fong's zombie cake. Image a screenshot for Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship.
Throughout his multiple appearances on the Food Network, Tidwell has been able to share his beliefs through the way he lives his faith. "It was very apparent to people, like within minutes of meeting me [that I am a Latter-day Saint]," Tidwell says. "I'm from Utah, have a young family, I don't drink alcohol, I don't drink coffee, and the questions come, 'Well, are you a Mormon? And are you a member of the Church?' And that is a fun opportunity and to help further the cause and help people know we are normal people like anybody else and care about loving and including others and that we are here to try and improve the world and help the world be a better place."
In fact, while competing on Halloween Baking Championship, Tidwell was able to generate conversations about his faith when he attended a local sacrament meeting. "Everybody was getting together to go to do something and I declined and said I was heading to church," Tidwell says. "That was also a good opportunity to not necessarily share a bunch of information about my faith but [share that] it was important to me."
In addition to living his beliefs no matter the circumstances, Tidwell also finds ways to deepen his faith through baking. "The one thing that I really, really love about baking is that I love the process," Tidwell says. Baking requires specific ingredients, steps, and procedures that combine to produce a beautiful outcome. "I also love that about the gospel of Jesus Christ," he continues. "If you follow the things that we have been directed, there are specific outcomes." To Tidwell, the gospel can easily be compared to a recipe for happiness and eternal life. But he also acknowledges, "Of course with a messed up recipe there is not much you can do other than add some frosting on it, but with the gospel, you can repair things."
