Episode Notes
Sinaí Vespie is executive pastry chef for Campus Dining at Notre Dame—although dessert fans around the country know her as the winner of season 6 of the Halloween Baking Championship, which aired this past fall on Food Network.
And if you’re thinking it’s pretty cool for a university to have the winner of a reality cooking competition on its culinary team, then you have a lot in common with the makers of this podcast.
Sinaí began her career as a junior sous chef at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort. She then moved to the Sweet Treats Cakery in Tampa before serving as pastry chef at the Tampa Marriott Waterside. She joined us from just outside her kitchen at Notre Dame, which is the closest we’ve gotten to brunch in a long, long time.
We used this opportunity to ask her about both the particulars of the Halloween Baking Championship—from the cursed croquembouche to the spooky challenge themes, including when she had to figure out how to depict a prank on a floating cake—as well as the demands of competing on a TV cooking show more generally. As you’d suspect, that took on some entirely new dimensions during the pandemic.
LINK
- From Sinaí’s Instagram: The Faces of Chef Si
Episode Transcript
*Note: We do our best to make these transcripts as accurate as we can. That said, if you want to quote from one of our episodes, particularly the words of our guests, please listen to the audio whenever possible. Thanks.
Ted Fox 0:00
(voiceover) From the University of Notre Dame, this is With a Side of knowledge. I'm your host, Ted Fox. Before the pandemic, we were the show that invited scholars, makers, and professionals out to brunch for informal conversations about their work. And we look forward to being that show again one day. But for now, we're recording remotely to maintain physical distancing. If you like what you hear, you can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Thanks for stopping by.
Sinaí Vespie is executive pastry chef for Campus Dining at Notre Dame--although dessert fans around the country know her as the winner of season six of the Halloween Baking Championship, which aired this past fall on Food Network. And if you're thinking it's pretty cool for a university to have the winner of a reality cooking competition on its culinary team, then you have a lot in common with the makers of this podcast. Sinaí began her career as a junior sous chef at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort. She then moved to the Sweet Treats Cakery in Tampa before serving as pastry chef at the Tampa Marriott Waterside. She joined us from just outside her kitchen at Notre Dame, which is the closest we've gotten to brunch in a long, long time. We used this opportunity to ask her about both the particulars of the Halloween Baking Championship--from the cursed croquembouches to the spooky challenge themes, including when she had to figure out how to depict a prank on a floating cake--as well as the demands of competing on a TV cooking show more generally. As you'd suspect, that took on some entirely new dimensions during the pandemic. Finally, if you check the episode notes, you'll see why Sinai warned us of the perils of letting your son manage your Instagram. (end voiceover)
Sinaí Vespie, welcome to With a Side of Knowledge.
Sinaí Vespie 1:58
Thank you for having me. So exciting.
Ted Fox 2:01
And congrats--I wanted to start there with congratulations on winning the Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship. That is an awesome, awesome accomplishment.
Sinaí Vespie 2:10
Yes, yes, it is. Thank you very much. I had a lot of fun.
Ted Fox 2:14
So if you'll let me, when I say I want to start at the beginning, it's the very beginning of baking, and my very limited understanding is that compared to other types of things you can do in the kitchen, pastry is very exacting in terms of the amount of an ingredient you use, the ratio of the ingredients of one to another, the bake times, all those things. Is that more or less accurate?
Sinaí Vespie 2:39
It is very accurate. (Ted laughs) I call myself a scientist, too.
Ted Fox 2:45
Right.
Sinaí Vespie 2:47
Because we have to be very precise. I mean, not adding salt or forgetting the baking powder will just--it can be devastating, you know?
Ted Fox 3:00
So knowing that, what were you allowed to bring in with you? Were you allowed to bring recipes in with you? Were you allowed to bring certain ingredients in with you? What did you get to start with when you went into that kitchen?
Sinaí Vespie 3:13
I could not bring any ingredients or tools.
Ted Fox 3:16
Okay.
Sinaí Vespie 3:17
We could only use whatever they had available.
Ted Fox 3:20
Okay, okay. What then was the atmosphere in the Halloween Baking Championship Kitchen like? Cuz one thing I wondered in watching the show is, Is it hard to get used to working alongside all these other bakers as well as having to pause and explain to a camera what you're doing in the middle of your bake?
