It’s a piece of cake ? This Ashburn baker will have you questioning the reality of your desserts

The three celebrity judges examined the healthy foods assembled on the plate: spears of asparagus wrapped in a rubber band, as well as cauliflower and an orange horned melon. Except it wasn’t healthy food at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“What trips me up are the details of the asparagus,” marveled actor and comedian Finesse Mitchell. “Like, I’m so close, and I still can’t say it’s cake.”

“It looks more like cauliflower the closer I am to it than when I was farther from it,” added Courtney Parchman, a social media star with more than a million TikTok followers.

This concoction – an almond cake with marzipan and a milk chocolate orange ganache – was designed by Ashburn’s Steve Weiss for the fourth episode of Netflix’s game show Is it cake? The premise: Across eight episodes, professional bakers across the country have just eight hours to design hyper-realistic cakes that resemble everyday objects, from purses to red Solo cups to rubber duckies.

The cakes are then presented in a range of five items alongside four examples of the actual item. A panel of three celebrity judges, a different trio in each episode, try to select which of the five objects they believe is actually cake, by looking at them from a few feet away. (Don’t worry, they’re not mistakenly biting into a real rubber ducky.) If a contestant tricks the judges into choosing one of the real items instead of their cake, they move on to the next round. The grand prize winner receives $50,000.

The show has become one of the biggest streaming hits of 2022. The week of its premiere in mid-March, it ranked as the #2 show on Netflix globally, just behind the phenom Bridgertonand it ranked in Netflix’s daily top 10 “most watched” for 24 days.

In this particular episode, Weiss fooled the judges and survived another day. But this outcome was hardly guaranteed.

Indeed, several decades earlier, he had hardly become a leader at all.

Beginning of the recipe

“When I was in high school, I weighed 300 pounds when I graduated [high school] and was a size 50,” Weiss says of growing up in upstate New York. He wanted to go to cooking school, but stopped doing so “because of the ‘big kid going into cooking school’ jokes,” he explains.

Then, at 18, he became addicted to his health and lost 145 pounds in nine months. “I went to a fair a few months out of high school, past people I had gone to school with for the past 12 years,” Weiss recalls, “and they didn’t recognize me, even if I had just graduated.”

He enrolled in art school, earned a degree in graphic design, and started freelancing after graduation, mostly designing logos for local businesses. “But I didn’t want to sit at a desk the rest of my life, so I decided to go to cooking school after all. I had lost all the weight, so I didn’t have to m ‘worry about people teasing me,” Weiss says. “So I did that, and I’ve been in the industry ever since.”

Although he prepares all types of food, it was at the end of the 1990s that he discovered his true calling card, combining his two passions, cooking and art.

“In fine arts school, I wasn’t sure how I was going to succeed in the field of art. I just knew I wanted to be a part of it,” Weiss says. “I had to make the transition into the culinary arts to work with the mediums of this particular art form. Once I discovered the mediums of sugar and chocolate, that’s what really got me. advances.

He has worked in the restaurant industry for a long time, including 14 years in Atlantic City with a stint at the Trump Taj Mahal casino.

“It’s a bit like being an athlete,” says Weiss. “You are conditioned to work seven days in a row or more. I once worked at a job where I had to work a month without a day off. And these are not eight-hour days; these can be 10, 12 or 14 hour days. You constantly work weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, because people go out on Saturdays and Sundays. You constantly work on holidays. A normal person just can’t do this forever.

So he found a job in education in 2008. Today, he is the Associate Dean of Hospitality and Culinary Arts at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College in West Virginia.

Wait a minute…West Virginia? While living in the Mountain State, he moved to Ashburn in January 2020, although it lengthened his commute to one hour each way. The reason: “I guess the slogan is true: Virginia is for lovers!” Weiss laughs. His fiancée, Bhavna, is a financial analyst for the Loudoun County government.

The show

On Is it cake?, host Mikey Day dubbed Weiss “the silent assassin”. Fittingly, Weiss’ personality came across as far more circumspect than the ostentatious personalities of some of the other contestants, exemplified by the multicolored hair and long beard of Andrew from Iowa and the crazy shoes sported by Nina from Louisiana.

Weiss reverted to Day for the nickname. Because Day is a Saturday Night Live actor and comedian rather than a food or baking expert, contestant Jonny from California suggested the bakers make up a fictional phrase and start using it a lot, to trick Day into thinking it was a real thing. While April from Toronto suggested “flumbé”, the contestants finally followed Weiss’ suggestion: “tiltscape”.

