Lakes Region baker rolls on Food Network show

MOULTONBOROUGH — Jen Clifford said she was worried that she wouldn’t be good enough to compete with the other contestants on Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship. That was, until the filming of the third episode, when the judges picked Clifford’s rolled cake as their favorite.

“What!?” exclaimed a clearly shocked Clifford at the climax of the episode, which aired on Monday night. The ultimate challenge of the episode was for each of the contestants to create a Thanksgiving-themed Yule Log cake, a thin cake spread with a filling, then rolled into a cylinder and decorated, usually to look like a log. Clifford, who works as the head baker at Cup and Crumb Bakery in Moultonborough, chose to make a chocolate cake with a cookies-and-cream filling, then piped frosting in a fall foliage theme on the exterior and, for a final touch, made a few small pumpkins with chocolate truffle filling.

Clifford, speaking by phone on Tuesday morning, said she was pretty sure that she was going to be safe during the filming of that episode. Each installment of the show selects one baker as the winner – and one baker to be eliminated from the competition. A couple of the other bakers had cakes that didn’t hold together during the roll, so Clifford said she figured she would survive to the next episode. Even when the judges announced that hers was among their two favorites, she was sure that the winner would be the one made by Geoffrey Blount, an instructor at a culinary institute, whose log looked like a work of modern art.

“I was just nervous to go out there,” Clifford said. When she started the Championship, she said she was worried that she would “make a fool of myself and go home immediately.” That didn’t happen – in fact, in the first episode, her version of the traditional Danish Kransekake wreath cake was selected as runner-up. In the second episode, her trio of pies finished mid-pack. By episode three, Clifford had shown that she deserved to be there. But, winner of the episode?

“I’m shocked, clearly,” she said. “I was seriously thinking Geoff was going to take that for sure. I’m never really confident enough to think I’m doing well.”

Part of Clifford’s modesty comes from her background. She grew up in Moultonborough, started working in bakeries as a teenager, and never got any formal culinary education. Instead, she stayed in her small town, where she and her husband raise two children, and was happy to work in a kitchen where she focused on challenging herself to make the best version of each treat that she could.

She is most comfortable in that environment, competing against herself, judging her food by her own standards. When Food Network called – someone had taken notice of her food posted on Instagram – she couldn’t pass up the chance to bake on TV.

Now, she sees that the self-taught girl from small-town New Hampshire can make some pretty good food.

“I am who I am, I don’t know anyway else to be. I definitely have a style and I don’t stray too far from it, I just try to be who I am, true to myself. I take traditional desserts and make them the best that I can,” she said. Now, she has a sense of how good she is.

“I am my own worst critic,” she said. “Just being against all these super-talented people, to have that win, it gave me the confidence to say, I think I can do this, I think I can hang with these guys.”

The Holiday Baking Championship airs at 9 p.m. on Mondays.