It looks just like mine.
It's like a dream come true, a success that you couldn't imagine.
You have to take the same amount of pride in cleaning the toilet bowl,
as you do in making a five tier wedding cake.
If you have that attention to detail,
and you put your heart and soul into everything you do,
whatever you do you're going to be successful at it.
I was lucky enough to be a young boy
when I figured out that being a baker was my dream job.
My dad never said to me, "Buddy, you have to be a baker like me."
He said to me, "Son, you're a man, you're gonna have to
wake up in the morning, you're gonna have to go to work."
When I make a cake it's what I call, I go into a zone,
and then all of a sudden you know what,
the cake's in front of me, and my focus is laser sharp.
I don't hear anything else around me, and it's just me and the cake
and I'm just putting everything I have, my heart, my soul, into it.
Then you step back and you look at what you've created,
and you get that feeling of, "Wow!"
You get that feeling of, "Oh my God! Look at what I did!"
It's hard work, I work like an animal, all the time.
But if you believe in yourself and you work hard,
and you do with all your heart, and you wake up in the morning,
you're happy to go there, you're going to be more successful.
If you have to put on a show all the time, it's too much pressure in life.
I'm just a regular guy man,
although they'll make me feel like a rock star,
but I'm just a baker from Hoboken.
Before I was the Cake Boss, I'd never understood what anxiety was,
until I had my first panic attack when I was like 27 years old,
I was running my business and I got a million things going on,
and I thought my heart was gonna beat out of my chest.
I went to the emergency room and, they're like, "You had a panic attack."
I was like, "But I'm not a nervous guy," you know.
But over the years you learn to adapt to it,
so I know when it's coming, I know when the pressures coming, it's like,
you got to breathe in, you got to focus on what you're doing,
and you can't take too much.
There comes a time when you just have to say, "Alright, look,
I need to detox, I need five minutes to clear my head."
It was a survival mode. When I was 17 my dad died.
I had to actually drop out of high school,
to take over the family business.
So now, I mean literally, I'm a 17-year-old kid,
who has 30 employees, and I'm the boss and I wasn't ready to be the boss.
When you're put into a situation like that, a switch goes on inside you.
We were having so many problems with the workers,
with, whatever, everybody was scared, everybody didn't know,
"Are we going to go out of business? What's going to happen?
Is this kid gonna be able to do it?"
And one day I made a decision, I said, "No matter what,
we are not gonna fail," and I said, "I don't care how hard I have to work,
I'll be the first one in every morning, the last one to leave,
what I don't know, I'm going to figure out." I read, I went on the internet,
I humbled myself to the people who knew more than me,
I studied, I did everything in my power to become the best.
After about three years, things got under control.
It comes like that time where you have to
run that extra mile, you have to do it.
So it's kind of like, I'm pretty all or none,
so when I'm going 100 miles an hour, I'm going a 100 miles an hour,
when it's time to relax, I need to relax.