SAN MARCOS — The lineup almost sounded like the beginning of a nursery rhyme: a cake baker, a pastry chef and a pumpkin carver.
Together, San Marcos’ pastry chef and sugar artist Christophe Rull, cake artist Liz Marek and champion pumpkin carver Mike Brown made up Team Ghoul’d, the trio that recently won the 16th season of Food Network’s “Halloween Wars.”
The trio also took first place nine years earlier in Season 7, making Team Ghoul’d the first team to win the competition twice.
The Season 7 team came together by chance, Rull said. None of the three had met before they showed up for taping, and the show’s staff put them on the same team. This year, they were invited back as a team.
That first invitation, Rull said, came out of the blue.
“They messaged me on Facebook. I looked at the previous season on YouTube and thought, ‘Oh, I fancy myself on this show.’”
The timing was trickier for Season 16. Rull had opened his San Marcos pastry shop in September 2025, and filming for the new season began in January in Utah. The seven episodes aired from Sept. 13 through Oct. 25 and are now available on the Food Network app and HBO Max.
Rull said he was fortunate his staff could cover for him while he was away filming.
“I’m so blessed to have such a good team,” Rull said.
Rull said he can confirm what he’d heard about taping a TV show: There’s a lot of sitting around while the director gets everything set up. The contestants were on set from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., he said, but spent only a fraction of that time taping.
“It was super cold on the set,” he recalled, adding that he preferred it to the heat on other shows he’d been on. “Chocolate and the heat don’t go together. The cold is easier.”
The first time Rull appeared on “Halloween Wars,” the size of the pumpkins the show gave contestants surprised him.
Rull grew up and began his career in France, where jack-o’-lanterns weren’t part of his childhood. He moved to the United States in 2009.
“Pumpkin is soup in France!” he explained.
Team Ghoul’d won $30,000 to split among its three members. Rull pointed out that only the winning team gets paid.
The show had no hairstylist or makeup artist, he said, but contestants had a place to unwind between takes. “There was a huge breakroom with darts and a pool table” where they could hang out when they were off set.
While North County residents know Rull best as the hands-on owner of Christophe Rull Patisserie in San Marcos’ North City, he was a fixture on food shows long before he opened his shop last fall.
In addition to winning Seasons 7 and 16 of “Halloween Wars,” Rull was part of the Frost Sleighers, the team that won the first season of “Holiday Wars” in 2018. He appeared in two seasons of Netflix’s “Bake Squad” and on Food Network’s “Super Mega Cakes” last year.
Since 2021, he has also appeared alongside Marek in her “Sugar Geek Show” instructional videos.
Before opening his patisserie, Rull was executive pastry chef at the Hotel Bel-Air. He first came to the San Diego area as executive pastry chef at the Park Hyatt Aviara.
