Happy Sugar Baking Land

Amazing Wedding Cakes - Silent Movie Cake

Is this thing on? Hellllooooo there! Husband Mike here and we are back after a week off on the mothership that is WE tv. Did you miss us? Mime the your answer in the comments because this week we tackle the theme of the silent movie era.

We had a ton of ideas for this cake as all of us love movies and have worked at times in the industry, so all kinds of lighting rigs and screens and cameras were being tossed around.  The biggest obstacle was narrowing it all down and tackling the rather tiny color scheme of the silent movie era!!  We did throw in a Chaplin nod and some film reels and one camera, but my favorite was the title cards and stills we made to go around the base of the bottom tier.  

For those of you curious, the reception was at the famed Silent Movie Theater on Fairax in Los Angeles.  They show all kinds of great and rare films there, including those with color and sound if you're into that kind of thing.  If you find yourself in the area, be sure to check it out.  But, in honor of our silent movie production, I'm gonna keep the talking to a minimum and let some pictures speak for themselves!!

 

Cake Girls nailed it again this week although they did claim world domination and I believe Reva planted that flag a few episodes ago, so it is on ladies!! No, not really. We love them and don't worry, we got some shirts for you real soon.

Speaking of, yes, we are making up some shirts with the help of some of our amazing artist friends that are going to look so good you'll be buying them for Christmas gifts this year! Seriously, some artwork just came in from our friend Candace and it is so cool!

Next week be sure to tune in, it's a talkie!  We have a basketball groom's cake which was a blast to put together. Marc and I had a little field trip and saw something so L.A. that I hope it makes the show. But, more on that next week!! 

Congrats Rachel & John!!

What? Where are we?

Hey, like you I was confused by the bump this Sunday night from WETV's Sunday night line-up. We don't know what happened, they never tell us anything! Don't worry if you missed us, it looks like they will be showing repeats of the show all week long. 

Until then enjoy the blogs! 

 

How about some cake photos to hold you over until the next episode? Here are some oldies but goodies....

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for all the support, the many emails and all the many calls!

Love ya'

Reva 

Online Episodes?

Happy Friday everyone!  And Happy Birthday to Disneyland!  

We get a lot of people asking us about where they can view episodes of Amazing Wedding Cakes online. We have an odd Puerto Rico fanbase, as well as all of you Canucks up north and my friend Brad in France, all wanting to see the show to no avail.  As for you cheapies with no cable, there's no help for you.

After some investigating, at this time WE tv does not offer streaming episodes on its website, nor does it authorize any third party video hosting sites such as Hulu to broadcast their shows online.  I haven't gotten an answer as to whether they plan to either, so for now there's not much you can do except write to WE telling them how much you love us and want to see us online!  Tell 'em Merci Beaucoup sent ya!

Not great news for Friday I know, but coming up Sunday is another brand spanking new episode of Amazing Wedding Cakes featuring little old us and a Silent Movie inspired wedding cake.  It is good times, so join us live on Sunday night or DVR so you can put it on a loop.  Happy weekend!

Amazing Wedding Cakes - Arboretum

I know what you're thinking, but just get that idea out of your head right now! You do not all need a giant wedding cake that gives me heart palpatations to deliver!!

This week we delivered the "cakezilla" known as the Arboretum Cake. 3 feet wide, 5 tiers high and needing to go all the way down to the campus of Cal State Fullerton in Orange County. As you saw, it was satellite cakes arranged to create a base for the big centerpiece tiered cake. It is a great look, but a real bear to assemble and move around. We had to do a test assembly at the shop and then take it apart again to fit back in the fridge and then into boxes and down for final assembly at the reception. Phew! That is a lot of work and puts a lot of stress on the cake itself. Reva had to make a few minor touch-ups as we worked.

And hey, I take a little stab at myself about her letting me help with the cake, but I do have some ability to work on small stuff! Just don't ask me to make the sugar flowers like Karyn was doing, but I can stick them into frosting any day.

The cake board wasn't so much a "board" as it was a table top! No, seriously, it was a table top. Because of the size of this cake and the eventual weight, I had to make a trip down to the local Lowe's and purchase a pre-cut, 36" diameter wood table top. The kind you can screw those pre-made legs into, slap some paint on and tell your friends you whittled yourself! Not that I've ever done that or anything. It was a couple inches of solid lumber and expensive. Next time you spend a few bucks on some cake boards down at the supply store, don't feel so bad. I often wonder if someone from the wedding grabbed it and has it in their living room right now with a lamp and some photo frames on it.