Sinaí Vespie 3:41
Whew. (Ted laughs) Geez. So working alongside the other bakers was not bad at all. I will tell you, we formed--we're like a family now. We still stay in touch. We're constantly texting each other, we bounce ideas back and forth with each other. It's super cool. What was very difficult is that as people went home, you moved stations. So I just get used to using this one kitchen and somebody goes home, and now I have to move to a different location in the baking area. So you know, that throws you for a loop. Not having everything readily accessible--you know, in my kitchen, I know where everything is.
Ted Fox 4:36
Sure.
Sinaí Vespie 4:37
And normally, I don't have two hours (both laugh) to make a carved cake or, you know, some sort of crazy, crazy structure. So I'm not rushing around trying to remember every single ingredient I need so I don't have to make multiple trips to the pantry. So that was hard, as well. And we also had to share some ingredients. So, you know, they don't have 10 containers of whole-wheat flour. So anything that wasn't like a pantry staple--like eggs, butter, sugar, stuff like that--any specialty items, there was one container. And if somebody already had it--I mean, you see it on the TV show, we call out, Hey, does anyone have the cocoa powder?
Ted Fox 5:29
Right.
Sinaí Vespie 5:30
And then because of COVID, it wasn't just run over to that station, grab it, and come back. They actually had a culinary team who would go and grab that container, sanitize it ...
Ted Fox 5:44
Oh wow.
Sinaí Vespie 5:44
And then bring it to us. So that took time, as well. It was very stressful. But fun at the same time. Call me crazy, but I had fun.
Ted Fox 5:56
(laughs) So how much of the challenge of a show like this, and when you're competing in these challenges, how much of it is the actual bake itself--the thing they're telling you, Okay, we need a cake that checks all these boxes--and how much of it is just that time pressure of, Sure, I could do this, you know, it'd be really easy if you gave me a couple days, but you're telling me you need this in 90 minutes? How does that shake out in terms of what makes it difficult?
Sinaí Vespie 6:27
In your normal everyday life, you don't have to make something in two hours because you have the planning time. So a lot of the work that I put out, you know, they're like, Oh, this is great or whatever. And I'm looking at it, and I'm like, Ugh, gosh, this is awful. Like, I'm not proud to put this out. But it's the best that I could do in two hours. It is--you definitely do have that much time; when they say you have this much time to bake, that is how much time you have.
Ted Fox 7:04
It's not like a time-lapse thing where it's like, Oh, we made it look like two hours. No, it's two hours.
Sinaí Vespie 7:09
No. It really is. Yes.
Ted Fox 7:11
And I imagine that's in any line of work, but again, you know, thinking about what you said about how exacting pastry and things like that are, I imagine that's a whole nother part of the challenge is just getting comfortable with being able to kind of sit in that space of, I'm going to have to maybe put things out as my finished product that aren't up to kind of my own exacting standards that I would normally do when I'm in my own kitchen. I would imagine that would be a hard thing to get used to, especially when you know it's going on national television.
Sinaí Vespie 7:49
Especially the croquembouche.
Ted Fox 7:51
What was that again? (both laugh)
Sinaí Vespie 7:54
The croquembouche?
Ted Fox 7:55
Yes.
Sinaí Vespie 7:55
Was my nemesis. Oof. We were baking in a tent.
Ted Fox 8:02
Okay.
Sinaí Vespie 8:03
On the beach (laughs). In California. (laughs)
Ted Fox 8:07
And I would say, like, watching it--I didn't see every episode, but I saw multiple episodes--and that wasn't immediately, it didn't look that way watching it on television. It looked like, Oh, it's just a, you know, it's a normal industrial, professional kitchen. But you're on the beach. (laughs)
Sinaí Vespie 8:26
Yeah. We were right off the cliffs--like literally, you could walk out, you know, and just see the ocean.
Ted Fox 8:34
Wow.
Sinaí Vespie 8:35
Right outside the tent. So this specific day, I'm not sure if it was a combination of--so at that point, there was nine of us left.
Ted Fox 8:46
So this is pretty early then in the competition.
