Baker Brittany Allen reveals what motivates her to create such creative cakes. 

Cake is not what you’d call a traditional medium in the arts but what Brittany Allen, co-owner of St. Albert’s Confections Cake Co., does regularly with batter and icing can only be described as works of art. While she can create cakes with towers of flowers so delicate that they look real, or the perfect multi-tiered nod to recent pop culture, her real passion is designing unique cake-based sculptures. Allen is happy to form the delicious, fluffy treat into pretty much anything you can dream—a hamburger, a suitcase, an avocado, a bottle of tequila. The more life like, the better.  

“I can’t draw to save my life,” shares Allen with a laugh. “Making something you can eat that people don’t believe is food is my thing. I like to make things where people are like, “that’s not cake” and I’m like ‘yeah it is!’ 

Her draw to the world of sweets has little to do with a personal affinity for sweets (she prefers a bag of chips over cake, though she does have a weakness for macarons). Instead, her cake-based career started at cooking school on Vancouver Island, where her work experience was at a shop called Cake Bread.  

“They showed me chocolate work,” she explains. “They poured chocolate on these sheets of paper and they wrapped the cakes with them. They were perfect and beautiful and that’s kind of what I like about cooking. I didn’t necessarily like working on the line flipping burgers. That was not my passion—it was making [food] pretty and perfect. So when I saw that with cakes, it was like ‘oh! I think I like this.’ So then I started dabbling in the cake world after that.” 

Her love of making cakes pretty and perfect eventually led her to open Confections Cake Co. with her partner, Jarrett Delaney. Tucked into a corner on Perron Street, the shop is inspired by European dessert bars.  After traveling around Italy and France, she noticed a marked lack of places you can go for a late-night treat and some wine here at home. So Allen and Delaney set about fixing that. 

While opening a shop had always been a dream for Allen, there was another, perhaps even wilder, dream she had simmering on the back burner—to be on a cooking TV show. And in a year where most dreams got put on hold, Allen got her chance to pursue hers. 

After auditioning and being put on the alternate list for Food Network Canada’s The Big Bake in 2018, she and her team got cast for the upcoming season in 2019.  

“And then COVID happened,” she says with a sigh. “It kept getting postponed and postponed and we thought, ‘oh my god! Are we ever going to get to do this?!’ And then finally they said, ‘It’s a go!’ So, in January we flew down and got to actually do it! When they reached out to us, I lost my mind a little bit.” 

In The Big Bake, teams compete to win $10, 000 by creating unbelievable cakes in an unbelievably short amount of time. With her teammates—Confections Cake Co. bakers Alex Lovett and Jocelyn Leyte— backing her, the trio happily took on the episode’s imaginative theme: flights of fantasy.  

“Me, Alex and Joc, have been working together forever, so we barely need to talk to each other, which I think is an advantage,” Allen explains. “I swear to god we read each other’s minds half the time. But we’re all really great under pressure.  

Of course, Allen loves the challenge of making something unique and eye-popping. 

“I knew I wanted to do a dragon,” she says.  “And then I thought, ‘his wings are going to flap and he’s going to blow fire and this is what’s happening. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but this is what’s happening.’” 

During the show, the team’s skill and grace under pressure is nothing short of impressive. But when you consider what draws Allen to the art of cake making—the challenge, the creativity, the chance to ‘wow’ people—it’s not surprising that she looked right at home on The Big Bake.  

“It’s getting to make somebody’s day super great, especially when they are going through something rough,” she explains, summarizing what she loves about cake decorating. “And it’s the best when people freak out about a cake. When you’ve worked really hard on a cake and you bring it out and they freak out—it’s the best feeling ever." 

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