- December 19, 2024
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When Briea Lowe toured Notter School of Pastry Arts, she thought the school wasn’t for her.
She had a bit of an ego coming off her third-place finish in Le Cordon Bleu’s rising star competition, which earned her a $15,000 scholarship to the culinary school.
But her mother had encouraged her to look at the local pastry school.
“I was like, ‘Well, if (the owner) won’t even talk to me, I don’t want to go to this school,’” Lowe said.
When Ewald Notter, the owner of Notter School of Pastry Arts, saw Lowe, he immediately grabbed her and told her in 10 minutes she would walk out of the school knowing how to make a chocolate flower.
In 10 minutes, she learned how to temper dark chocolate, dip a paring knife into tempered chocolate on acetate and set the chocolate in a refrigerator so it crystallizes, use melted chocolate to assemble the flower and spray it with edible cocoa butter color and gold dust.
“I literally thought I had just been shown Neverland by Peter Pan and somehow I was a pixie,” Lowe said. “I fell in love. It was almost magical.”
Lowe decided despite her scholarship, she would enroll at Notter School of the Pastry Arts to learn from Notter himself.
Since then, Lowe, now 33, has been doing all she can to excel in the pastry arts, give back to her mentor and parents and educate anyone with a passion for the pastry arts.
Lowe has been focusing on her YouTube channel, Pastry Fundamentals, in which she teaches classic pastry techniques, styles and concepts.
“It’s about enabling people to have the skills to do it themselves,” she said. “I truly believe if I educate the public on what pastry is, they will spend their money where it belongs, toward businesses who are doing a pastry properly and providing a high-quality product at a reasonable price.”
Lowe started her own pastry business, Glaze Confections, in October 2020. It was time for her to go out on her own and do business in the way she thought was right.
“What I’m seeing from people who are trying to do baking and who are not pastry chefs at farmers markets is they’ll make a small quantity and charge like $9,” Lowe said. “I don’t agree with that. That’s not OK in my book.
“For Glaze, I’ll produce 500 pieces for a farmers market, and I’ll only charge $3. I’m not going to charge you more than that, because I don’t agree with that, and if I can’t give you that service, I just choose not to do farmers markets until I can.”
Lowe said she wants each person to feel special when eating one of her pastries.
“You should feel like the only person in the world at that moment and get that spark of pixie dust like I felt when my mentor showed me how to make a chocolate flower,” she said.
Lowe said she’s been playing the numbers game since the pandemic. As much as she wants to share her creations with the community, she refuses to do so if she can’t make them affordable. With ingredients such as eggs costing her 25 cents per egg compared to 9 cents per egg four years ago, Glaze Confections has taken a backseat.
Instead, she’s focusing on making more long-form episodes for Pastry Fundamentals, helping people with a passion for baking like she has had since childhood.
Lowe’s passion for pastries and baking started as a child, learning from her mother and grandmother.
Rather than turning in dioramas or diagrams like her classmates at Osceola County School for the Arts, Lowe had other ideas.
She was attending the school to focus on theater, but she also had a knack for baking.
For one assignment, she decided to make a box cake look like the layers of a skin cell. It was a common occurrence for Lowe to turn in baked items rather than projects out of paper and cardboard.
Lowe said her friends joked that she would never be a “starving artist.” They encouraged her to be a chef.
“I never really thought about it,” Lowe said. “It was more like I just wanted an excuse to eat with my friends and get an A.”
But because of her learning disabilities and lack of confidence, Lowe was afraid to apply for college. Instead, she pursued culinary school.
Upon graduation, she started working at Albert Uster Imports, one of the largest distributors of pastry imports in the United States.
At only 18 years old, she was put to the test. The CEO saw her dedication and passion as an intern and was considering promoting her to become assistant corporate pastry chef. If she did well, she would be the youngest in that position in the company’s history.
In eight hours, Lowe had to create an entree, a 3-foot-tall show piece, three different molded bonbons, a plated dessert, entremet and a wedding cake. She was hired.
Lowe went on to compete in the Junior World Pastry Cup in 2011 in Italy. Her showpiece collapsed with 18 minutes left in the competition. She kept calm and composed under the pressure to ensure she still had something to present. Lowe said she had five out of the 15 international judges in front of her booth representing the U.S. watching her recovery because she was “so laser focused on a goal.”
She placed fifth out of 15 countries, which she said she considered herself a failure for not making the podium, but judges thought differently.
“They said, ‘We’re going to see you go places because of your goal mentality. … You might have placed fifth, but we saw something in you that means volumes more than what we even think you understand right now,’” she said. “I thought I was a loser.”
Competitors signed her chef’s jacket, and she still has it to this day as a reminder of the lessons of perseverance and her goals of continuing to become a better chef.
Lowe has participated in 32 competitions, placing in the top three in at least half of them.
She’ll never forget her first experience on TV. She competed in Food Network’s “Sugar Dome” in 2012. Her showpiece came crashing down on her head. The show’s medical team had to come on stage and wake her up as the piece caused her to lose consciousness.
She said her team looked at her with defeat, to which she didn’t disagree, but she refused to give up.
Lowe said she and her team still were able to put together a beautiful piece for the “Wizard of Oz” theme.
Lowe went on to compete in other Food Network shows, including “Halloween Wars,” “The Elf on the Shelf: Sweet Showdown” and “Holiday Wars,” often returning for more than one season.
Each episode came with surmounting pressure. Could her team come through with a victory in the end?
Being on TV allowed Lowe to use that high school theater background to unmask her silly self, although she said being autistic, she tends to be hyper vigilant and guarded while also showing her more serious professional pastry chef side that could show off the skills she’s gained over her career.
“When I choose to do competitions, I have to separate into that theater performer that wants to be funny and be your court jester, if you will,” Lowe said. “But then there’s that pastry chef discipline training side that goes, ‘We have a goal and we need to win, and what are we going to do to win?’”
At the end of the day, she always has competed to become a better chef, despite what people might say about her online.
Every TV appearance came with criticism as people judged her for how she carried herself in these sometimes pressure-cooker situations, but Lowe said she always used the pressure to fuel her and drive her toward the finish line.
She recalled being bullied after her team won season four of “Halloween Wars.” She only was 21 years old.
“I was the youngest competitor to ever win the show, and people were like, ‘Oh, you didn’t look very happy,’ or ‘Why didn’t you hug your teammates?’ People came up with all sorts of complaints,” she said. “What’s funny is, when we filmed the finale, I had strep throat. I was in a lot of pain. Nobody knows those things. They just immediately try to judge you.”
No matter what people say, Lowe encourages those she teaches to use the stress and pressure they are experiencing to fuel themselves.
“Use it to motivate you because at the end of the day, no one else is going to motivate you but yourself,” she said. “Only pressure makes diamonds.”