The delivery was one of those nerve shredding ones. We gave ourselves plenty of time (the trip from L.A. towards Disneyland can be one hellish commute) but the traffic was stop and go most of the way. It took so long in fact, that our sound man extraordinaire, Brian, went through at least two big bags of chips. That guy loves chips! When we got to the site, there were a couple crumbs left in the bottom and I forgot my mic was on while Reva was talking. Brian shot me a look from across the field as I snuck some Doritos! Oops. It was pretty funny though.

No matter how many precautions you take, with an important cake of this magnitude, it gets stressful. When we got to the arboretum at CS Fullerton, we had to drive over some dirt access roads and then carry the cake across the big grass grove. So basically the universe threw everything it had at this cake! And then the tree which I always worry about dropping leaves and what not.  Not to mention me knocking off a couple flowers as I set it  down!  I can't believe they got that on film, but hey, that's what happens.

Funny note to caterers: unless you've confirmed with the cake shop, don't put a stand on the table. We had a good laugh when we got to the table and there was a flimsy metal circle with a thin piece of glass on top. It looked nice from far away and matched similar ones by the buffet, but I think the Arboretum cake would have smashed it into a thousand pieces.

Reva did the final decorating touches on site, adding the flowers and walking around it like a bazillion times trying to figure out if it was finished. Because of the traffic, we weren't finished by the time guests started arriving. That's when it is my job to stop her and tell her how awesome it looks. And it did! The Arboretum Cake looked so good in that setting! The color just popped underneath the tree and there was a matching candy bar just behind it, so I was pretty much jealous of the guest list.

You know, an interesting question we get quite often about these cakes is price. Without going into our standard pricing here, all of the cakes featured on Amazing Wedding Cakes were done pro bono. This Arboretum cake would have definitely helped out with the vacation fund, but all our couples were so nice letting us butt in with cameras and lights etc., that the least we could do is call it even. But if you must know, since this cake was such a pain for me to deliver..... um, it was a million dollars!!

It was good to see Cake Girls back on the show this week. We love them out here in Cali, they're awesome. I just wish they'd showed them making those cool sugar flowers.

Thanks for watching our "cakezilla" be born! Let's see, next week we'll be back with a true Hollywood kind of cake. It was probably our toughest design and execution this season, but more on that next time. Take care everybody!!

Reality Math

I wanted to do a little mathematical break down for you today of how a reality show is filmed. I was going over it in my head, and I think it will be really helpful in conveying the complexity involved in assembling an hour of television.

For Amazing Wedding Cakes, we filmed over the course of a couple months, totaling I think 24 days in all. We shot on two cameras the entire time. Give or take, I saw 10 tapes a day go in and out of each camera for 20 tapes a day equaling 20 hours of footage.

20 hours of footage x 24 days = 480 hours

That means, with some extra filming here and there, WE tv had access to just shy of 500 hours of Merci Beaucoup in action.

Now let me start another equation. We are featured in 11 of the 14 episodes set to air for season 2 of Amazing Wedding Cakes. In each episode, 3 of the 4 cake shops (L.A., N.Y., CHI, & O.C.) are presented creating a cake. In a standard hour of television, about 44 minutes is actual program while the rest is commercials. We all know that too well don’t we! Taking out credits and those little animated bumpers between ads and cake shops, you get I’d say 42 minutes of cake time. That’s 14 minutes per shop per episode.

11 shows x 14 minutes per show = 154 minutes or 2 hours 34 minutes.

2 and a half hours of Merci Beaucoup will actually make it across your T.V. and into your homes this year. That seems like a lot doesn’t it? Well, not really. Not when you factor it up against the 480 plus hours of footage out there. That includes interviews, deliveries, decorating, all of what you see in the show.

I ask you give me the 500 hours just to make this math a little easier, okay? So, if we take 1 hour of television time and divide it into 100 hours it is what... 1% right? How about 200 hours, .5%. Half of a percent! That would mean 1 hour of 500 hours comes out to .2%!! So our 2 and a half hours equals approximately .5% of all the video that was shot!!

2.5 divided by 500 = .5%

Half of one percent of every inch of video tape we were exposed to will actually be used!!! Now that is amazing!! Even if they used 1% or 10% or even 25%, that is still almost nothing and hardly an accurate representation of what went into bringing these cakes to life. And the whole show! 2000 hours of footage shot for what amounts to under 11 hours of actual television. It is absolutely crazy when you think about it.

Imagine you went to Europe for a month, filming the whole wonderful experience on your camcorder. Sounds great right? But when you get back home, you only have a five minute highlight reel to show your friends. Mere seconds of the most beautiful art, landscapes, buildings, and culture. That is sort of what filming this show has been like and why we wanted to share even just a bare minimum more with you here on the blog, because the simple truth is, showing someone wash their hands is boring television.