Sinaí Vespie 8:48
Right. This is the second episode. So there's nine of us. And they say, Croquembouche! Okay, croquembouches are a European thing. I can tell you the last time I made a croquembouche was when I was going through pastry school. (Ted laughs) They're not that difficult. But it's pretty darn difficult to make it look the way you want it to look, especially a themed one, in two hours because the eclair paste alone takes a good 45 minutes to an hour to bake, and then you have to let it cool down. I think maybe the generators weren't giving enough juice or something, but the ovens--everybody had issues with the ovens. And everything was taking a really long time to bake, so I was freaking out (laughs). And yeah, I mean, in the end, I finished putting it together. But it wasn't exactly what I envisioned.
Ted Fox 9:58
And I imagine when they say, you know, they give you that assignment, croquembouche, there's no one there to tell you if you haven't done it since pastry school, Oh, by the way, this is what needs to go into it. It's just, Alright, here's my best recollection of what this should be, and I gotta run with that.
Sinaí Vespie 10:15
There were quite a few of us that it had been a very long time since any of us put a croquembouche together.
Ted Fox 10:26
What is it? I know you mentioned eclair paste there. What is it exactly?
Sinaí Vespie 10:30
It's basically cream puffs.
Ted Fox 10:33
Okay.
Sinaí Vespie 10:34
You know, filled with the cream. And then they get dipped in caramel and stacked to look like--into pretty much like a pyramid traditionally. But it wasn't just a croquembouche. Each of us had a theme and a candy that we had to incorporate and then make it look like there was candy pouring out of it or into it.
Ted Fox 10:58
(laughs) Yeah, and like you said, I mean, it's the Halloween Baking Championship, so there has to be a Halloween theme to this European dessert that you haven't cooked since pastry school (laughs), which is kind of crazy. Do you remember what the trick ingredient was for that episode?
Sinaí Vespie 11:14
The trick ingredient for the croquembouche episode was pumpkin.
Ted Fox 11:20
Okay. And so what I want to explain to people is, we talked about all these other things--you know, you can't have recipes with you, it's not your own pantry so things are all over the place, people are sanitizing the things as they bring them to you, you're cooking on the beach, you have two hours, all these things. And then every one of these challenges, the host, Carla Hall, shows up like halfway through it and says, Oh, by the way, here's a random ingredient you need to use. And it's not like chocolate or vanilla. It's something like pumpkin. And I don't know if it was this one with the pumpkin or another time, was there ever one where she came in and you thought, Oh man, I'm toast--like, I have no idea how this is going to fit into what I'm doing?
Sinaí Vespie 12:05
Let's see, we had balsamic vinegar, pumpkin, black garlic, sage. That one kind of threw me for a loop. And one of the judges said she couldn't taste it at all. But I put a lot of sage in there. (both laugh) I was borderline concerned that I put so much they were going to be chewing on it. (Ted laughs) So that one threw me for a loop because I already had everything made. Like, I already had everything made, I was getting ready to fill my cake and roll it up. That was for the severed limb.
Ted Fox 12:45
And that was the first heat of the finale, too, right? So that's--I mean, you're basically, this is where it's all on the line because you're competing, this is the last episode to win it, and they give you sage to put in a severed-limb cake.
Sinaí Vespie 12:58
And just think about it. I mean, I had guava and cream cheese.
Ted Fox 13:04
Natural pairing with sage, right? (both laugh)
Sinaí Vespie 13:07
Yes. Definitely goes with something super herby. Well, I mean, I thought it tasted good. I thought there was plenty of it. But you know, everybody has different tastes. The black garlic, throughout my career, I've had the blessing of being able to help with the savory side a lot with plate-ups, so I've gotten a lot of ideas. And for that black garlic episode, it stumped me for a minute. But I was like, Okay, okay, jam--make a black garlic jam!
Ted Fox 13:48
Right.
Sinaí Vespie 13:48
You know, and I didn't think I was gonna make that work. But it worked. And it was good. It was so good.
Ted Fox 13:58
And would that ever become something then that you would, you know, use in your work at the University or anything else then? Now that you've--you wouldn't have normally had the chance to try that, and now it's like, Wow, this is delicious.
Sinaí Vespie 14:09
Yes, actually one of the chefs at the dining halls makes his own black garlic. And he actually has a batch going for me.
