When I call he’s shopping for GoPros, so his team can capture the frenzy for a time-lapse video. Not of kayaking vicious waterfalls or careening around racetracks—building an enchanting holiday scene for Neiman Marcus with more than 300 pounds of chocolate, 275 pounds of sugar, 50 pounds of cake and plenty of icing.

Dessert is Robert Teddy’s extreme sport, and the local pastry chef has been proving himself on national TV, with back-to-back battles on the Food Network’s Halloween Wars and Cake Wars: Christmas. Teddy’s team won the former in October, and looking toward the latter’s final episode on December 14, all he can say is that he and his fellow food artists of We Three Kings are “bringing it.”

We talked to Teddy about unashamedly loving Oreos, playing Santa for veterans and baking with booze for the holidays.

Before you were Chef Teddy, you were the teen apprentice of Belgian master pastry chef John Espelund in Washington's Bavarian-themed village of Leavenworth. How did that happen? In the ’60s and ’70s, my grandparents were part of Leavenworth, a dying town, transforming itself into a Bavarian village. Part of it was wooing people in, and Chef John was one of them who came over, loved it—loved the whole area. I was about 14. … He was amazing, so I started to hang around. And then he saw I had skill and interest in it, and that’s when he started to teach me.

Yet you didn’t end up in culinary school. I went on to a few restaurants and hotels, but I got bored, because this is before all the hyper-interest in cakes in the 2000s. So I left.

And landed where? I only went a year in college, and I actually majored in music and minored in art, and I was working at a local bakery then. After that year I realized, okay, art is it. So that’s when I went to the Art Institute in Seattle and got my Associate’s. … I wanted to stretch creatively, and at that time, in the ’80s, I didn’t see a lot of stretching in the pastry world, beyond dough (laughs).

How did you use your degree? I spent the ’90s as a commercial illustrator and designer, freelance, for Microsoft, Lionsgate, Disney. … After the web bubble burst and all my huge clients slammed their checkbooks shut, I thought, you know, this isn’t any fun anymore. I eventually found my way back to pastry, because I started watching the Food Network and they were having these cake challenges, and I was like, I could do that! I tell people, look, I’m an artist first and then a chef. Because most important is the art—how it looks and the design—but it also has to taste yummy. Nowadays it’s so important when you’re a pastry chef to also be an artist, if you want to be out of the box.

Your work on the Food Network, from a candy-cane dragon ridden by Santa to a full-blown Toyland, has been way out of the box. Has the exposure impacted your career? Being on the shows, I took it as a huge compliment. And those kinds of compliments definitely grant you access to perhaps a little more publicity and acknowledgement. It hasn’t brought me a lot more financial security, but it’s given me more recognition and affirmation, which has been wonderful.

You started competing on Cake Wars not long after your team won Halloween Wars. Is a back-to-back appearance unusual? I was called in last-minute, because there were some paperwork issues with someone involved. I was basically the go-to. They immediately said, “Call Robert.”

It’s because your beard is so good on TV. I don’t know why they called me first. Was it my skills? Was it my sparkling personality? Was it my beard? Was it because I was just a sucker for it? I don’t know (laughs). I said, “Sure, when do you need me?” And I thought, you know, a week or two out. And they said, “We need you tonight, because we’re filming in the morning.”

You’re the cake artist on your team, We Three Kings. What can you say about how you perform in the final episode? Like a lot of parents have done in terms of fudging about Santa, I’ve committed to an NDA (laughs). … You’ll see that we are consistently bringing it, and one of the judges says we are the team to beat. … I’m really proud of us, because we had issues in the beginning, clashing personalities, which is normal. We all work at a different level. And by the third episode we really worked it out; we really came together.

So well that the holiday display you’re creating at Neiman Marcus is in partnership with your team’s sugar artist Travis Martinez, senior pastry chef tournant at Caesars Palace. It’ll be Jack and Jewel [Frost] levitating over Travis’ sugar and chocolate work, with sugar-snowflake butterflies all over, emanating this frosty magic.

These are 4-foot figures made entirely of sweets—so many hours to create this edible marvel that no one actually eats! Even when your creations do get eaten, why make art that’s so ephemeral? Pastry chefs, there’s something in us that we want to create art that’s temporary. Is it nihilistic? I don’t know. I love creating these gorgeous things, and I get a happy thrill knowing people are going to see this, be wowed and then eat it. … We love to push ourselves and show off our levels of artistry in our medium. I’m a sculptor, a painter, a designer, an artist. This is my chosen medium, and so I want to show you exactly what I can do with it.

You’ve shared your talents through everything from La Sugarie, the patisserie you had at the Venetian, to your custom confectionary M. Antoinette to a sugar exhibit at Trifecta Gallery. How did you conceive of that show? I thought, I have to do some over-the-top stuff. So I took a few classes from Chris Hanmer, who’s a wonderful sugar artist who was the youngest [chef ever to win a World Pastry Team Championship]. I learned sugar because I wanted to do this 10-foot sugar chandelier that was lit, in the shape of a raindrop. So having just learned that, I did it. My mom was like, “You’re nuts!”

You know how to make the finest desserts, but do you ever go slumming with Hostess? (Laughs) Most pastry chefs have their guilty pleasures, and mine is Oreos. I mean, Oreos just hit it. They bring it. They brought it over a hundred years ago, they still are, and it’s amazing. It’s so simple, but we cannot escape the fabulous combination of that chocolate wafer and that shortened filling; you can’t run from it. … I prefer the original. I don’t like all the hoo-ha stuff, all the messing around, all the hybrids. I’m very much a snob that way. And Pop-Tarts!

