'Cake Boss' Buddy Valastro practices cake decorating again after serious hand injury
Buddy Valastro is slowly but surely getting back to decorating cakes.
The “Cake Boss” star shared photos of himself adding icing embellishments to a white cake with his left hand after his dominant right hand was seriously injured in a gruesome bowling accident.
“Family time is the BEST time! Doing it all over again, left handed,” Valastro captioned a series of photos on Instagram, along with the hashtags "recovery," "lefty" and "southpaw."
His wife Lisa and three of his four children, Buddy, Marco and Sofia, also joined in the home cake decorating session.
The TLC reality star and owner of Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey, injured his right hand last month while trying to fix a machine in his family’s home bowling alley.
"There was a malfunction with the bowling pinsetter, a common fix in the past, but (it) turned into a terrible accident,” a spokesperson for Carlo’s Bakery told TODAY Food last month. “After trying to release the bowling pin from the cage mechanism, his right hand became lodged and compressed inside the unit.”
Valastro recalled the terrifying accident and described how some quick thinking from his two oldest sons saved the day.
"I thought I was going to faint, I looked at my hand and there was blood everywhere and I was stuck, the rod going back and forth because the machine goes back and forth," he previously told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY.
"My whole family worked together, my son Buddy, my son Marco, and within five minutes they were able to take the bolt out, cut me off the machine, and I was actually in my driveway before the ambulance even got there,” he said.
Valastro underwent emergency surgery to remove the rod impaled in his hand, then had an operation from an orthopedic surgery to deal with the damage to his nerves, tendons and muscles.
It will be a long road to recovery, and Valastro admitted he has questioned whether he will ever be able to create the kinds of elaborate cakes that made him famous.
“I have a thing with my hands. If I get a paper cut on my hand, I'm pissed off. My hands to me are my lifeline of everything I do,” he told People. “And I wonder, ‘Am I ever going to do what I used to be able to do?’”
As his recovery continues, it looks like Valastro is determined to continue baking and decorating cakes, even if it means learning how to create intricate embellishments with his non-dominant hand for the time being.
“He will bake again, even if he has to use his left hand,” his wife Lisa told People. “Trust me.”
