When Jang Kwon was a young boy, he used to pick up cakes and other pastries just down the street from where he lived in Montreal’s Park Extension neighbourhood.
But then his family moved to the South Shore and the nearest bakery was a 10-minute drive away.
“My parents said, ‘If you want cakes, then you’re gonna have to bake your own from now on,’” Kwon remembers. They handed him a box of Duncan Hines cake mix, and seven-year-old Kwon got to work on his first cake.
The IT manager at Concordia’s Instructional and Information Technology Services (IITS) hasn’t stopped baking since.
On May 23, Kwon will showcase his hard-earned skills on Food Network Canada’s new show Wall of Bakers. The Wall of Chefs spin-off features amateur bakers competing over three rounds in front of the country’s best pastry chefs, for a chance to win $10,000.
Two key ingredients: determination and preparation
Kwon’s big break comes after years of applying to different cooking competition shows.
“After eight years of rejection, you tend to say, ‘Okay, here’s another one.’ I read the email over and over again — it was surreal,” he recalls.
To prepare for the show, he watched every episode of Wall of Chefs that he could get his hands on.
“I really studied what goes on — how the contestants were eliminated, what didn’t they do or what did they do badly — and transferred that into a baking environment,” Kwon says. “So, it was a summer of a lot of baked goods.”
Luckily, he had an easier time procuring flour that summer than the previous, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone was baking. “I was so desperate that I splurged and shelled out 20 bucks for a bag of organic flour,” he says.