Ted Fox 14:18
Oh, wow.
Sinaí Vespie 14:19
Yeah.
Ted Fox 14:20
Oh, that's great.
Sinaí Vespie 14:21
I want to make the toasted sesame shortbread stuffed with the black garlic so everyone can taste them here. And for Halloween last year, I got to feature four of the desserts that I did on the show for the Halloween Spooktacular for the students. So that was cool.
Ted Fox 14:41
So we've already told people that you won, and we've talked about a few of the challenging moments here. But was there a particular time during the competition when you thought you were going home--like this is it, this is going to be the dessert that sends me home?
Sinaí Vespie 14:59
Absolutely. It was the last cake, the inverted cake.
Ted Fox 15:04
So this is the final-final challenge.
Sinaí Vespie 15:07
Right. And that was because I just, I spent so much time on attention to detail that I didn't have--I didn't feel I had enough on the cake. I looked across the way, and I looked at Renee's and Aaron's cakes, and they had their cakes loaded with stuff. I knew my flavors were there. Because after the croquembouche episode, I was like, Okay, Sinaí, no more burnt caramel, you have to taste everything individually and everything together. So I made sure that that was on point. My flavors were amazing. I was definitely proud of that cake; that was--ooh.
Ted Fox 15:58
Well, I mean, Stephanie Boswell, who's one of the judges--I don't think you were in the room in real time, but when you went back and watched the episode, she just pounded the table and said, Wow, just wow after tasting it. So that definitely seemed to be a very much shared opinion that, Wow, this is a delicious cake.
Sinaí Vespie 16:15
Yes.
Ted Fox 16:15
And an inverted cake is exactly what it sounds like, right? It's basically a cake hanging upside down?
Sinaí Vespie 16:21
Mm hmm. Just as crazy as it sounds.
Ted Fox 16:25
Had you made something like that before or no?
Sinaí Vespie 16:28
No, sir, I had not. That was my very first time. And it was frightening. (laughs) There was a couple of times that I almost tipped the cake over just picking it up and trying--because you build it on the table that you're working, and then you have to pick it up and walk it over to where you have to hang it. I mean, I think my heart stopped beating for the whole time walking from the table to the little hanger piece.
Ted Fox 17:00
Because as we've established, it's not like you would have time to remake it if it fell to the ground. It was, this is a one-shot deal.
Sinaí Vespie 17:07
So I knew my flavors were there. Like I said, Renee and Aaron had so much on their cake. And because of COVID, we're not allowed to stay behind and, like, walk around and see everybody's work. We literally--they call time, and we drop everything, we put our masks on, and they tell us to leave the kitchen. So I'm just looking, you know, down the row from me, I'm not really seeing detail, I'm just seeing there's a lot of stuff on their cakes. And another thing: If I tell you, Make me a cake, and your theme is, you know, this guy died taking a bubble bath, or this lady passed away playing the piano and they found her decomposed, and then I tell you, make me a death-by-prank cake. My heart sank. Like, at the very beginning of it, when I got that, I was, Oh my goodness--what am I gonna do? Like, how do you put a prank on a cake?
Ted Fox 18:24
On a cake. (laughs) Right, right.
Sinaí Vespie 18:26
In three hours? Like, how do you do this?
Ted Fox 18:31
I feel like you could easily spend three hours just coming up with the idea of like, Oh, this is a prank that would translate to a cake. (laughs)
Sinaí Vespie 18:39
Yeah, definitely. So I just, you know, I decided I'm not going to really worry about the design right now; I'm going to concentrate on baking my cake. Let's get the cake baked, get the buttercream made, get the fillings made. Because I made two or three different fillings, I can't remember. And then, I mean, I lost like half-an-hour to cracking the coconut and getting all the meat out of it. (laughs) That was a task. And then, you know, they walk around--like, Carla comes by like, Sinaí, so what are you doing for your death-by-prank? And I'm like, I have no idea. (laughs) I don't know yet.
Ted Fox 19:24
Yeah.
