Meet Chef Duff Goldman and the Charm City Cakes team. The upcoming week is a busy one. The staff must crank out 21 decorative cakes including a special cake for the Preakness, one of the three biggest horse races in the world. Duff will be
Hell week has arrived at Charm City Cakes! It's the busiest week of the summer, as Duff and his team are pushed to the limit - 24 cakes in 7 days. Duff and co. have their Monday morning meeting to go over cakes for the week, assign cakes, a
Monday morning - Duff and the Charm City Staff meet up to go over the cakes for the week. The cakes include a four-tier wedding cake based upon a knock-off drawing of the late artist, Aubrey Beardsley, a cake shaped like a vintage hat for a
Duff is making a cake for Zoomerang, the annual benefit gala for the Maryland Zoo. This year's theme is Pink Flamingos, so he visits the zoo for inspiration. Duff makes a pair of flamingo cakes, explaining the difficulty of balancing a cake on the long, skinny legs of a flamingo. Geof invents a new dessert - the crisped rice cannoli - to make the flamingos' beaks. The gang blows off steam at the end of a long week by dressing up and going to Zoomerang, where their cakes are a huge hit. Duff gets to collaborate with his old friend Warren Brown of Sugar Rush when a DC couple orders a Capitol-Dome-shaped cake from Charm City that will sit on top of a cupcake tower from Cake Love. A bride orders an unusual groom's cake for her heavy-metal-loving fiance - a flaming Fist of Rock.
Duff has been asked to make a crab-themed 50th birthday cake for Baltimore's most famous seafood restaurant, Phillips Harborplace. The gang decides to make a bushel (wooden barrel) of crabs with ears of corn around the base. Each crab has to be sculpted out of modeling chocolate and the barrel must be painted so it looks like wood. Duff has also been asked to appear on the Tonight Show, to make a birthday cake for Jay Leno. Once they get to LA, Duff and Geof must make the cake in their hotel room, with the help of Food Network Challenge's Mike McCary. Despite some setbacks along the way, the cake (and Duff) are a big success on the show. While Duff is in Los Angeles, he uses his power-tool skills on a Habitat for Humanity build and realizes a childhood dream when he goes to the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and gets to play a bass that once belonged to Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
A couple getting married at a local amusement park has ordered a cake for each table in the shape of a bumper car. But when the big day arrives, it's 100+ degrees and humid: can the modeling chocolate on the cakes survive the heat? The Maryland Science center has ordered a birthday cake, and Duff decides to make it in the shape of a dinosaur blowing out candles. The gang works out the specifics: which parts of the dinosaur will be rice krispies and which parts will be cake? Duff takes the cake to the kids at the Science center, who sing "Happy Birthday" to the dinosaur before digging in. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has a new building, and Duff has been asked to make a cake to kick off its grand opening. Duff decides to make two cakes for the event: a Peach Tree Cake, which combines cake and metal sculpture, and a Mehndi Cake, with intricate piping.