Exclusive Lifestyle Report From New York: Who will be the next great baker?

When we last left master baker Buddy Valastro, he was putting icing on the literal and figurative cake: he had top-rating show Cake Boss on Discovery’s TLC channel, his wife Lisa was about to give birth, and he talked about building a state-of-the-art facility to produce his in-demand cakes.

Seven months later Valastro is standing atop an even taller, more elaborately detailed enterprise. He has a new reality show spin-off, Cake Boss: Next Great Baker, a baby boy named Carlo (named after the man who founded his family’s bakery), and a cake factory that turns his clients’ sweet dreams into reality.

At the 10,000 square-foot facility in New Jersey, Buddy hands me a pignoli, an Italian almond cookie studded with pine nuts. “Try this,” he says. Still warm from the oven, the cookie’s so good I almost see double.

Like a Pied Piper of pastries Buddy leads the international press through this bigger and better bakery, which is possibly the best-smelling place on earth. In one of the cavernous decorating rooms he continues to dole out baked goodies, turning us jaded journalists into clamoring little children.

He’s the Boss: Buddy holds up a cake prototype with car made out of modeling chocolate.

About a fresh batch of cupcakes he says with pride, “That’s my vanilla cake … and this is one of my mother’s favorites,” handing out huge pecan wedges. Both are of such excellent yet artisanal quality you’d swear they came from the hands of an Italian nonna, not off the line in a Jersey City facility.

Lackawanna, as Buddy calls this place (after the name of the building), not only allows him to bake thousands of pastries and ship them all over the United States (soon the world); it also serves as the set of Next Great Baker, where 10 promising pastry chefs compete for that vaunted title, US$50,000, and a chance to work with Buddy at Carlo’s Bakery. Every week, the chef-testants face two challenges and one is eliminated, until the last baker is left standing.

In the first season, which is currently airing on TLC, Buddy claims he was really stern with the contestants: “I wanted to give them a hard dose of experience but as the episodes went on, I felt like they were my students and I was rooting for them. That personal connection was pretty cool but there’s definitely some sparks, fireworks, fights, crazy stuff among competitors that I don’t encourage. But once you put some personalities in the kitchen and tell them to bake together, it always makes for great TV.”

Cake Boss Central: Some of the cakes made at Valastro’s state-of-the-art baking facility in Jersey City, New Jersey; the only cakes he won’t bake are erotic cakes, in deference to his mother’s wishes.

We pass through a break room where employees normally eat, and the 10 contestants for Next Great Baker Season 2 are in there having a production meeting.

Buddy plans to tweak the show to make it even better the second time around. “In some episodes we made them bake alone. This year I felt like those challenges didn’t work as well as when they work as a team,” he notes. “Without my team, I could never do what I do. You give these people a 10-, 12-hour window to make a cake … when they do it alone, you get a lot smaller results. When you do it as a team, you get amazing results.”

And what qualities is he looking for in the next great baker?

“I’m looking for a contestant that is a total fit,” Buddy says. “You can’t only know how to decorate cakes, you have to know how to bake them, how to work clean, be willing to scrub the toilet bowl, deliver, and everything in between. You have to execute what your client wants and be able to stand toe-to-toe with my family.”

Since so much of the action in Buddy’s life is happening here, he’s made it Cake Boss Central. There’s a conference room with fake cakes for brides to come in and choose from; a test kitchen where Buddy’s team experiment on new flavors; and a lab where Buddy plans to hold baking classes for kids and their families. A wood-paneled office with espresso machine is connected to a walk-in closet with shower, for when the Cake Boss has to prepare for evening events. A sofa where Buddy Jr.’s four children can watch a flatscreen TV sits under a photo of Valastro with his father, the late Buddy Sr., from whom he inherited his passion, skills, and Carlo’s Bakery.

Fun with fondant: One of Valastro’s 150 employees works in the cake decorating room.

“My dad made cakes for Frank Sinatra’s mom back in the day,” recalls Valastro, a Hoboken boy just like Ole Blue Eyes. “We made a cake for his first wife, Nancy — she was 94 a couple of weeks ago.”

He sits down at his desk to draw the cake of which he’s currently proudest, the eight-foot-tall, 3,000-pound Transformers Autobot he created for a Season 4 episode of Cake Boss. Buddy’s famous hands — pinkie ring and all — quickly sketch out Bumblebee in the process of transforming into a Camaro. “That, I swear to God, is all cake,” he says, indicating the robot’s head and the car. “It took three days and a forklift to pull it out of the truck.”

This dedication to creating ever larger and crazier cakes has kept Cake Boss a hit with the young and young at heart. After Lackawanna we stop at Carlo’s Bakery and the line of children and their parents in front stretches down two city blocks, despite the blazing sun and 30-degree Celsius temperature. Those in line say they’ve been waiting over two hours to get into the small but famous bakery, which is doing a brisk trade in fondant cakes thanks to the show.

“To be able to captivate a four-year-old to a great-grandmother, there’s not many shows that do that,” Buddy says. “But the underlying message is, no matter where you’re from in the world, our show resonates with family. That’s why I push myself to the brink of insanity with these cakes sometimes. I feel it’s my obligation to do the impossible. I want you to say, ‘Wow!’ That’s my gift to you for inviting me into your families.”

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Cake Boss: Next Great Baker airs every Wednesday at 7 p.m. on TLC.

Pastry Mecca: At the famous Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey, featured on Cake Boss, the line of customers stretches down two city blocks.