A Mississippi resident recently had his baking skills put to the test on Netflix’s Is It Cake, Too? competition, which requires contestants to make cakes look like everyday objects.
Shelby native Corterrius Allen, who also goes by the name “DaCakeGoat,” was chosen as a contestant on the show after competing on Food Network’s Halloween Wars in 2021.
During an episode of Good Things with Rebecca Turner, Allen stated that he discovered his love for baking after working as a buttercream maker and dishwasher at a bake shop in Cleveland.
“I started making cupcakes, so the word got around on campus and I started selling cupcakes out of my dorm room and then one day someone asked me to do a cake. I didn’t even know if I knew how to make a cake so I just took the order and stepped out in faith,” Allen said. “The design didn’t look good, but the cake itself was good so I started to practice more.”
After that, Allen began working towards honing his baking and decorating abilities, with his first realistic cake being modeled after a stack of pancakes.
Despite his prior experience, the recent Mississippi Valley State University graduate explained that he quickly realized that Is It Cake, Too? was a different kind of competition than he was expecting.
“I always just tell them it’s a game of deception,” Allen said. “You have to go in there and you have to make your cake look exactly like the decoys that are placed right in front of you. Any little hiccup or mess-up can cause you to miss out on $5,000 to $10,000 or even the whole grand prize, which was $70,000.”
Allen joined nine other contestants to fool a panel of judges through the creation of hyper-realistic cakes in each episode, with one individual being chosen to go home after each challenge.
“Going into the competition, I didn’t look at it like it was a normal competition because you wanted to help out the other contestants,” Allen said. “We were all so supportive of each other because we all had a common enemy and that was the celebrity judges they brought in.”
Now, Allen has chosen to continue pursuing his passion by opening his own baking company, CJA’s Cakes and Cupcakes.
