Kailua-Kona native Bryson Perkins, a cake decorator extraordinaire now working in New Hampshire, will draw from his roots with his entry in the Cake Designers World Championship in Milan, Italy, next week.

The sole U.S. representative in the competition, he leaves Thursday with a 5-foot-tall display cake, meticulously wrapped in a gigantic box. The cake’s core is just a foam concoction, but its exterior took at least 700 hours to sculpt, topped off by the goddess Pele rising from a volcano as a tribute to his hometown. The cake’s bottom will resemble the ocean, accented by frolicking dolphins and other marine life; its midsection includes a verdant mountain and waterfall.

“This one’s cool. It’s going to turn and spin and have lights shining on it so it looks like the volcano goddess is all fiery!” Perkins said in a phone interview.

Perkins is just coming off his jackpot win Oct. 1: grand prize in the Grand National Wedding Cake Competition at the 24th Annual Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show. It took him 350 hours to make a cake resembling a perfume bottle, he said, including crafting more than 4,000 gum-paste sequins and arranging them with tweezers into flowers, curlicues and other ornamentation.

The show’s founder and director, Kerry Vincent, said Perkins triumphed over 84 others “based on workmanship, innovation, imagination and creativity.”

“Bryson has just won the most prestigious Rolls-Royce event in the world, joining a list of amazing artists who occupy a very small club of winners,” Vincent said.

Perkins has garnered more than 100 U.S. and international prizes, and was named last year to Dessert Professional magazine’s list of Top Ten Cake Artists in North America and the New York Cake Show’s list of Top Ten International Cake Artists.

It’s not unusual, he said, for tycoons in the Middle East to fly him over and pay up to $50,000 for an ornate, towering sculpture of sugar, fondant and buttercream.

At his shop, Triolo’s Bakery in Bedford, N.H., “extravagant cakes” can cost $4,000 to $20,000, he said, but a simple wedding cake would be $800.

Now 35, Perkins was 19 when he left Hawaii for the East Coast so he could experience four distinct seasons and learn independence. The only inkling of his artistic potential was winning the occasional grocery store poster contest, and bonding with his Lahaina grandmother while baking and making crafts.

He was 24, working as a toy-store cashier, when he went looking for a basic cookbook as an antidote to his homesickness. He nearly stumbled over a wedding cake design book by renowned author Colette Peters, left on the aisle floor. Perkins picked it up and was entranced — “it was so colorful!”

Hoping to earn some extra money as a decorator, he started baking boxed cake mixes and practicing design techniques he’d read about — “they were not pretty-looking cakes, I’ll tell you.” He spent countless hours teaching himself and apprenticing under a French pastry chef at a bakery.

In just seven years he was able to cultivate enough of a reputation to open Triolo’s Bakery in 2012 with some investor friends. As creative director he now has nine assistants. Their workload is so frenetic, Perkins was hospitalized two years ago for stress and dehydration — “it’s a blessing and a curse.”

The Italian competition was founded in 2015 by the Pastry Ice Cream Chocolate International Federation, which plans to hold it every two years. Perkins took fourth place in the inaugural event. The grand prize is not so much the money — 2,500 euros (about $2,955) — but the status of the world championship, he said.

For this year’s competition, Monday and Tuesday, he has to bake a cake “live, from scratch on stage” to prove his baking skills, as 30 percent of his overall score will be based on taste. This cake’s predominant flavors will be chocolate and coffee (grown on the Big Island), and it will incorporate mousse, fondant, mascarpone cream and sponge cake among its building blocks — “it’s all fancy French things” — but it will be simply decorated, he added.

Then he’ll be given 4-1/2 hours to decorate a second cake on stage — 2 feet tall with a foam core — replicating the Kona theme of his display cake, to demonstrate his artistry.

Perkins said the hardest part of competing is always traveling with his display cake through airports of varying climates. That cake will account for 50 percent of his overall score. “There’s knots in my stomach and I can’t sleep once it’s on the airplane. Some of the sugar work is so delicate, one gust of wind and it shatters.” To get to Italy, he will travel through Boston and New York.

He has bought special packing material for a box that takes two or three to carry. He will cover it with “Fragile” and “This Side Up” labels in English, Spanish and Italian, and paste a picture of it outside the box, with a note explaining the precious cargo is destined for the world championship.

“There’s never, ever a guarantee” it will arrive without damage, and that’s what keeps him up at night, Perkins said.

While his reputation has been built on grandiose creations, his favorite things to make are “French macarons, French-style petite cakes, little cute desserts.”

He yearns to return to Hawaii one day and open a “small, little Hawaiian-French fusion pastry shop on every island.”

See more of Perkins’ prize-winning work at cakesdecor.com/manvscake.