The exchange was captured in one episode. Adopting a deadpan facial expression, Weiss told Day, “With fondant you don’t have to worry about it, but with chocolate you have to worry about something called tiltscape.” When you finally mount your piece on a piece of cardboard for presentation, if there isn’t enough air space, then you have a horrible tiltscape.

Competitor Hemu from Texas added, “Everyone is worried about the tiltscape.”

Day looked thoughtfully, “Interesting…”

Weiss was finally eliminated in the sixth episode. He baked a devilish cake with raspberries and passion fruit and crispy white chocolate pearls, supposed to look like a bowling pin. Alas, the three judges – comedian Tony Rock (Chris Rock’s brother), singer King Princess and American barbecue showdown host Lyric Lewis – successfully detected Weiss’ article as the cake among the five-pin lineup.
Don’t feel bad — Weiss still has a decent record of winning and losing in televised cooking contests. In 2020, he won Season 10 of Food Network’s Halloween Wars as part of the team of three bakers “Mommies Rejects”. And as far as non-televised contests go, he also won a baking contest in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with the grand prize of a trip for two to Switzerland. Alas, Weiss never made the trip: “I asked my boss to give me the weekend off, promising, ‘If I win, I’ll give you the prize.'”

Is it cake?however, is by far the biggest stage he has appeared on.

“This show, unlike a lot of shows, had legs,” Weiss says. “And there are a lot of families watching it. If I am in the supermarket or the store, I am recognized more by children than by adults.
To what does he attribute the virality and the family character of the series?

“The format is different because there wasn’t a lot of drama. We all really, really liked each other and blended in,” Weiss says. Indeed, the contestants later posted group selfies on their social media showing them all smiling together outside.

Compare this dynamic to Gordon Ramsay’s swear-laden rants on Hell’s Kitchen Where Nightmares in the kitchenor TBS’ Rat in the kitchen, in which a member of each kitchen team attempts to sabotage the dish. “To this day, we all continue to chat with each other in a group text,” says Weiss. “It was by far the best experience I’ve had on a show.”

For his most memorable moment competing on a show, however, he cites a scene from Food Network’s Pastry daredevilsin which he had to make an edible sugar sculpture 6 feet tall – and carry it through an obstacle course.

A four-course meal

IIt’s a piece of cake ? was Weiss’ big break into TV fame, emulating the path of his idol.

“Julia Child is the reason I got into the industry,” Weiss recalls. “I used to watch all these cooking shows on PBS back then because there was no Food Network or big YouTube channels.” He and Child were both born on August 15, and he hopes the similarities don’t end there. “She didn’t really become famous until she was around 57, and my 57th birthday is in August.”

Asked to name their favorite fictional pop culture leader – with options like Monica from Friendsby Pixar Ratatouilleand even Lunchlady Doris from The simpsons — Weiss selects the Swedish chef of The puppet show. “He reminds me of some chefs I’ve worked with in the past. You’ll be working with these European chefs, they’ll be mumbling and they already have the accent so you have no idea what they’re saying.

What’s next for Weiss? On TikTok and Instagram, where he has thousands of followers, he posts videos in which he cuts out his hyper-realistic cakes to reveal the dessert inside, with recent slices featuring cakes resembling an Etch A Sketch and a Amazon box. On April 1, he also posted a video showing a hat, then he pulls out his knife and cuts to reveal it’s actually…a hat.

@chefsugarishere ♬ original sound – chefsugarishere

On the other hand, he has a wedding to organize. “Bhavna wants me to make our wedding cake. Right now, I’m trying to figure out what type,” Weiss says. There are high expectations on this front; a mistake would be like a professional musician choosing the wrong song for his own first dance. (Weiss has a son, Charles, and a daughter, Emilia, from a previous marriage.)

But if you want to order a cake yourself from Weiss, be aware of price considerations in advance.

“A simple 8 inch round cake, 6 inches tall, if decorated or sculpted in some way, could easily cost between $400 and $450. And that’s a small cake! exclaims Weiss, “Someone recently contacted me and said they wanted a replica guitar. For me, that starting price would be around $750. I told them, ‘You can buy a guitar for $130!’ he laughs. “If your budget is under $200, you better go get a cake from a supermarket.”

He himself is not averse to these low-cost food options. Guess where the professional chef took his now-fiancée on their first date? The Potbelly sandwich chain.

This story originally appeared in our July issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.