The borders of Pop-Tarts insult me; they’re like sawdust. What do you love about them? My mom refused to buy them hardly ever. And so I vowed when I was an adult I would eat Pop-Tarts all the time. So when I was away to college, my first year in college, what do you think I lived on? Cereal, Top Ramen and Pop-Tarts. And ever since college, I really can’t eat Pop-Tarts (laughs).

You say you’re a fan of original Pop-Tarts, no frosting. But what do you think about the “naked cake” trend, where there’s no frosting on the outside? The simpler things are, the more chance of disaster, because if you do a lot of design on a cake you can hide a lot of holes and errors. If it’s very clean and very simple, you have to be very careful. The naked cakes I’m not a fan of just because they tend to dry out a lot faster. … It’s a fad.

Still, it’s evidence of the boundaries of cake design being pushed. When I started out decades ago, it was just, a cake is a cake, and this is what you do: buttercream roses or flowers, that’s it. Or marzipan figures. Marzipan—who uses that anymore?

I’m Scandinavian. Don’t knock my marzipan. (Laughs) Marzipan is delicious, but the figures are definitely Old World; we’ve moved beyond that using gum paste and fondant for figures. There’s been a continual evolution and complexity level and raising of the bar in cake land. It’s wonderful. I’m seeing a lot of very abstract, forward artwork, and this has been the reason why Food Network has really tapped into all that stuff, the novelty stuff. … You almost have to have some knowledge or skill in construction now, architecture, on some of these crazy cakes.

You’re teaching the next generation of pastry chefs about cakes both classic and crazy at Le Cordon Bleu. You can’t do all the new fun, funky stuff without knowing the foundations. You can’t build a beautiful novelty crazy cake without it tasting fabulous or no one’s happy.

Which celebrity would you most like to make a cake for? Someone with rich history in terms of their celebrity, so I’m talking, like, Cher or Elton John, where there’s so much iconography, so much imagery; they bring an encyclopedia and volumes of their music and their videos and their lives. … That is manna for a cake artist, because the more stuff you can draw off of the more fabulous or fun the product.

Have you always had a way with cake? The Cake Whisperer! (Laughs) No. I’ll be doing something and then I’ll turn a corner and it’s like, I guess I’ll do this now. It’s really more out of need or necessity where I’ve expanded, like the art show, where I would love to do sugar glass and so I learned it and then I did it. When I was on Halloween Wars I’d never sculpted in my life. … I rolled up my sleeves and I got modeling chocolate and I just dug in, and I found I could do it. That’s just how it’s been for me, and thankfully I’m able to make things work. Throw me in a situation—as long as it’s a creative situation I’ll figure it out.

Living in Las Vegas is its own creative situation. I never thought I’d live here! What brought me actually was family, because I met my partner in Seattle. He was raised in Vegas. His mom was a showgirl; that’s a whole other story because she knew Frank Sinatra and Elvis … and he was raised backstage among all this stuff. … Vegas is a strange lover. I tell people, when you enter Vegas you leave the planet. It’s a place like none other. … Moving here in ’98 it was difficult, it was like an island, but then I realized, if I focus just on my family and my little world, I’m fine. Since then I do believe as people have continued to move here the community thing has started to develop. It still has a long way to go, but it’s there now. I see it.

Speaking of things that have a long way to go, how about the reputation of the Christmas brick we call fruitcake. Don’t be afraid of it anymore! Enough chefs have been playing and experimenting with it that now you can find some marvelous fruitcakes. … How they used to do it, they would have candied fruit, which I abhor. But a fruitcake can be like a fruited carrot cake, where you’re adding fresher fruit like pineapple and brandied cherries, and the cake is actually more cake-like, a spice cake with fresh fruit and nuts, and perhaps a little rum in there or brandy. It changes everything. The one suggestion to make your fruitcake better is alcohol. … Alcohol brings that lovely warmth of the holidays.

What else do you suggest for holiday cheer? Rachel [Smith] of the [FOX5] More show asked me on-air what should be the one suggestion for a holiday party, and my answer is glitter. A ton of glitter. Because we’re in Vegas, but also “holiday” is about magic and enchantment and lights.

And occasionally a 6-foot chocolate cactus for Ethel M ... I only had a weekend, and I just threw it together. Yet another example of me being insane.

I don’t think you’re insane. I think your beard gives you special powers. It does whisper to me at night (laughs).

It’s so awesome that you’ve won regional and national competitions and were asked to play a very special character at Cookies for the Troops at the VA this year. Cookies for the Troops is a special charity created and run by chef Brenda Villatoro for the past nine years, which has been primarily sponsored by Le Cordon Bleu. This year she and her volunteers made over 18,000 cookies that have been delivered to Nellis—along with pages and pages of personal messages of holiday wishes—to be shipped out to our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. They then do a big cookie party at the VA hospital on the 21st. I've been asked to play Santa! It's another wonderful way to remember our brave soldiers!

Of course, we had to feature you in the Weekly’s tribute to No-Shave November. I started in ’93 and I’ve never shaved it off. Way back then it was a lot shorter; it’s evolved. People do look at it, and I have to say that it’s more men than women. … Beards are a huge secondary male characteristic, and I get comments far more from men. Now, the women they’re with usually are glaring at me like, “Oh, hell no!” But, you know, the guy’s like, “Wow, dude, that’s really awesome.”

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice Unveiling/raffle (benefitting Three Square) December 12, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., with chefs Robert Teddy and Travis Martinez available 1-2 p.m. Neiman Marcus inside Fashion Show Mall.