Sinaí Vespie 19:24
And so I don't know, maybe an hour into it, I'm like, Okay, pranks, pranks, pranks. My oldest loves to prank me. He was helping me make dinner one time, and he opened the cupboard and found the red food dye and colored his finger and pretended like he chopped his finger off when he was cutting potatoes, I think. And so, okay, we're gonna do a cutting board and just put a bunch of fingers (Ted laughs)--like a chopped-off hand and fingers cascading down the cake, blood everywhere, some vegetables trickling down something. (both laugh) Yeah, and they loved the fact that I actually had the video of him pranking me.
Ted Fox 20:11
There is something there to like, No, this is actually a prank that would happen because it's been done to me by my child, so I can vouch for the fact that it's real. But I mean, I love the moment, too, when--I mean, they caught a great shot of, you talked about Renee's cake, like as they go to announce the winner, you look over at Renee like, Okay, yep, this is who I think's winning. And then they say your name. And it's like, Wait, what, I won? It was a really--you know, I've watched a lot of reality TV; I've watched a lot of reality cooking TV in my time. And it really was, like, one of the better reactions I think I've ever seen because it was so genuine in that moment of, No, really? Me? Like, I won this thing? It was very cool.
Sinaí Vespie 20:57
Yes. I mean, Renee had won how many episodes? She had three, and Aaron had two or three. I think they were--yeah, Aaron had two, Renee had three, and I had one. I mean, Renee, she's very talented. She is so talented. But she doubts herself. Like, she questions everything she does. So you know, every night we would like pep-talk each other and, you know, tell each other how awesome we were. And even during baking, we were sitting there cheering each other on. But she was like, Nope, no--like, she was whispering. I kept looking at her, and I'm like, Girl, stop, you know you got this. (laughs) You know?
Ted Fox 21:46
I mean, I always wonder, too, about, like, when we watch a competition show and people talk about being friends and staying in touch with people, I know you had a difficult time in the finale because you ended up cooking against Michelle, who you were close with. And it was only one of you is going to make it to kind of that final heat. You talked about it a little bit earlier, but how has that relationship--because it sounds like you have kind of this community of really awesome pastry chefs now that you're a part of and that it really was kind of a lasting bond that you all made with each other by being on the show together.
Sinaí Vespie 22:21
Well, as Michelle puts it, nothing creates stronger bonds than going through traumatic experiences together. (both laugh)
Ted Fox 22:30
Right. Right.
Sinaí Vespie 22:31
Yes, definitely. I actually was just talking to Michelle yesterday. When I first saw her, it was when we went to do our first COVID test. And she saw me in the lobby, and she was like, Hey! I thought she was one of the production staff because she was talking to me like she knew me. And so, you know, we go do our COVID tests, and then later on, I saw her by the pool, and I'm like, Hey, are you one of the producers? And she's like, No. I'm like, Are you one of the contestants? And she's like, Yeah, and I was like, Oh, well, you were talking to me like you know me, like you know all about me. And she's like, Yeah, I looked everybody up. (both laugh)
Ted Fox 23:13
She was prepared.
Sinaí Vespie 23:15
I was like, What? How did you get everybody's information? And she was like, Oh, the Zoom call. I was like, Wow, very thrifty. But yeah, I was almost intimidated. I was like, I've never had anybody look me up like that before. (Ted laughs)
Ted Fox 23:32
So what was that like--you talked about some of the COVID precautions in the kitchen. What was life like for all of you when you weren't filming? Like, you talk about boosting each other up at night. Are you all--still even though you've been COVID tested--sitting around in masks? Like, what was that experience of--I feel like doing a competition show would be kind of a once-in-a-lifetime experience to begin with. And then trying to do it during the pandemic is just a whole nother level of oddity and things you might not expect. What was the pandemic piece of it like for you when you weren't in the kitchen?
Sinaí Vespie 24:10
We were quarantined to the hotel. We were allowed to maybe, like, take an Uber down the road to Trader Joe's if we wanted to get something, but we didn't really have kitchens in the rooms. So leaving the hotel was not really an option. And so we just DoorDashed food in every night, and we'd sit around the fire pit outside and have family meal and talk and share experiences. It was awesome.
Ted Fox 24:36
And how long were you all together? How long does it actually take to film the entire show?
Sinaí Vespie 24:42
We got there four days before we started filming. So we got there Sunday, July 5, and we started filming that Thursday. I went home July 21.
