“I’m still stunned. I thought, ‘Are you serious?’
Chocolatier Priya Winsor (Baking and Pastry Arts ’19) has a taste for pushing creative and culinary boundaries.
It’s what helped the owner of Compass Chocolates rise to the top on the latest season of the Food Network’s Spring Baking Championship. Winsor, who has never baked professionally, bested 12 other competitors on the reality television show – many of them professional bakers or pastry chefs – to take home the US$25,000 prize.
“I’m still stunned. It was shocking to me. I thought, ‘Are you serious?’” says Winsor of her win on May’s Season 11 finale, which she had to keep secret from even her family.
For the ultimate challenge, the three finalists created a layered cake incorporating a floral flavour and inspired by Marie Antoinette’s elaborate hairstyles – all balanced on a mannequin’s head. When she learned what the final bake-off entailed, Winsor, who had been a hairstylist for 20 years, thought she had hit the sweet spot.
“What a full-circle moment to have my previous career as a hairstylist and my new career as a chocolatier combine in this last challenge,” she says.
“I wanted it to be almost modern, edgy and unique,” Winsor says of her chocolate and orange-blossom cake, which she designed to resemble a topiary garden, surrounded by chocolate vines and leaves, and buttercream flowers.
During the five-hour challenge, though, Winsor says she had doubts. “My heart kind of dropped. Because mine was so different [than my competitors], I thought, ‘Oh no. I’ve done it wrong.’”
But the three celebrity judges disagreed, calling Winsor’s intricate chocolate work “breathtaking” and her flavours “well-executed.”
Here's what you can learn in NAIT's Baking and Pastry Arts program
Science, art and adventure
What Winsor enjoys about making chocolate, she says, is transforming science into art.
“It starts in a liquid form and if it’s properly tempered you get that really nice shine and snap,” says Winsor, who launched her St. Albert-based, artisanal chocolate company, Compass Chocolates, in 2020.
“It’s beautiful. I love every part of it.”
Winsor handcrafts all of her products herself. Her approach draws from her own backstory.
Originally from Newfoundland, the chocolatier, whose parents immigrated from India, grew up connecting with others around food and sharing stories from different cultures.
“Compass” reflects her passion for incorporating flavours from around the world – including Filipino-inspired coconut calamansi and Indian mango lassi – along with more conventional flavours like rum raisin.
With her time divided between her business and being a mother of three, Winsor says she had no plans to compete on the Spring Baking Championship. Then a producer contacted her.
“At first, I thought I was being pranked,” she says with a laugh, but later learned her social media posts had caught the producer’s eye.
Each of the 11 episodes, filmed in Los Angeles in May 2024, involved hours of “high-stress” baking under time constraints that brought “lots of adrenaline jumps and crashes,” as well as multiple taped interviews with producers.
But Winsor is familiar with responding to stress. Her can-do attitude has been shaped, in part, by her family’s harrowing ordeal of fleeing their Fort McMurray home during the 2016 wildfires. Then she took on the challenge of starting her own business during the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout, Winsor has reframed adversity as adventure.
“You never know what life will bring and what chances you have,” she says.
“She had the ambition”
Enrolling in Baking and Pastry Arts was one of those unexpected journeys. After settling in St. Albert, Winsor says a friend suggested channelling her passion for cooking and baking into a career.
Instructor Enrico Caparas says he believed Winsor had something special from the beginning. As a mature student and mother who was changing careers, she was focused and motivated. And she quickly grasped the technical components while maintaining her creative flair, says Caparas, who ranks Winsor as one of his best students.
“She’s adventurous,” he says. “She’s curious.”
While he was thrilled to hear Winsor had won the Spring Baking Championship, he wasn’t surprised.
“I knew she had the ambition, and she’s very competitive. She wants to win,” says Caparas, who keeps in touch and regularly invites Winsor to speak to his students.
Winsor credits her NAIT education, and especially Caparas’ guidance, with giving her a solid foundation. From the technical expertise to flavour pairings and presentation, she says the program helped her succeed in the show's stressful bake-offs. One of her favourite courses involved creating plated desserts for Ernest’s, NAIT's fine-dining restaurant.
“She’s adventurous. She’s curious.”
“[Caparas] really allowed us to stretch our creativity and push the limits,” Winsor says.
Caparas says Winsor’s innovative approach was evident even back then, recalling her bon bon with curry-infused ganache that took top honours at a NAIT chocolate-making competition. (The prize was an introductory course at the Chocolate Academy in Montreal, where Winsor later took a two-year program.)
But not all skilled chefs have the ability to start a successful business, Caparas notes. Winsor, he says, is one of them.
Nevertheless, the leap from chocolatier to entrepreneur has been “eye-opening and incredibly demanding,” says Winsor. She’s learned a lot about marketing, accounting, logistics and problem-solving.
Compass Chocolates has seen a boost in business since the Spring Baking Championship. Winsor intends to capitalize on that, using the prize money – and her elevated profile – to expand. For her, the icing on the cake is the friendships she’s made through the show.
“People are my favourite thing,” she says. “So working with all of these talented and incredible human beings was just so awesome.”
