She’s always gone all in, family members say.
“I knew she was going to be a little rocket, but I didn’t know she was going to fly this high. And I know she’s going to go higher,” said her grandmother, Susan West of Sebastopol.
“When she was just a little thing, she was imagining making the house into a salon and getting buckets of water to soak our feet and paint our toenails. And this was all for 50 cents. She was a like a little entrepreneur,” West remembered. “When I watched her as a child, she was tearing up the living room and turning it into a fort or a theater. We would watch a movie and we’d have to have a ticket and popcorn and candy, like you went to a real theater. She’s always been a lot of fun and gotten a lot of attention. It was easy to give it to her.”
Discovered on Facebook
Morales was recruited for “Bake It ’Til You Make It” by a man who reached out to her through Facebook. It felt dubious at first, she said, because he used his personal account to contact her, and she had no information about the show or what it was about.
But it all checked out, after an hour-long Zoom interview in the spring of 2020. She was invited to make a pilot video, which she did in her little kitchen in Berkeley with her Uncle Matthew Gravell, who has Down syndrome, behind the camera.
“He’s hilarious and the most lovable person I know, the perfect person to film me. We laughed the whole time,” Morales said.
She made sure to wear her signature bandana and lipstick. “And I just tried to be me and as quirky as possible,” she said.
“Definitely what I’ve realized throughout this entire process is the baker comes second to just being marketable.”
Morales was one of three bakers to be filmed for the show’s pilot episode. Instead of working out of a studio in Georgia as originally planned, a film crew came to California and captured her baking and telling her story, at her suggestion, in her grandmother’s Sebastopol kitchen.
“I thought, ‘I want my family and my grandma and my uncle and my mom to be involved in my story.’ It was so special because of the way I grew up. Learning to bake and cook was through my mom and my grandma. I just have precious memories of us all dancing and listening to Sam Cook in the kitchen and licking the beaters.”
Morales chose to make a layered red velvet cheesecake for the pilot.
“It was going to be this over-the-top, decadent slice I was going to present. It turned out so bad,” she said, laughing. “I mean, it was delicious. But it looked like the COVID ball.”
That didn’t sink the show. Months later, while sitting on the roof of her co-op in Berkeley, she got a call informing her the show was a go.
Out of her element
“Bake It ’Til You Make It” isn’t your typical food wars-type of show. Instead, it follows seven bakers as they compete against other bakers, not necessarily each other, in competitions around the country.
The first episode follows several as they vie for an award with elaborately constructed cakes at the National Capital Area Cake Show in Virginia. Morales can be seen only fleetingly in the first couple episodes, but she was expected to be featured more prominently last Friday.
Contestants can’t share any spoilers. But she said she and one other baker, a former football player and cupcake maker from Delaware, are the only two with no experience in competitive baking and the only two who make a living baking.
The other cast members make intricately constructed theme cakes that are more like works of art where food just happens to be the medium, something that’s become an online obsession of one-upmanship.
“The thing is, does that even taste good when it’s made out of PVC pipe, modeling chocolate and Rice Krispie treats?” she said. “That’s not what I want to spend my time on. I want to eat what I bake.”
Because there were no local competitions, producers had to create a competition for her at the Marin Farmers’ Market. She did compete at one big show: the Ultimate Sugar Show in Georgia, but she discovered competitive cake baking is not her thing.
What’s next?
Morales, whose story of tenacity gained national attention when she was invited to appear on “Good Morning America” in 2019 and was presented with a $10,000 check to help with college, has an exuberant personality made for TV. She also was considered for (but didn’t get) a spot on Peacock’s “Baking It,” with Maya Rudoph and Amy Poehler.
What she really wants to do is build a good business. An arrangement with the nonprofit Sonoma Family Meal to use their new kitchen in Petaluma will give her some stability and bring her a step closer to her own place. Moving from kitchen to kitchen like a professional nomad has not been a recipe for success. Her professional Hobart mixer takes three people to move.
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