‘Halloween Baking Championship’ Host John Henson Speaks Out After Emotional Season 12 Premiere

Host and curator John Henson opened the doors to the Museum of Unnatural History for Season 12 of Halloween Baking Championship. The deviously delicious competition kicked off with a two-hour premiere where 10 bakers looked to scare up enough wins heading into the finale to earn this year’s title and $25,000. This frightfully fun Food Network offering opened September 14 with a “Haunted Heat” challenge with the bakers tasked with making a creation that expressed their favorite Halloween memory using a specific nut as an ingredient. Things got emotional as they battled to impress. 

Ultimately, judges  Stephanie Boswell, Aarti Sequeira, and Zac Young chose young pastry chef Kyle Caulkins, the returning cake artist Justin Giordano, and dessert table business owner Marian Mulero for immunity. They were able to sit out the second round of the evening and move on to next week. Victory was even sweeter for Mulero, who also earned $1,000 for her mousse dacquoise skull. 

The remaining seven ventured to the Hall of Humanity for inspiration to serve up “Hideous Mask Desserts” from the disfigured mask collection. In the end, Katie Shegda, a pastry chef from Greenville, was sent to the dreaded gift shop (and then home). Her stout spice cake masquerade mask turned out to be not spicy enough to survive the night. 

We caught up with Henson, who married Boswell in the summer, to get the scoop on the kookiness to come. The former Wipeout and Talk Soup host also shares his own spooky season reflections. 

Host John Henson, Contestants Ciarra Roberts, Caleb King, Katie Shegda, Kyle Caulkins, Lisa Pak, Justin Giordano, Baindu Squire, Kyle Olsen, Marian Mulero, and Elizabeth Suwanski, portrait, as seen on Halloween Baking Championship, Season 12.

The Halloween Baking Championship has gone on now for more than a decade. What does that mean to you? 

John Henson: I mean that’s even more when you think of it like dog years or like in TV it’s like 70 years. Nothing runs this long in the world of television. I’m so grateful because there have been a couple of times in my career that I’ve been fortunate enough to walk in.to a job and feel completely at home. Talk Soup was obviously one of those. The chemistry from day one. It felt like a relationship that began in the middle where you just come in and from day one you feel completely at ease. The whole team around the Halloween Baking Championship is very, very tight. We refer to Halloween Baking Championship as summer camp because it feels very much like that. Like the perfect little vacation break where you get to have a bonding experience with a bunch of people. I’m so grateful it has been this long that I’ve been able to be a part of something that I love doing, that it is so beloved by fans, that is ascending in ratings and popularity at this stage of the game. That’s amazing.

And on a personal level, the show is where you met Stephanie. So, the series has brought you even more on that end. 

Absolutely. It’s not often that you get 10 years of work and a wife out of a job. So yeah, hats off. I owe Food Network a debt of gratitude.

How is it working with her on set and also being open now about your relationship as it was not made public since your engagement announcement in January. 

We didn’t really post or acknowledge our relationship really honestly until we were engaged like you said. The response from the fans has just been so wonderful. It’s been universally positive. You know nothing has changed in the way we are on set. Like, we are very much just going to work. When we started dating, there was no discernible change. We were professional in our roles on set, but like I said, it’s a family, and people were really happy for us. To have that happiness mirrored, both behind the scenes and with the audience has been really special. It’s like our favorite part of the year, when we get to shoot the show. You get really bonded with the bakers, especially for me because I spend so much time with them,

The first thing I ever did for Food Network was a cooking competition. It was just a fun little thing that I did because I like to cook, but I have a lot of empathy for the amount of pressure that they’re under, and how intense an experience it is, how challenging it is to be cooking, or in this case, baking in a foreign kitchen. I call it an away game where you don’t know where anything is. I view my job to connect with them on a personal level. I try to put them in a position to do their best, to be present and relax enough to really be authentic with me, and to open up about their experience, and let the viewers into that. You get close to people. You’re watching them go through this very intense experience. It’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy it.

I feel you make them feel at ease as best you can because they are not only under the pressure of the competition, but you’re also throwing things out like opening the fridge and maybe seeing a head pop out or something like that.

Yeah, at ease as you can be in a house of horrors kind of situation. 

What did you make of the first episode? A number of the bakers were emotional at different parts of the challenges. It was also sad to see Katie go home. 

I mean it’s hard to work that hard and that intensely. As the season goes on, it’s hard not becoming super invested in it…I want to be a release valve for them. You try to really see who needs to be told to take a breath, and that everything’s fine. I try to be grounding for them, while at the same time, being a little bit of comic relief. I try to pull their experience and their story out a little bit. I’m trying to keep the mood light. There’s a little bit of armchair psychology, reading people and their situations they might need in that moment. You’ll see this over the course of the season, I think the viewers see who is really open to that. Who opens up about their experience and is more vulnerable. I think fans really connect with that. That’s how people really get their favorites they want to root for. 

Contestant Marian Mulero’s round 1 dish, Macadamia Dacquoise withPina Colada Insert and Coconut Mousse and Rum-Infused Pineapple, as seen on Halloween Baking Championship, Season 12.

What were your thoughts on how the challenges played out? Some took the abstract route, which proved risky. Then there were others who wanted to make their visual more obvious. 

That’s the thing. There’s always two challenges per show, and it’s always fascinating to see how people interpret them and relate to them. And I think it’s always interesting for us when people really. connect the challenge to a part of themselves, really personalize it. It gives a layer of depth and puts that into their dessert. With the haunted mask challenge,  the producers really tried to really imbue this with a lot of your creativity. You have a blank slate. Okay, you’re making a mask. What are you going to do with it? It allows an enormous range for interpretation and creativity and artistry.

