Let Them Eat Cake…

One of the highlights of the NCS Reuben Weekend was the cake we had made as part of the King Features 100th Anniversary celebration last Friday.

Fans of the Food Network’s “Ace of Cakes” show know Duff Goldman and his team of pastry artists at Charm City Cakes. Since the 2015 Reuben Awards Weekend was in nearby Washington D.C., we decided to pay Charm City Cakes a visit in Baltimore with an eye on having a cake made honoring King Feature’s Centennial. What you see is what they came up with. Here’s my original design:

It was an adventure in more ways than one. First, both The Lovely Anna and my kids were big fans of the show, so there was plenty of geeking out over working with them. Second, Anna and I got stranded in the Baltimore neighborhood where Charm City Cakes is located due to the impossibility of getting a cab or an Uber, and had to walk about 1.5 miles through some pretty rough neighborhoods to the train station all while starving because we hadn’t eaten all day. Fortunately it was the middle of a bright afternoon, I weigh 230 lbs and look like more trouble than it’s worth to try and mug, and we had a box full of flavor-sampler Charm City cupcakes . We got to the train station intact, unmugged, and with full stomachs… but out of cupcakes.

The cake was a big hit and we ended up eating what was left of it all weekend up in the presidential suite (we had five extra sheet cakes to feed those at the party). My only disappointment with it was that the newspaper strips they used, printed on rice paper for the surface of the “stack of newspapers”, where too small to fill all the cake surface so it really looked like a newspaper… too much space between the strips. I wish they’d realized this and let me know, I’d have gotten them more strips or told them to print some twice to fill up the spaces.

I will post more about the Reubens next week.