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Mostly Cloudy Sweet success at North Bellmore bakery
Decorators featured on TLC's 'Next Great Baker'
Meredith Gulfman has been a teaching assistant at Merrick’s Birch Elementary School for six years, but she’s also been baking all her life. Still, she said she was unsure whether she could design a cake in the likeness of King Tut for a friend’s birthday four years ago.
Gulfman called her longtime friend, Don Donneruno, asking whether he could help decorate the cake. Although Donneruno said he had never touched a cake, Gulfman was sure that, with his artistic talent, he could sculpt her grand creation. When the cake was done, Donneruno posted a photo of it on Facebook — a choice that altered his career path.
“From that one photo, I started getting phone calls from people asking me to decorate cakes,” he said. “The very next day, a friend posted on my Facebook page, ‘You’re the Cake Don.’ Then I said, ‘You know, this could possibly turn into something.’”
Donneruno’s Facebook friends weren’t the only ones who recognized the skills that he and Gulfman possessed. The pair were recently chosen to appear on “Next Great Baker,” a reality contest on TLC hosted by “The Cake Boss,” Buddy Valastro. And the owners of North Bellmore’s A Taste of Home bakery also took notice, welcoming the pair to their shop after they finished filming the television show.
Tight competition
Donneruno, 45, of Northport, and Gulfman, 37, of Westbury, are the tan team in the fourth season of “The Next Great Baker,” which premieres on June 24 at 9 p.m. on TLC. They competed for a chance to work for Valastro at the new Carlo’s Bakery at the Venetian in Las Vegas, in addition to a grand prize of $100,000. “Next Great Baker” averaged 1.3 million viewers last year.
The pair noted that they could not divulge how far they progressed in the competition, which was filmed in February and March. Gulfman, however, said that the creative cake challenges that Valastro and the other judges — famed chocolatier Jacques Torres and Magnolia Bakery’s chief baking officer, Bobbie Lloyd — gave the 10 teams were more difficult than she had imagined.
