Long Island baker competes on Food Network's 'Halloween Cookie Challenge'

She may not have won the "Christmas Cookie Challenge" last December, but Mount Sinai's Emily Solomos is back in another Food Network competition, the new "Halloween Cookie Challenge," Monday at 10 p.m. As she said in a recent post on her Em's Custom Cookies Instagram account, "I'm back, witches!"

The 25-year-old cookie-preneur says she was invited in April to compete again for the network. "They emailed while I was on my cousin's bachelorette trip in Mexico," Solomos says, chuckling. "It was a very quick process that came out of nowhere."

The following month she found herself in a Los Angeles studio kitchen, competing against three other bakers for the episode's $10,000 prize. Under celebrity chef Jet Tila and YouTube star Rosanna Pansino, each had to create 3D cookie graveyards filled with creepy characters, using such "bloody” ingredients as Amarena cherries, pomegranate seeds and blood oranges.

While Solomos had not done specifically Halloween-themed cookies at her three-year-old, nights-and-weekends company, "I learned in preparation for the show" — in particular with "these things called icing transfers, which I've only picked up on within the last few months." These are edible sugar decorations made from royal icing, a type that, after being piped or spread into a shape on parchment, wax paper or on an acetate sheet, develops a glaze as it dries and hardens. Transferred onto the main cookie body, the royal icing decoration then can be painted with food coloring.

And Solomos has also learned to hold firmly onto her baking trays: On "Christmas Cookie Challenge" last year, "I dropped my tray of cookies in the final round before I decorated them!" she says with a laugh — now; she wasn't laughing then. "So they were straight out of the oven and I dropped them right on the floor and that was, like, a big 'Oh no!' moment that was featured on the commercials! And ohmigod, my parents have never let me live it down!"

Solomos is the elder of two daughters of Michael, an IT executive with the Farmingdale office-environment company Waldner's, and Gemma, a secretary in the Mount Sinai School District. Born in Smithtown and raised in Mount Sinai, where her high school softball team reached the 2015 Long Island Class A championship game, she was exposed to baking during her job throughout high school at the counter of the now-closed Create-a-Cake in Port Jefferson Station. She went on to attend Iona College, graduating with a marketing degree in 2019.

Her cookie kitchen continues to be in her parents' house, a fact that still doesn't thrill her folks. "I actually talk about that a lot on the show," Solomos says. "Hopefully that'll be changing by the end of this year. … I'm looking at apartments all the time now. Obviously the cost of rent is absurd."

Besides which she has little time to search between her full-time marketing job at PipingRock Health Products in Ronkonkoma and having cookie orders fully booked for months. Taking the time to compete on the show, however, was a no-brainer. "It was so much fun. How could I possibly turn down this insane opportunity that I've not only been handed once but now twice?"