Near the end of Gordon Ramsay's Next Level Baker, Oklahoma City pastry chef and OKC Sweets owner Stefanie Embree said she had a Kevin McCallister moment. "In 'Home Alone,' Kevin walks out of the house and says, 'I'm not afraid anymore. I said I'm not afraid anymore!'" Embree said. "Making that show I was able to release so much fear."

Overcoming impostor syndrome was only one of the benefits of competing on and winning Ramsay's new spin on Next Level Chef, his popular cooking show on Fox that features professional chefs, home cooks, and social media cooks competing in what contestants call 'the tower." The formula was flexible enough that it worked well for a baking show following the same guidelines, and Embree said she was shocked when a recruiter for the show approached her online.

"The first thing I did was check to make sure I wasn't being scammed," she said. "Once we realized it was real, my husband encouraged me to go for it." The producers finally selected her as one of twelve contestants for the inaugural show. But getting on the show brought Embree face to face with the impostor syndrome that had dogged her for years. Five years before she won Next Level Baker, she opened OKC Sweets in mid-2020 -- not the most auspicious time, certainly -- and the shop struggled for a few years.

"I didn't come to baking the traditional way," she said. "I'm self-taught, and I didn't have any formal training. I wasn't part of the food world when I said yes to the show, and so you struggle with fear of failing publicly on a nationally televised cooking show. I've alway approached baking as a chance to use my gifts to love people, to bring them together with delicious flavors. I tell my children, if you have a gift, you should use it, share it."

Embree said the feedback she received from Ramsay and others in the show helped her overcome the fear and led to that McCallister-esque epiphany. "I got to bake with him four times, and like many people, my opinion of him had been formed from 'Hell's Kitchen,' in which there is a lot of him yelling. On the Next Level shows, though, he's more of a mentor, and you see pretty quickly as a competitor that he's really cheering for us and wants us to do well. To come from a place of no formal training to have that guy saying nice things about your food, it made it easier to overcome the fear, and of course winning was validation I'd only dreamed of before."

This month, Embree's sin cake, a recipe she developed for two of Chef Ramsay's concepts -- Hell's Kitchen and Ramsay's Kitchen -- landed on menus around the country, including the Chisholm Creek location in north OKC. She describes it as a recipe that showcases some of her favorite things. "I love chocolate, loved it growing up, but I also used to sneak drinks of my grandmother's coffee, because I loved it too. I wanted to bring these favorite flavors together, and I added blackberry sauce to brighten it up. It's a spring dessert, after all."

"I worked with the culinary team, but I had free rein, which really surprised me," she said. "I remember when one of the culinary team -- his name is Rich -- said, 'Stefanie, I can hear Gordon in my ear saying not to mess with your recipe,' and they really did let me create the sin cake by pulling from the things that I love."

Embree sees purpose in all that's happened with Ramsay, Next Level, and OKC Sweets. In a very real sense, the Christian entrepreneur, chef, mother and wife embodies much that is good about the Evangelical tradition, and purpose is a cornerstone of the evangelical worldview.

"This opportunity came at the weirdest time," Embree said. "We were on the verge of closing the shop in 2024. I sat down to take a hard look at where we were at the end of that year, and I remember being in bed one night praying, and I came out of it with a renewed sense that I need to lock in for 2025. I knew I was going to fight to save the shop, and so we worked hard. I have such a great team, and then the (NBA) playoffs saved us. The shop just blew up with business, including players' families, fans, and even a Thunder neighbor. A man whose daughter had cancer came into buy mini cakes for a Thunder player who lived next door. The player, who's no longer on the team, would come to his house to play with his kids. We heard so many great stories. I think that's when we realized we were more than a bakery -- we'd always said it, but this made it even more clear that we get to be a part of people's lives, both in celebrations and hard times."

Embree and her family are too familiar with hard times, including one of her children suffering a serious illness that lasted nearly a full year while they were trying to make OKC Sweets work. Last week, Embree announced on social media that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer, so now there is another battle to fight, and unsurprisingly, she's ready. "Good things and hard things happen at the same time," she said. "It's not like it's one or the other, and the hard things can bring us so much joy, and I believe that there will be a purpose to all this, even if it's just using my platform to encourage young women to do self inspections."

Embree, 39, was blindsided by the diagnosis. "I remember thinking when I turned 39 that I'd need to start getting regular mammograms at 40, so I wasn't expecting anything like this. I was in shower when I looked down, and remember thinking, 'My left boob looks weird.' I know you probably don't believe this, but I believe it was the Holy Spirit. I found a lump, and so called the doctor immediately and scheduled an exam. What's been so bizarre is that I feel completely normal, but here I am looking at the possibility of a double mastectomy."

One of the most compelling things about Embree is the way she manages to be relentlessly optimistic and incredibly well grounded. Hers is not a saccharine positivity. She readily acknowledges that awful things are part of everyone's life, even people of great faith. Like many evangelicals, she's drawn to the idea of redemption -- that God can take the awful things and bring good from them, not that God causes them; God, rather, redeems them. And like other people of faith, Embree finds signs, consolation, directions in her daily tasks, interactions with others, and even in things as pedestrian as Chinese takeout.

"When I was thinking about going on the show, we went to dinner at Dot Wo," she said. "I never take a fortune cookie; they don't taste good, but this time, I looked at the bowl of cookies, and said to the family, 'I'm taking this one,' when I reached in and grabbed one." What was meant to be a silly moment, turned into one of those serendipitous occurrences that Embree called a "God wink."

"The fortune said 'You will have an incredible culinary experience during your travels,'" Embree said. "Shortly after, I got the call that I'd been selected, and filming was scheduled for Ireland."

I talked to Embree the day before she was scheduled to see her oncologist. She said the shock is wearing off, and true to form, she is being direct about the trial ahead. "This will not be without purpose," she said. "This has given me time to reprioritize my life. It's easy to get swallowed up in busy. Some of that is my ADHD, the always staying busy, the feeling lazy if I'm not doing something. By the time I was done with this recipe development, the show, the travel, and everything involved with being part of a family and owning a business, I was exhausted. Dr. Kathy Koch was a fellow presenter at a Museum of the Bible event, and afterward she handed me a note. It said, 'I feel like your heart is heavy. It's ok to slow down.' Reading that made it easier for me to see who busyness was exhausting me."

Embree also said that after the diagnosis "the world did not implode." She reallocating time to be with her family more, and she's trusting her OKC Sweets team to help her with the business. She's also zeroing in on what she considers one of her great purposes in life. "I believe I should love people well, and that's what I tell the team we should all be doing. We're supposed to take our gifts and use them for others. I have a unique platform, and being transparent about my challenges and fear has led to people being open about their struggles too. We get to know we're not alone in this."

Embree's sin cake is already on Ramsay menus. It's a feature of the spring/summer menu, so should be available for roughly six months. She said she's not sure if there will be other collaborations. It's hard not to be hopeful that she'll be met with even more opportunities, because she's the kind of Okie we want representing the rest of us.