Well the long awaited, highly anticipated Chattanooga Cake Ace Contest finally arrived this past Sunday. After many hours working on our cake (unfortunately we got a very late start on our cake and had a few obstacles to overcome which led to us working all night Saturday to finish in time for the show on Sunday) we are very proud of the outcome. As you can see we made a replica of the historic Tivoli theatre for the bottom tier of our cake, it was comprised of 6 – 16” x 16” x 3” square cakes, on top of the Tivoli we have the Lookouts home plate, a hand-sculpted Lookouts baseball cap cake and a hand-poured and painted regulation size Belgian chocolate Baseball. The next tier was a replica of the original chocolate Moonpie box and we topped our masterpiece with a hand-poured sugar Coca Cola bottle. The cake itself weighed well over 150lbs (the Tivoli tier alone weighed 120lbs!). We are very proud to say that everything on our competition cake was edible made with actual cake, chocolate and sugar. We refuse to use rice crispy treats on a cake!!! The billboards on each side of the Tivoli are made from edible sugar paper as is the Coca Cola label.
In case you’re wondering or haven’t heard yet, we didn’t win. Well officially that is but of course we are a little biased and believe we had the best cake at the show (as did many of the vendors and hundreds of the general public who kindly offered their feedback) but we'll let the pictures speak for themselves. We are very proud of the fact that we made a true competition style cake, hit the theme spot of “Chattanooga Groom’s Cake” that we would happily put up next to any cake we’ve seen on Food Network, TLC or WEtv. We do have to say that Jennifer & Chad at Cup-a-Dee cakes also brought it with an awesome cake (I'll post a picture shortly). We knew Jennifer would present the strongest competition and hoped that she would rock and awesome cake, which she did…you go CoCo! (lol).
Although to us the whole Formal Affair/Cake Competition seemed to be unorganized and poorly supervised/time managed causing the bakers way too much lost time out of our very expensive booths away from potential customers this year (issues we are all addressing one by one) the highlight of the day was to when we got to meet the Ace of Cakes himself, Duff Goldman. Duff made our day when he told us, “Your cake is freaking bitchin’, flawless and better than any competition cake I ever made.” and it totally blew our minds when he asked us how to make the sugar coke bottle. I thought surely he was joking but he said he was serious. How cool is that? The Cake God himself…Ace of Cakes…Cake Master…Duff Goldman asking two small town bakers from Chatt Town how to make something?!!! Duff was gracious enough to take time to chat with all of our staff and take lots of photos with all of us and even asked the photographer to take a photo of just him and Erin (our 14 ½ yr old adopted daughter/intern who really is the one responsible for us making Duff style cakes to begin with), he autographed a few of our chocolate boxes. It was great to know that Duff really is the cool, down to earth, funny & friendly guy that we get to see on TV. Thanks Duff for the laughs and the memories forever etched in our minds and hearts! Rock on Ace of Cake…Rock On!
We served 1600+ cake samples and received wonderful feedback from dozens of other vendors and hundreds of people attending the show.
We have more photo's to post when I have more time but for the moment they are available on our facebook page.