I cannot stress enough how talented these bakers are. To be able to accomplish what they accomplish. Not just in terms of flavor profile and execution, but in creativity and in artistry., under enormous time constraints and enormous pressure. They were literally running around and working until the last possible second. Every season I’m blown away by the things people create. And then you get to try it, and you’re like, “Oh my god, not only is it this incredible visual experience, but it’s delicious. It’s two levels that they’re playing on.

What did you make of Justin’s journey from last season where he bowed out and then for him to come back this time around?

I was so happy to see him come back. That had never happened before last season. Where somebody just kind of took themselves out of the competition. For him to be able to come back and have another shot to put himself out there. We were all thrilled to see him. He’s a great guy, super talented baker. It takes a lot of courage to come back and throw yourself back into the frying pan. We were all applauding that.

Who had the best costume out of the judges during the first episode?

With Zac, I don’t even know if that was a costume. He sort of is Peter Pan. He has never grown up, emotionally, physically size-wise. 

Although he did get married recently. 

Yeah, that’s right. That was very exciting. But knowing the story behind Stephanie’s costume gave me an added layer of it because I know the pathos behind it. She had this idea of this incredible butterfly costume. She wanted this sort of ethereal butterfly costume, and instead she got a costume that her mom had worn. I think there’s actually a photo of her just weeping, just so sad that she’s wearing this heavy old costume and just crying the entire time. I think her brothers are smiling in the background. That one has history for me. I don’t claim to be objective, but I’m going to have to say that one. 

What’s your favorite Halloween memory? 

I’m the youngest of five boys. I am the youngest by seven years. There was a lot of what I would call parental exhaustion by the time I came around…I remember one year specifically, I went as the mummy. If you are reading this, and you have children, I implore you, never dress your child as the mummy, because inevitably what happens is you just wrap a kid in like 500 yards of gauze. It’s just a miserable experience because it’s over your face, and you’re claustrophobic, and you can’t breathe, and you can’t articulate your hands. It is awful, I’m a prisoner in this costume, please let me out of it. I can’t breathe, and it starts coming off. Before you know it, you’re coming out of a bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. You got this long train of gauze behind you. That would probably be the one that comes to mind. I’m just telling parents out there, don’t do that to your child.

What can you tease about the next few weeks of the Halloween Baking Championship? 

This was a really fun theme, and they made the most of it. All the different rooms, all the different challenges. I am amazed. by the producer’s creativity. I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say I think the bakers were challenged and horrified. There is everything. There is the sort of jump scare kind of Halloween that you think of or the skin-crawling, kind of get-it-off-me. There are the frights. I think the audience will get a kick out of it. I enjoyed it. I hate to say it, but I sort of get to torture the bakers a little bit, you know? I know what’s coming and they don’t. There’s an element of, like I’m running a haunted house. I am the one that is scaring the people that come through the haunted house. So it brings out the schadenfreude in me, I’ll say that.

Are you decorating for Halloween yet? 

Not yet. The kids are 13 and 15, so they’re sort of out of that. They’ll still dress up, but it’s not trick-or-treating. It’s, “Dad, leave me alone. I’ll be back in a while. I’ve lived in a couple of neighborhoods in LA where. Halloween is like Mardi Gras for the elementary school set, and they’re bussing kids in, and the streets are packed. There was one neighborhood that I lived in where I bought almost $500 worth of candy at Costco. You know those giant storage tubs, those plastic bins? I went through two-and-a-half of those. We were out of candy by 8:45. It was a wedding reception line. You get to that point where you’re like, “Look, I’m out, man, leave me alone.” It’s time to shut it down when you get, like, a 45-year-old man that’s not in costume, and you’re like, “Alright, you know what? We’re done here, you know? “This is no longer trick-or-treating. If you’re not in costume and you’re a grown-ass man, this is now begging. Then what am I going to hand out when I run out?  Batteries? Am I giving out cans of soup? And then you have to shut the lights and do the, “Sorry, we’re out of candy thing.” I sort of became the Clark Griswold of Halloween. I was out there risking death on a ladder, nailing lights.

One year I shopped at a pop-up Halloween shop, and I went bananas on animatronics. There was one that I got that was a haunted doll, a demonic haunted doll in a hospital gown that hung upside down, and her head turned, and the lights in her eyes came on. She opened her mouth and screamed. I thought it would be great, but my kids were little at the time. It made my kids cry when it was still in the box. Literally, they looked at the box and started crying. I was like, “Alright, next year. This goes into the garage, and we’ll bust this out next year. This is too much. Alright, now we know where the line is, we’ll pull back.”

Did you put it up the next year? 

We did. That’s for my kids and their doctor when they get older, when they start to cope with their childhood trauma, to talk about what I did to them. But I love Halloween, and the Halloween Baking Championship is a really special show. If you had ever told me when I was hosting Talk Soup in my 20s.that I would spend 10 years on a baking show on Food Network, I probably would have laughed in your face. I always tell the story about my agent calling me 10 years ago and going, “Do you want to host this Halloween show, a baking championship? And I go, “I don’t know, what’s it called?” And she goes, “Halloween Baking Championship.” And I was like, “Yeah, catchy title, I’m in. Halloween-themed baked goods. Everybody knows that’s my thing. Now it has a very near and dear place in my heart and in my home because I am now married to a two-time Michelin Award-winning, world-renowned pastry chef and chocolatier. And I’m gonna tell you right now, that’s a quality of life thing. If you have that opportunity, you make it work, you figure it out because life is good.

You just have to watch the calories in that case. 

Oh my God, it’s always in the house. There’s just so much product. You just walk through the kitchen. I’m like Boogie. I’m the golden retriever just waiting for something to hit the floor so I can snap it up.

Halloween Baking Championship, Mondays, 9/8c, Food Network (Next Day on Max)