On January 8th 2010 the call came through. “Do you want to be a team member on the TLC program Ultimate Cake Off?” This came from fellow ICES member Barbara Sullivan from Alabama who would be our team leader. Now on any other day this would be exciting, but after spending the last 72 hours at my daughters bedside in the hospital, and my husband informing me earlier that morning that he was going in a new career direction by accepting a new job, it was all a bit overwhelming. But I jumped at the chance.

It was several days of anxious waiting to find out what our topic was, and many legal papers to sign. We were finally told the theme, and not much else. “Honoring the Unsung Heros of the LA Fire Department.” After reading over the rules once again, we all started on a design. I headed off to my local Westford Fire department for some research. It’s a bit difficult to get ideas from people when you can’t explain why, or what for, but they were amazing gracious and extremely helpful, even posing later on in their full turnout gear for me to make sure the proportions were correct, and that we had good reference photos to go on. These were all turned into design elements on the final submission.

We all conferred by phone on the design, and with some tweaking here and there, a final design was submitted for approval. Once that was set, it was on to the actual mechanics of how to do something like this. For those that do not realize it, the cake must be over 5 feet tall, be on a 48” or large base that is no higher than 5 inches, must be made up of 60% edible material, and have movement, light, and you have to push the final piece up a ramp. Plus you have to make it all in 9 hours.

Now no one ever told me I would be a mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, and an electrical engineer when I graduated with my art degree and decided to do cakes, oh and a carpenter to boot. But it is amazing how much engineering does go into something like this. Piping, tubes, wire, stress loads, support panels, everything must be thought out, built, and tested before the cake is even baked. So on to phase two: Testing and building.

After much conversation and planning, we were ready to give it a go. We were all to meet at team leader Barb Sullivan’s home in Alabama for 5 days to build, bake, carve, and test. Barb and Amanda started on ordering the supplies and baking, Barb Evans from Illinois, started on the flag construction and testing, and I worked out the cubic square inches of this thing and the platform engineering. Then if was off to Alabama over Valentines day weekend, the only weekend we were all free to travel. I managed to make it there on standby and begging after 4 of my flights were cancelled due to a big snowstorm in the mid atlantic. It was a miracle. When the airline told me I had one shot to make it, I packed in 10 minutes and flew to the airport to try and make the first standby flight before the airport closed with yet more snow. Amazingly the snow followed us to Alabama, and it was a very chilly weekend. We made numerous trips to Lowes and other stores to acquire all of our necessary supplies, making fast friends with the plumbing department.

We built, baked, rolled, cut, mixed, created, redesigned and generally knocked ourselves out. And after 4 days of reworking the design as we went, we all packed up to go home only to fly to Los Angeles 4 days later.

Ah, California, a very nice change from February in the East Coast region. We arrived at the airport with numerous bags of luggage and a nasty little rental car guy that gave us a hybrid compact. Needless to say some of us were sitting on luggage and others were holding it. (This was traded in the next day for a mini van.) We were incredibly lucky to have a wonderful friend in the LA area who let us wild women invade her commercial kitchen and shop for 4 days to bake and make everything we needed. I really do not see how people ship everything there. Just getting the base shipped out was an adventure in itself.  After 4 days and long nights, we packed up everything and headed to the bright lights of LA.

Thursday we were on set early for overview shots, interviews, wardrobe and miking. Then it was unloading everything out of the vans and placing it in the kitchen. There were interesting moments when we tried pushing the cake base up the ramp to make sure we could do it, and an incident with the 80lbs. of buttercream that we won’t mention, but once everything was in place that night, it was back to the hotel to try and sleep. 6:30am and on the set in our spiffy green chef’s coats with wires running up our backs. Don’t worry about the cameras they tell you, but they are right there every step of the way for 9 long hours. Our main goal? Finish the cake, and look like we know what we are doing. Funny thing is that once they say “And your time starts now!” you actually do not notice the cameras until the producer asks you to do something or  move somewhere. I learned how to use the very nice fondant sheeter really quickly too. My job was to help carve and make all the detail parts of the cake, the head, dog, eagle, hose couplings, hoses, flashlight and radio, and outfit finishing touches. Barb Evans worked on the building and flag, a giant piece of SugarVail that the producers loved.  Amanda and Barb carved up our bad boy, assembled him and iced him up and covered him with fondant.

Barb Sullivan won her first challenge making awesome flames and we sat out the blue team who looked like they were slightly ahead of the yellow team in progress. Unfortunately we lost the tasting challenge and the yellow team decided to sit us out! Apparently they were insulted we did not sit them out previously by not thinking they were as much of a threat. But we really did not mind as it gave us a chance to eat and relax for a few minutes before starting again. Our surprise elements were the addition of the fireman’s names, and also their company number. We were able to add these to the front cake and the maltese cross Barb was working on.

Funny how 9 hours can go so quickly. When they started counting down to the last minutes it seemed like we had only been working a short time. But we did it, we finished and we were pretty happy with what we made. It was structurally sound, and we had completed what we had set out to do. Nothing failed, and it looked great.

Nicely they let us eat before pushing this massive thing up the ramp. It was a darn good thing we practiced, since knowing where to hold, push, and lift was really important when playing with a cake that ended up being 6’11” tall and weighed probably over 500 lbs.  We made it to the top and then went through the judging process. This took awhile because of the parts that need to be filmed. The only thing that kept us awake was knowing we had to clean up our entire kitchen and pack everything out before leaving that night.

Standing before the judges was actually one of the harder parts. It was hot, and stuffy, and the suspense was killing us. Finally the moment of truth, the yellow team was sent home, then it was down to the blue team and ourselves. When the MC said, “Great job, but do you think it is a little to somber for the occasion?” I looked at Barb Evans and knew we were sunk. Too somber? We were told this was to honor the brave men and women of the fire department for their heroic efforts! It was to honor the “everyman” who works hard everyday without recognition. We thought we honored that to a “T”. But apparently they had other ideas. So we went home not in defeat, but not taking home the $10k check either. It was very hard dismantling our firefighter and saying goodbye to all that hard work. One nice thing is that the fireman had asked for the helmet, hose coupling, eagle, flashlight, radio and other pieces that we had made. The producers took Wilshire our fire dog, so we know he had a happy home.

On Saturday instead of attending the award ceremony we poked around LA, Hollywood, and Rodeo Drive.

All in all would I do it again? It is a little like child birth: a lot of work and frankly miserable at times, a lot of expense, months of preparation and then hard labor for several hours, and then finally you are finished and very proud of your end result. Plus later it didn’t seem sooo very bad as event amnesia sets in. All in all it was a once in a life time experience and must stay that way since the show has been cancelled for this season.