A Guy Named Renfield

ACE OF CAKES

I first met Duff Goldman at a Smalltimore festival last year. It was some shindig at a theater on North Avenue, I think (someplace in the Bermuda Triangle that is the Station North Arts District anyway). Several local theatrical troupes were invited to participate, including Fluid Movement, so I went to help out. Duff Goldman was kind of the emcee, but more sort of the celebrity guest star. He made crabcakes for the audience, and kept things moving along. He was wearing his signature chef’s jacket with a Food Network patch on the shoulder, so we chatted a bit backstage about some of the shows. He told me about some of the Challenge shows he had appeared on, and he was able to confirm for me that a certain Food Network celebrity was just as much of a jerk in real life as he appeared on TV. Smalltimore being what it is, I ran into Chef Duff again at another Fluid Movement show later that summer, where he played a giant lobster.

After that show, he asked everyone to come over to his place to celebrate a cake he had just made. Apparently, a Food Network producer was doing a segment on holiday cakes, and asked Duff if he could a) make a cake that fireworks could be launched from and b) have it ready the following day. He of course said yes, and invited everyone over for a “Fourth of July” party where we watched the fireworks get launched out of a red, white and blue cannon-shaped cake. The cake got set up on a dock by the water’s edge, the camera filmed the crowd’s reaction to the fireworks, the fireworks were launched (so the camera could then film them), we hid from the police helicopter, the cake was cut and the creosote-covered upper layers were discarded, and then we dug in.

Duff is the owner and proprietor of Charm City Cakes, a fast-growing and interesting specialty cake bakery based here in Baltimore. Most of the employees have backgrounds in art rather than baking, and Duff’s love of metal-sculpting and power tools usually shines through. He has appeared on several shows on Food Network, most notably on Food Network Challenge in several cake bake-offs, as well as an episode of Sugar Rush described above. I don’t believe he’s won any of the challenges, but his appearances are notable simply for his charm and character. I’m pretty sure one of the reasons he didn’t win the Elvis Birthday Cake Challenge was due to his use of a blowtorch to melt butter in one of his bowls. Some judges have sensibilities about such things apparently, but you shouldn’t ask Marilyn Manson for fashion advice and expect to walk off with a button-down sweater vest. In any case, he must have impressed someone at the Food Network because they offered him his own show.

Ace of Cakes follows the day to day operations of Charm City Cakes. The first episode focused on a cake he made for the Preakness, but the best moments involved the staff interactions during the work week. What’s really fun for us is watching all these people we know from Fluid Movement shows being filmed at their job. I believe they filmed six episodes, and hopefully there will be many more. They are running the episodes quite a bit, but it is a pretty confusing schedule. The first episode aired Thursday at 10:30, and the next episode aired Saturday at 10:30. The second episode will be on again this Thursday at 10:30, and will be repeated this Saturday at 10:30. What bugs me is that our DVR caught the second episode, but since I thought it was just a repeat of the first episode I deleted it before we watched it. (Several people had mentioned that the schedule was bizarre, but I just couldn’t understand why they would run them that way and I didn’t understand what they meant until after the fact.)