Ice Carving Demonstration
The Disney Food-Tastic show
One day I received a message from a casting agent on Instagram for a new tv show, Foodtastic. They asked if I would be interested in competing on a 3 person team against two other teams, to my surprise one of my good ice friends was on my team and had referred them to me! Once I confirmed we began going over the vision of the show. Create a show stopping sculpture with the theme of our episode that was entirely made out of food!
Our first episode was the very first to film for the series. It was a pirates of the Caribbean theme with the story of helping capitan Barbosa find a hidden treasure and each team was given a secret that must be incorporated into our sculpture. Following a pirate theme the secret ingredients were shrimp, crab and squid. We were given the squid to incorporate into our build. We created the back section of a pirate ship with 3 squid crew members, a monkey, treasure chest and ice waves crashing up against it. We were the guinea pigs of the series and both filming crew and competitors learned A LOT. After 3 days of work ranging between 12-14 hr days we were DONE. All of that hard work paid off as our team, “Monster Sculptors” were dubbed the champions and received the coveted Disney Foodtastic pin.
Skip ahead 6 weeks after the remaining episodes were filmed, the producers reached out to the three of us to be a part of the Christmas special episode where they wanted to highlight ice sculpting, my specialty, and each team had a sculptor on it. With minimal prep time we were given everything to prepare for another massive food sculpture. This time it was a muppets theme. We had to incorporate 2 specific characters, we chose statler and waldorf, into our final sculpture with a twist of adding a specific theme. The three options were Christmas tree, hearth and nutcracker. Our team was given the nutcracker theme and we took our own spin on it and incorporated the nutcracker ballet with our characters based in a theater from the show. At this point the production team had ironed out a lot of kinks from our first filming. With highlighting ice and knowing what we wanted to incorporate, I needed a freezer. It ended up being the smallest freezer trailer I think they could find that I had to work in! Nonetheless I was determined to WOW the judges with my ice skills and bring our food sculpture to life with ice. After long days of work we had brought our vision to life. Each time we competed we made sure that when the judges first saw our sculpture that it told a story. There was no questioning what it was or losing their attention and it worked! To this day, I still don’t know how I didn’t break any of the intricate ice pieces I created. But, it is one of the best sculptures I have sculpted by hand to date! And, ultimately, it was the winning factor that separated our team from the others and brought our team to victory!!! Monster Sculptors was crowned Diney Foodtastic holiday champions! We are the only three individuals in the world that earned the coveted holiday special Foodtastic pin. Never stop playing with your food!