Which is why I began running these numbers in the first place. Over at the We tv website, there is a lot of negative chatter from a lot of uninformed people about us, about the other shops, about everyone. Most of it has nothing to even do with the show or the cakes presented but come down to personal attacks. It must be easy to launch an anonymous attack from the safety of your couch. Fortunately, it is just as easy for me to debunk them from my comfy recliner.

See, those numbers above are much like the actual percentage of viewers as compared to those on the message boards. Boards are a notorious wasteland of petty, anonymous comments from a marginalized few. I thought it might be better on a network like WE as opposed to a bunch of dudes picking apart X-Men films, but it takes all kinds to make up an audience. I rest my case however, that the half a dozen bad eggs posting their hate amount to little more than a speck of dust in viewership.

The reality of reality TV is that a lot of hard work went into making Amazing Wedding Cakes, from the producers to the sound department and camera crew to Cake Girls, Christopher Garren’s Cakes, Cake Alchemy, and Merci Beaucoup and down the line to those poor editors with all that tape. It takes a village people and we thank all of you who have said so many nice things over the past few weeks and are enjoying the ride. Your numbers are far far greater and we appreciate it.

We love making cakes! We treat it like a party every time and make sure to have the most fun that we can. Nothing about our personalities is fake, we really are the way you see us. It’s cake! It is meant to be a celebration and I hope that comes through. Amazing Wedding Cakes is just a glimpse into what we do, and we’re glad you enjoy all one half percent of it. It is television after all, entertainment, so remember to have fun, we do!!

Oh, and trust me nitpickers, Marc washes his hands like every 10 minutes. I know, I buy the soap.

Amazing Wedding Cakes - Origami Wedding Cake

Konichiwa!! Welcome back to Happy Sugar Baking Land and the continuing saga of  Merci Beaucoup on WE tv’s Amazing Wedding Cakes! Husband Mike checking in with what is probably our most normal cake of the season, the Origami Crane Wedding Cake.

We have one coming up next week that is sort of a normal wedding cake on steroids, but the Origami cake is a terrific representation of the kind of standard wedding cakes that we do. It is elegant with some nice detail and size appropriate. You see these giant cakes on all these shows and that is more the exception than the rule. This time we delivered a cake to both feed and light up the room.

Marc did the consultation this time, a rarity for him. I think he did a good job though! Sometimes one of the  hardest parts of meeting with the couple is helping them get what they need. If you come to us, you’re getting our years of experience and that means our professional opinion. We’ll do everything possible to give you what you want, but we will also make sure it works for your wedding as well. Marc recognized that a full origami crane made of cake would be too big and too expensive for their budget and wedding size, so he steered them towards a more traditional base with that awesome chocolate painted crane on top. We actually found a simple silver and red patterned piece of origami paper and that is what was used for the crane’s final look.

I just want to say a big thank you to my mom’s friend Shoko who is an origami master and took time out of her schedule to make up a couple little crane’s for us to reference. They were invaluable to the process and a whole lot quicker than us trying to figure it out!

The biggest problem this week was with the red bands around the tiers. I don’t think they showed it and it was probably pretty hard to tell on T.V., but that was a buttercream cake! The color was awesome in my opinion by the way and it was a smoothed out buttercream with a nice rounded edge at the top. Then the red band was piped around the bottom of each layer, so when we saw that they were a little wonky, and with time a ticking, it was either make it work or basically strip the cakes and re-frost them. The later wasn’t a good option, so Reva and Marc made some fixes and managed to get the top tier redone to provide a beautiful perch for our crane.

Speaking of the crane, little known fact, Marc actually made two of them. He picked one to paint and then the other he used in a practical joke on Karyn. While she and Reva were working on some sugar flowers, Marc walked the crane over and then tripped himself and dropped the crane on the ground, smashing it  into a dozen pieces!! Karyn had no idea what was coming and the look on her face was priceless! Needless to say this led to quite a fit of laughter around the bakery over the next couple days. I thought they had gotten it all on camera, but I guess they didn’t. Oh well, you had to be there.

The delivery was smooth with the crane flying there in a separate box with some padding around it to make sure those chocolate wings didn’t fall off. Marc came along this time with Reva and myself at the request of the bride and groom. They wanted to have both of them there to cut the cake. This is actually pretty unusual for us and not a service we commonly offer. We rarely have the time to do something like that, but since the reception was a little later in the evening than usual, we got all our work done at the shop and headed over. The Stargazer banquet facility was a trip too. They had a wall with all the celebrities who had eaten there and even shots from an indie picture that filmed there called “Scorched.” That’s not unusual in Los Angeles, but I guess the selection of names was kind of amusing. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but the place was pretty cool inside.

