Bethel Park resident to appear on ‘Cake Wars’
Tristan Slater, left, and Emily Bartlow model their “Cake Wars” outfits.
Tristan Slater will graduate from Grove City College at the end of this semester. She is majoring in communications and Spanish, and had the lead role in the school’s fall production of “Oklahoma!”
See how they do on the episode that airs Feb. 1.
Tristan Slater and Emily Bartlow appear on a “Cake Wars” promo.
Emily and Tristan flank “Cake Wars” cast members Waylynn Lucas and Ron Ben Israel.
Say you’re selected to appear on national television. Your first inclination probably is to open the nearest window and shout, “Hey, I’m going to appear on national television!”
Now consider the plight of Tristan Slater and Emily Bartlow, Grove City College roommates who got the nod for the Food Network’s “Cake Wars.”
“It was difficult because we couldn’t tell anybody where we were going. It was a total secret,” Tristan, a 2012 Bethel Park High School graduate, said about traveling for filming in October.
Naturally, their friends and professors became a bit curious as to their whereabouts.
“It’s really hard to just leave everything and skip off to California,” Tristan said. “We came up with all sorts of things to tell them.”
They couldn’t tell the real reason until Monday, one week before their episode airs. At that point, the friends and professors could start marking their calendars – or these days, setting their DVRs – for 9 p.m. Eastern on Feb. 1.
Oh, and Minecraft players might want to tune in, too. The premise of “Cake Wars” is a competition to come up with the best cake for a special event, and the popular video game is the theme of Tristan and Emily’s episode.
“It has some very recognizable characters and elements to the game that we wanted to include,” Tristan said about their creation, on which they had all of three weeks to think about and put to the test. “We experimented with different flavors and just trying to find what we could do well, hoping it would work for the show.”
The road to “Cake Wars” started when Emily, a Sacramento, Calif., native who graduated from Grove City in December, was online looking for recipes for her brother’s birthday dinner. She noticed a call for contestants and decided to give it a try, asking Tristan if she’d like to be her partner in the unlikely event of being selected.
“We had no ambitions or expectations of being on a national TV show,” Tristan recalled. “We laughed about it and said, no way could it happen.”
The next thing they knew, they were headed to Los Angeles for filming, knowing full well that televisions across America eventually would be tuned in to see them.
“As soon as the cameras are rolling,” Tristan said, “you don’t have time to think about anything else.”
Besides, she had spent the summer interning for WICU-TV in Erie, so she had that type of experience going for her.
On “Cake Wars,” Emily is technically “lead baker” for the show’s purposes.
“Her cakes are stunning, and that is the reason we were there,” Tristan explained. “But we viewed ourselves as a team.”
When they tune in Monday night, that will be the first time they’ll have seen any parts of the episode except for a few Food Network promotional clips.
“They thought we worked well together,” Tristan said. “So that was encouraging.”
Learn more about Tristan and Emily at http://kindredcupboards.wix.com/emandtris.