On the season premiere of Food Network’s “Spring Baking Championship,” judges handed Fort Lauderdale pastry chef Sandro Arotinco a baking challenge slam dunk.

The theme: Tropical spring break adventures.

The lead pastry cook at The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort in Miami Beach only needed to gaze toward the sand and windswept palm trees outside his kitchen window for proper inspiration. No problem, right?

“I picked Puerto Vallarta in Mexico,” Arotinco, 45, tells the South Florida Sun Sentinel with a laugh.

Whether his spring break-inspired cake wowed the judges will be decided when “Spring Baking Championship” kicks off its 10th season on Monday, March 4. Two episodes will be released back to back, concluding with a May 6 season finale.

Arotinco joins 11 other competitors — including a fellow Broward County baker, Sabrina Courtemanche of Pompano Beach — as they flaunt their baking skills in spring-themed pastry challenges for a $25,000 grand prize.

During a Q&A session with the Sun Sentinel, Arotinco talks about working for several beachfront Fort Lauderdale hotels, his favorite cake and how he would spend the grand prize.

So you work at St. Regis, which means driving every day from Fort Lauderdale to Miami? Ouch.

Well, I like the challenge, the St. Regis kitchens are huge, and they let me do a lot of pastry and chocolate work. It’s bigger than other hotels I worked at, like The Ritz-Carlton Fort Lauderdale, the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Harbor Beach and Pelican Grand Beach Resort. And the St. Regis desserts have so many details, many garnishes, chocolate crémeux, the best ingredients: Plugra butter, Valrhona chocolate.

How did you get invited to compete on the new season?

The producers found me! It’s funny because I arrived at work and coworkers said, “They called for you, Sandro.” I thought, “Oh, this is a mistake. I didn’t apply to any job.” Maybe they knew me from taking classes at Valrhona pastry school in Brooklyn or the Cacao Barry Chocolate Academy in Chicago. I go every year for chocolate-making classes.

Did you grow up in South Florida originally?

I grew up in Lima, Peru, but I left my country in 2006 to work as a pastry chef in Sucre, Ecuador, and then Mexico City at a Peruvian-Japanese chain. I hoped to work somewhere in L.A. or Orlando next, but then I got offered to work at the Pelican Grand Resort in Fort Lauderdale and then the Marriott hotels. At first I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m a rockstar!” Because the beach hotels were so popular. But then I realized it’s a matter of scale. When you work for a restaurant, you’re cooking for 100 people or less. At a hotel, it’s 1,500. It makes you more experienced, even more powerful.

Speaking of beach hotels, your first challenge on the season premiere was tropical spring-break adventures. Considering where you work, you won this easily, right?

(Laughs) I’m not allowed to say! Yeah, the challenge is about something memorable at the beach. I made a cake remembering my best vacation ever in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I made a cookie in the shape of a whale to top my cake because it’s the place where whales gather, and I lined the sides with pretzel sticks dipped in homemade chocolate, all in two hours.

Puerto Vallarta must have been gorgeous if it beats any inspiration from South Florida.

Puerto Vallarta is a spring-break destination too, but I was with friends and coworkers on New Year’s Eve. We had just watched the ball drop at a disco party and we came out to the beach and saw all these whales coming close to shore during their mating season, and they made all these sounds and it was beautiful.

You have another South Florida competitor on the show with you this season.

Sabrina! Yes! I went to her new bakery in Fort Lauderdale. She’s amazing, such a nice person. They put us contestants together to wait in a special room before filming started, and we met and we’re like, “Oh, you’re from Fort Lauderdale too?” She’s employed some girls who worked with me at the Ritz-Carlton. Small world.

I mean, if she was so nice, was it hard to think of her as a competitor?

When you are competing on this type of show, you’re concentrating on your own thing. But I glanced over sometimes and saw her cakes, and they were good. I remember it was hard to turn off the chocolate sprayer at my cooking station, so I went to her and I said, “I don’t know how to work this,” and she showed me. And then, one weekend between recordings, she said in a group chat that she had extra detergent pods for the washing machine, so I came over and said, “Yes, please, I need to do my laundry!” She was very helpful. Nobody wanted anybody to be eliminated, really, but it was the rules.

What was your favorite moment from the season?

It was the first time I stood in front of the judges. I’m a fan of the show, but I never imagined being there with (judges Duff Goldman, Kardea Brown and Nancy Fuller), and I said, “I can’t believe this!” I presented my Puerto Vallarta cake and they loved the creativity, the taste of it.

You said earlier that you take chocolate-making classes. Which baking techniques gave you the edge in the competition?

There were some very talented young guys. In the third episode, I was using chocolate shapes, and I’d never worked with flexible chocolate, and my competitors were doing impressive things. I had some tricks, too. I think what impressed people was my speed. The guy next to me shouted, “What the heck, Sandro’s already building his cake!” I was already piping decorations. You have to be fast when you’re making cakes for 500 people at the hotel.

So what are you going to do with the $25,000 you won?

Wow, you try to trick me again! You have to watch! But if I win, I will get the paperwork ready to bring my 73-year-old mother in Lima to live here with me in South Florida. I think it would be great; she likes humidity. And if I had a little bit of money left over, I would be traveling by myself. I’d go to Osaka, Japan — they have good pastry technique — and then make a Black Forest cake in Germany and a torte in Vienna.

The 10th season of “Spring Baking Championship” will premiere at 8 p.m. March 4, and conclude May 6 on Food Network. Go to FoodNetwork.com/SpringBakingChampionship.