Most teenagers celebrate a birthday with a cake. Brooklyn Kyzar’s family once faced a different kind of pressure: baking birthday cakes for the girl who owns her own bakery, Whipped Up. Her mother and father made a two-layer strawberry cake for Brooklyn and a chocolate chip cake for her twin brother Avery, and the family agrees the stakes were unusually high.
Kyzar’s path to pastry started early, watching her mother and grandmother bake in the family kitchen and, later, starring in an imaginary Food Network show complete with a chef’s hat. At age 10, she got serious. Through her grandmother, she met Aidan Berry, the winner of Season 3 of the Kids Baking Championship and its $25,000 grand prize, and learned what it actually takes to get on the show.
The Audition Process
The Kids Baking Championship, based in Los Angeles, draws more than a thousand applications from the United States and Canada each season for 12 competition spots. The process is rigorous: video submissions of baking at home, producer interviews, and proof that a young baker genuinely knows the craft. Baking, after all, is both art and science, and the show’s producers screen for both.
Kyzar tried out for Season 6 at age 12, nervous and prepared. She was selected on her first attempt. She didn’t win the title, but the experience delivered something arguably more durable: confidence, and a certain celebrity status among family and friends that never quite wore off.
Whipped Up Is Born
In August 2018, after her television appearance, Kyzar founded Whipped Up, her own bakery business. The early resume filled fast: a speaking engagement in Birmingham at 13 in front of 25 kids for Itty Bitty Bakers, a judge’s seat at a church Christmas cookie bake-off, an appearance on Talk of Alabama to discuss her baking, and baking classes taught in Silverhill.
The business runs on custom orders: wedding cakes, birthday cakes, French macarons, sugar cookies, and cupcakes. Kyzar keeps a calendar and asks for about six months’ notice on big projects like wedding cakes. For custom work, she reviews photos with clients to make sure the finished product matches the vision. Seasonal cupcakes rotate through the lineup, Maple Pecan and Pumpkin Snickerdoodle among them, and the cake she most wants to master is an entremet, the layered French mousse cake that tests every skill a pastry chef has.
The Six-Tier Wedding Cake
Every baker has a story that marks the transition from talented kid to professional, and Kyzar’s came from Mobile. The parents of a bride asked her to create a six-tiered wedding cake, a project requiring a bigger kitchen than her own. Jimmy and Paige Dill, owners of Tailgate Cheese Straws in Fairhope, lent her theirs in exchange for a cooking lesson. Kyzar baked the cakes, made the icing, transported every tier to the wedding venue, and assembled and decorated on site. It was a monumental task for any pastry chef, and she pulled it off without a hitch.
Her favorite wedding commission to date was a cupcake-themed display of individual cakes, a reminder that big celebrations don’t always require a big knife.
School First, But a Chef’s Offer on the Table
Baking has never been the whole story. Kyzar is a serious student, dual-enrolled in high school and college courses, and for a while she imagined a career in the medical field rather than the kitchen. But after working alongside the pastry chef at the Grand Hotel, a professional offer was left on the table if she ever wants it.
That is the thing about starting a business at 13: by the time your peers are choosing careers, you already have one, with a client list, a portfolio, and a season of national television behind you. Whipped Up maintains a presence on Facebook and Instagram, where custom orders and seasonal creations find their audience.
Whatever Kyzar ultimately decides, whether medicine, pastry, or something in between, Baldwin County already knows what she can do with an oven, a piping bag, and a deadline.