I Blew Up a Cake on The Food Network
By: Cory Pohlman
Tags: Food Network, Baking, Reality TV, Cake Decorating, Cooking

It never rains in Southern California. Well, except the entire day of shooting for my appearance on the Food Network TV show Cake Off. I’d made a four foot tall space cactus cake and I had to ferry it from my friend’s chocolate shop to the studio downtown in pouring rain. Our Honda CRV has a rubber lining across the top of the hatch back which serves as a fifty gallon bucket for collecting rain water. Every time I opened it that morning sheets of water would crash down on the tailgate and soak everything. So there I was, standing at the back of the CRV and trying to wipe it down with a towel and shaking out my drenched supplies, panicked about how I was going to accomplish everything I had to do. I was fairly certain my cake would not fit in the CRV, I could feel something tingling on my forehead, I knew I was breaking out and I was about to be on camera for fourteen hours, so, of course, I said to myself “It’s all going to work to in the end.” Um, yeah, I was wrong.

Photo by Steven Pahel on Unsplash

This was my fifth Food Network Challenge. I had won Cake Wars and Sugar Dome and had appeared on Cake War Champs and Halloween Wars so my confidence wasn’t derived completely out of thin air. Also, us cake decorators have a pretty strong bond with the “the show must go on” philosophy. Delivery trucks hit bumps, cakes hit walls, slide off tables, get stubborn notions of their own and just move themselves ways that seem physically impossible. But the show goes on. You pick up that palate knife and a bucket of flowers and you go to work. But this one had been different from the beginning. When the judges for Cake Off presented me with the concept of creating a cake which would transform from ugly to beautiful, “The Beast to Beauty Challenge” to say I was stumped was an understatement. I searched online, I flipped through books, I even asked my husband what he thought. He thought I shouldn’t do any more of the these TV shows where they pay you in “exposure”. Exposure it turns out does not not pay the bills. But then I found it. A night blooming cactus which spends it’s days as an unimpressive, even ugly (no offense succulent fans) green blob, but one night a year it blooms with pale white flowers and traces of almost neon yellow and becomes… a swan. Well, the swan of cacti.

Photo by David Sola on Unsplash

Anyway, it didn’t matter, my inner art girl had taken hold and I was on fire. I would make a giant cactus with a motorized blooming action that pushed big, colorful flower pedals from the top of the cactus out into the world to dazzle everyone involved. Another thing cake decorators share is the constant conflict between out inner artist and our inner shopkeeper. The artist wants to go over the top, not on the nose, splashes of color which tell a story just by their composition alone. The shopkeeper knows the customer asked for a cake that looks exactly like their husband’s Miata. This cake wasn’t going to be a Miata. Everything was going to work out great.

When the week started I had everything I needed to make it work. I had a motorize lift, a box of assorted molds, a bucket of black fondant and of course, my palate knife. I got to work building the internal structure and the decorative pieces for my cactus cake. My friend Caitlin had volunteered (she might say had been coerced) to help out for the week. She was a cake decorating novice. But I had built a fence in front of her house with her and I told her it was basically the same thing except for the icing, the piping and the TV cameras. The filming for this show was new for me because they embedded a film crew with us for several hours a day for a week to get footage of the build. There are two different kinds of people in a kitchen, those who chat and those who don’t realize five hours have gone by and they haven’t said a word or eaten lunch or changed the Spotify mix. I realized very quickly that Caitlin was in my camp and neither of us were going to be chatting up the cameras. Caitlin later commented that she came off like the Sling-Blade of cake decorators by mostly grunting and occasionally commenting “Un Huh” on camera.

Photo by Joshua Hanson on Unsplash

The producers on rare visits just did a lot of head tilting and stunned observing like I was Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters building that mountain in his living room. We started calling the cake “Blobert the space cactus.” I wasn’t sure myself that I was in complete control of Blobert, but once I attached the arms and covered it in black fondant the shape emerged. The structure for my cactus flower opened and closed perfectly, the details were getting sharper and the cake recipe elements were falling into place. I started to think about winning the ten thousand dollars. All I had left to do was tie in the fire element. I tied the outer black cactus flower petals with a sparkler fuse so that once it burned out they would fall open. Simultaneously I would be remotely operating the motorized lift pushing the colorful pedals up with umbrella scaffold underneath them finishing in a dramatically fully bloomed midnight cactus. The tests with the string fuse worked so well that I thought to myself “Why not more fire?” I know, believe me, I know. I found flash paper at a local magic store and took to it like a twelve year old boy with minimal parental supervision. Caitlin and I had a blast sending fire balls up in the air from the kitchen counters. But Blobert couldn’t take more of beating than he already had during testing and I didn’t want any singe marks on the outer shell so I decided the first real flash paper test would have to be live on camera. Everything was going to work out fine. I know. I know.