'Cake Boss' Buddy Valastro works to recover from hand injury

Buddy Valastro, the New Jersey celebrity baker who has starred in a host of TV culinary shows including "Cake Boss," is working to recover from an accident that mangled his right hand two weeks ago.

Known for his intricate cake-icing designs, Valastro, 43, posted four photos Saturday on his social media, showing him sitting at a table at home, laboriously working with an icing tool in his nondominant left, his face contorted in concentration. Around him in various stages of helping are his and wife Lisa's three eldest children — daughter Sofia, 17, and sons Buddy Jr., 16, and Marco, 13 — as Lisa looks on.

"Family time is the BEST time! Doing it all over again, left handed," Buddy Valastro wrote.

Valastro had required two surgeries after his right hand, lodged in a piece of pinsetting equipment at his home's bowling alley, was pierced multiple times by a metal rod. His hand remained impaled for more than five minutes until Buddy Jr., Marco, and Valastro's brother-in-law Joe Faugno, 52, a captain at the Harrison Fire Department in Hudson County, New Jersey, used a reciprocating saw to cut through the metal rod and free Valastro's hand.

Valastro told People magazine in its new issue that he will need physical therapy and possibly additional surgery in the months to come. "It's really preliminary right now, but they're saying it's definitely going to be a long road to recovery," he said.

He recalled how the pinsetting mechanism "went through my hand and through my two fingers, but if it was four inches lower, it would have hit my wrist and forget it, I could have bled out … or it could have ripped my fingers off. So much could have happened."

Calling his hands "my lifeline of everything I do," he confessed to the magazine: "I wonder, ‘Am I ever going to do what I used to be able to do?’ "

"He will bake again, even if he has to use his left hand," his wife assured. "Trust me."