Food Network show is icing on a young baker's 'Cakes'
Duff Goldman was a high school student in Sandwich when the idea of going to culinary school first crossed his mind. Cooking and eating and food had always been a part of his childhood on Cape Cod, but he remembers having something of a career epiphany while making a steak and cheese sub at a local pizza shop where he worked. "I was just like 'I should do this,' " Goldman recalls. "This is what I'm good at."
Today, Goldman, who is 31, has left the pizza shop of his formative years behind and is better known as the star of the new Food Network program ``Ace of Cakes," a series that focuses on the day-to-day operations of his Baltimore-based business Charm City Cakes.
There, Goldman, who sports a shaved head and a goatee, and his staff -- a quirky but talented collection of friends and art school graduates -- create elaborate special-occasion cakes. There are wedding tiers air-brushed with images of California or painstakingly painted with mehndi tattoo designs. There are cartoonish confections shaped like bumper cars, dinosaurs, and German shepherds. In one episode, a cake resembling an airplane wing is loaded with fireworks and set ablaze.
What makes the show unusual is Goldman's techniques. Cakes are crafted through traditional methods -- the store goes through an estimated 200 pounds of fondant a week -- as well as offbeat ones. Some of the cakes are shaped with the help of drills or blowtorches. While much attention has been focused on Goldman's use of power tools -- the Food Network markets his creations as ``extreme cakes" -- he insists they are simply handy for building unusual food structures. ``It's just how I learned to solve problems," Goldman says over the phone from Baltimore as taping for the second season of ``Ace of Cakes" gets underway.
But at Charm City Cakes, artistic skill seems as valued as practicality. Goldman dabbled in graffiti and three-dimensional art while in school and is quick to praise the talents of his staff members, many of whom have design and art backgrounds but no formal culinary training. ``It's not even a cake shop, really, it's a studio," he says.
``Ace of Cakes" was the Food Network's top-rated primetime show last month, outpacing the offerings of food world luminaries such as Rachael Ray and Emeril Lagasse, according to Bob Tuschman, senior vice president for programming and production. The show marks a new style of program for the network, what Tuschman calls the ``docu-soap," a story-driven documentary suited to the station's evening line up of travel - , competition - , and entertainment-oriented shows. (Instructional cooking programs are reserved for daytime hours, Tuschman explains).
The Food Network, which knew Goldman through previous work he had done with them, thought his personality was strong and interesting enough to support a series. So far, viewers have apparently agreed. ``We had always thought he was really colorful," Tuschman says.
Following his sub shop soul-searching, Goldman's path to culinary school was not direct. After leaving Sandwich High School, he studied history and philosophy at the University of Maryland. He began learning about pastry while working at a Baltimore restaurant and later headed to the Culinary Institute of America's campus in Napa Valley.
Robert Jorin, who leads the school's baking and pastry program, believes students should first learn the basics of cake making, and then add their individual spin. Goldman, whom Jorin recalls as a determined student, has done that. ``I've seen some of his stuff, and it's quite wild and amazing," Jorin says.
Goldman, who says he found himself making cakes at various jobs, crafted his first personalized wedding cake for the brother of Mary Alice Fallon Yeskey, now the manager of his store, while working at a Colorado ski resort. After a brief stint working for Todd English at the Washington outpost of Olives, Goldman moved back to Baltimore and began building the business that would become Charm City Cakes. The Massachusetts native is enamored with his adopted hometown.
``I really took Baltimore into my soul," he says. Goldman calls ``Ace of Cakes" an accurate depiction of life in his store. He now receives more than 500 e-mails a day, up from about 20 in past years, but says he still aims to limit production to about 30 cakes a week. He will turn down orders from out of state, as well as those for mundane items such as sheet cakes.
"I don't want more orders," he says. "I don't want to expand."
But in some ways, Goldman notes, change has been inevitable. After one viewer wrote in to admonish him for using a mildly offensive word in one episode, Goldman's first instinct was to craft a response using even more colorful language. He quickly realized that would be a bad idea.
"We're definitely under a microscope now," he says.
"Ace of Cakes" airs at 10:30 p.m. Thursdays on the Food Network. 