I’ve been meaning to shout out our crew along the way too. Because of scheduling etc., we had three different producers work with us during filming. The first was Margaret. She guided the first three cakes you saw this season plus all those shots of Reva and Marc around Los Angeles. Miss you Midge! With this cake, we see the first of three cakes we did with Alexis and let me tell you, she was a huge part of this delivery! She made sure things happened on time, cause as you might know, wedding receptions are always late. But Alexis was on top of it all.

You know what I just remembered? They did some great interviews with some of the guests that didn’t make the show. You know, it’s T.V. and there is only so much time, but there were super cool people at the reception and I want to thank them for how great they were to us the bakery, and us the Amazing Wedding Cakes crew.

I wasn’t sure when they first mapped it out, but the end product was wonderful with the branches and flowers etc. I’m a huge fan of Japanese culture as well and I thought it was very fitting for the nation that it represented and a great example of how to take a simple wedding cake and toss in just enough character to make it amazing.

Thanks for watching everyone and I promise to get back on schedule next week and have our next Amazing Wedding Cakes blog up on Monday. As I said, we have a monster of a pastry coming up so set those DVRs!!

Amazing Wedding Cakes - Ciga-Roo!!!

Wow!!  I am about 15 minutes away from the start of this week's new episode of Amazing Wedding Cakes, and finally getting to our blog about last week's episode!  A major basket of thank you to the Genius Bar staff down at the Apple Store for getting our computer back online and saving all of our data.  Having you hard drive go crazy is never a good feeling, especially with all these cool cake pictures on here!

So, How do you feel about 3-dimensional kangaroos standing up?

Husband Mike here once more with the skinny on the thunder from down under known as our cigar-roo grooms cakes!!  I am a little disappointed that the edit of the show failed to credit me for the name "ciga-roo," but you know, I know I'm awesome.

Nothing makes Marc sillier than working on a silly cake.  He had so much fun working on his little Aussie buddy.  The bad Crocodile Dundee accents were flying the whole time as we sculpted this thing out with a combination of cake and "krispy rice treats." Remember folks, if you reverse those first two words, it becomes copyrighted material! So I got called in to make the krispy rice. What was Reva thinking?

Let me ask, have you ever been on camera before? It's not easy, especially when they come in and film you working. Reva and Marc have some experience from last season, but the first day I showed up, they thought it would be a great idea to let me make these krispy rice treats on film, even though I'd never made them before. And like a fool, I agreed. I was pretty nervous and they were nice about the editing, but I mucked up that recipe good! It all worked out in the end as the dynamic duo fixed it. Although, my wife was laughing her butt off as we watched it! I guess it was pretty funny.  I'll just have to practice that recipe some more.

Luckily, my skills were not required to make this kangaroo live. That was Marc doing his best sculptor impression as he sliced away the kangaroo body and then molded the head out of my patented dry krispy treats. Reva handled the tail and the ears and then we went with a nice buttercream finish to give it a "furry" look. It really did look furry too!  The buttercream easily "flicks" out into points and textures, giving it the look of a baby "joey's" soft coat.  Since it was last minute and indoors, we knew the buttercream would be the best option. Our little hopper got finished off with some nice airbrushing and the cigars in the pouch.

Those stupid cigars took the longest time too! I was off in the corner on the computer and all I could hear was Marc and Reva going back and forth on the size of those three little fondant cigars! I think she made like 9 or 10 different sizes before they matched the scale of that kangaroo. But finally our little marsupial humidor was complete! And ain't he the cutest?

Something not mentioned was the flavor of this little guy.  It has become in vogue to add unique flavors to our cake base and for the ciga-roo we baked in a nice, high quality lager.  Much like a champagne cake, adding the beer gives it just a hint of flavor.  Trust me, the scraps were delicious!

I cannot believe what the Cake Alchemy crew attempted this week!! As someone who carries these things around everywhere, I can look at a cake and tell you the weight and it is always heavier than you think.  They had to make a few adjustments to hold it up, but I think the effort was superb. 

Sorry it took so long to let you in on the ciga-roo, but thanks again for watching!  We've got 8 more cakes to go this season, including a Japanese Origami inspired wedding cake on in about, oh... now!!  More on that soon.  Take care!

Uh Oh!!

Quick quiz.  What happens when you turn your computer off and then come back to turn it on and nothing happens?  Nothing!  You're absolutely right! 

Nothing is happening here at Merci Beaucoup HQ as we try and figure out why the computer Gods have frowned upon us.  So, no special blog post about our lovely Ciga-roo cake until I get back from the Genius Bar.

I hope you all enjoyed the episode though, and can't wait to tell you more!!

-Mike