Ted Fox 24:57
Oh, wow. Just over two weeks or so?
Sinaí Vespie 25:00
Two-and-a-half weeks, yup. Normally, filming would have just been maybe 10 days at the most. But because of COVID, at the beginning since there was so many of us, we baked and judged in one day, and then the next day we spent doing interviews until we got to, like, around five people left. Then we started doing all the baking, the judging, and interviews on the same day.
Ted Fox 25:30
It sounds very grueling. It just sounds like a lot to process and still try to be at your best and also dealing with all these constraints you wouldn't normally encounter in a kitchen.
Sinaí Vespie 25:41
I will tell you--so we finished baking. Your body is just still rushing with adrenaline.
Ted Fox 25:51
Sure.
Sinaí Vespie 25:52
So we walk out to the tents. And then our producers, each of us had an assigned producer. They come up to us and they're like, Okay, describe what you made, what's your menu. I don't even remember what I just got done making; let me breathe for a minute. (laughs) Give me a few minutes. It was so intense, like, just getting to that finish line, I had to email them and ask them to email me my menus because I could not even remember half of the stuff I made on the show. (laughs)
Ted Fox 26:27
Yeah. I mean, imagine when you're, again, especially under that time pressure, it's just do what I got to do to get something out when that clock goes off, and I'm not gonna worry about remembering it, I just need to get through it. So having gone through the experience, did you watch the episodes back as they aired?
Sinaí Vespie 26:48
(laughs) Yes.
Ted Fox 26:50
Did it change your perception of your experience? Is there anything that you noticed in watching it that maybe didn't occur to you at the time, like you said, when your head's down and you're just kind of barreling through it?
Sinaí Vespie 27:02
Seeing it on on the show, seeing, like, my final product on the show--no, it was still not, like, the best. But it looked a lot better than the last time I remembered seeing it. (both laugh) When I'm looking down at it at the table, it was different, it was different. At times, embarrassing. Because I mean, my son is in marketing and social media and stuff, and he actually started making videos called--he named them, "The Faces of Chef Si." (Ted laughs) So if you go into my Instagram, he actually made a couple of different videos of clips of my faces through the show. (both laugh) Like, why was I making that face?
Ted Fox 28:01
You're a good mom for sharing them on your Instagram, though. (laughs)
Sinaí Vespie 28:04
He actually runs my Instagram, so I had no choice.
Ted Fox 28:07
So he shared them for you. (both laugh) Oh, that's funny.
Sinaí Vespie 28:11
Yes, all of a sudden my phone's dinging and dinging and dinging. And I'm like, What is going on? And I open it up--Oh, he made a video of my faces.
Ted Fox 28:22
As we kind of wrap up here, do you have any advice for or words of wisdom for anyone out there who might be listening to this and thinking, you know, Oh, I might want to go on a reality cooking competition at some point. Are there any words of wisdom or any one thing to kind of pay attention to like, Yeah, you might not think this, but this part is really difficult or challenging beyond, I guess, maybe what we talked about today,
Sinaí Vespie 28:52
I say do it. Like, stop doubting yourself and just throw yourself to the wolves. Because in the end, even if you don't win, and you get sent home, you still got there, you made it through. A lot of our goals were to not go home in the first few episodes. (both laugh)
Ted Fox 29:13
Right. You don't want to be the first, right?
Sinaí Vespie 29:16
You know, as long as we're not the first, okay. But it builds you up, you know? And the people you get to meet, the experience, everything is just--I grew so much from it. And I learned a lot about myself, as well. I learned to stop doubting myself so much and questioning myself so much. Yeah, it's a very validating experience, and I recommend it. If anyone's questioning on whether they should or should not do it, I say just go, just sign up and go.
Ted Fox 29:51
And we now as a result of that at Notre Dame, we have a Halloween Baking Championship chef as our head pastry chef here at Notre Dame, which I think is just super cool. Chef Sinaí Vespie, thanks so much for making time to talk to me today. I really enjoyed it.
Sinaí Vespie 30:07
Thank you very much for having me.
Ted Fox 30:09
With a Side of Knowledge is a production of the Office of the Provost at the University of Notre Dame. Our website is withasideofpod.nd.edu.