Selma’s Waters lives to bake another day on Food Network

Published 4:40 pm Friday, August 9, 2019

Brooke Waters, a student at Selma’s Morgan Academy, made her debut on the Food Network’s Kids Baking Championship Monday, where she survived the first round of competition and will return to bake another day.

The television show pits nine kids from across the country against one another in a weekly bake-off, culminating in a championship round on Sept. 16 where one young baker will walk away with the top prize of $25,000, a feature in Food Network Magazine and the title of Kids Baking Champion.

Waters began her ascent to the small screen as an amateur baker in Selma, cooking up a variety of sweet delicacies and drawing inspiration from the Food Network show – now, that dream has become a reality.

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On Monday’s show, the contestants were asked to make an art-inspired two-layer splatter cake using mystery ingredients doled out based on the paint can of their choice – Waters ended up with banana.

“I had never made a banana cake before, so that was a challenge right from the start,” Waters said.  “Also, I wanted to make a 2.3 to represent how much I weighed when I was born, but I couldn’t quite come up with how to do it.  So, I made a basketball because that is my favorite sport.”

Waters mentions her birthweight because she has drawn inspiration from the love she was shown as a patient in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Baptist South in Montgomery – while there, Footprints Ministry, a non-profit dedicated to assisting families with children in the NICU, was established and Waters became the first child the group aided.

Since then, Waters has used her culinary prowess to raise money for the organization and even named her baking operation, Brooke’s Bountiful Blessings, as an homage to the good work the organization did for her so early in life.

Brooke’s banana cake was made with a cream cheese frosting with strawberry coulis with pink, yellow and light blue splatters made from melted chocolate.

“I felt good about my performance,” Water said. “I did not have any major problems during this episode.”

The episode was not without its hang-ups, however, as Waters noted that she forgot a line on her basketball design and ended up with splatters a little too thick, but judges Valerie Bertinelli and Duff Goldman praised the cake as “moist” and “colorful.”

The biggest struggle for Waters was simply overcoming her shyness as the competition and filming kicked off.

“I was nervous at the very beginning of the process but, once we all met each other and saw how much we had in common, it was just fun baking in the Food Network kitchen with all the things I got to choose from and the new friends I made,” Water said.

The next installment of Kids Baking Championship will appear on Food Network Monday, Aug. 12, at 8 p.m Central Standard Time (CST).