The Truth About Laurent Carratie From Spring Baking Championship Season 7

If you wanted to pick an early favorite in the seventh season of Spring Baking Championship, it would probably be Laurent Carratie. The season premiere already aired on the Food Network on Feb. 22. Unofficial results posted on the game show fan site Bobbymgsk, indicate Carratie finished in fourth place at the end of episode one, so he's still in the race for the $25,000 prize. In the first round, or pre-heat, Carratie whipped up an impressive-sounding yellow squash, fresh raspberry, and milk chocolate cake with orange blossom cream cheese frosting. For the next challenge, he had something even more unique up his sleeve.

Carratie came up with a hemp milk chocolate sponge cake with white chocolate hemp milk mousse, peanut butter crunch, and strawberry coulis. It seems Carratie knows his way around baking ingredients, no matter how unusual. Spring Baking Championship host, Ali Khan, was impressed with Carratie right off the bat. As Khan told TV Insider, "We had Laurent, who is from France and in his 50's. He had decades of experience working the stoves. You think someone like that should win the whole thing." Of course Khan would never hint at who did or didn't win the current season of Spring Baking Championship. He only said that other contestants who didn't have nearly as much experience or culinary education, proved themselves in the competition too.

Carratie, a French native who calls New Jersey home, is a fifth generation baker. "I can really, definitely say I have this in my blood," he told LRM Online. Like most bakers, he has a favorite treat. "My specialty, my passion, is definitely the chocolates," he said, adding that he would work chocolate into Spring Baking Championship whenever he could. Carratie didn't exactly give anything away in the LRM interview, but as you watch the video Q&A you sense that he's dealing with defeat. The interviewer asked him how he managed his anxiety while the show was filming, knowing that "anything could go wrong at any moment."

"Trust me, I know!" Carratie replied. "No comment on that." Toward the end of the interview, when Carratie was asked how his experience on Spring Baking Championship changed him for the better, he talked about learning from his mistakes. Making a sports analogy, he said, "Even the best player in the world can have a bad day." After season seven of Spring Baking Championship wrapped, Carratie asked for money on GoFundMe to open his own shop. He says he lost his job as pastry chef at New York's Harvard Club at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since his GoFundMe post, however, it appears Carratie may have gotten his job back. He was wearing his Harvard Club chef's uniform in a selfie posted on Instagram Dec. 22.