Hey gang, check out the WE tv website where every week they have a little caption contest based on a photo snapped during filming of one of their shows. This week, you'll find the unholy Merci Beaucoup trio, so make with the clickey and leave your best caption!!
By the way, there's a shot from this episode where you can see me in the background at a table working on something. It's this bubble sign!!
- Husband Mic
When we first fielded the call for a cheesecake that looked like a wheel of cheese, we thought, "hell yes!" What surprised us was when the bride Gina told us how many bakeries she spoke to that said "hell no." What are you afraid of out there cakers? Scared of a little mouse? Discriminating against the glory of cheesecake? Well, we here at Merci Beaucoup weren't afraid to tackle the monster known as the Cheesecake Cheese Cake!!! Bring it on!
Hello everyone, it is I, Husband Mic (nonregistered trademark) with the behind the scenes on this week's particularly "cheesy" episode of Amazing Wedding Cakes. *insert grunting noises and crowd moans here* Interesting sidenote, Reva adores herself some cheese. She really, really digs the fromage. We even have issues of "Culture" magazine strewn about our home. Last New Year's Eve, we had a cheese party with our friends Russ & Alysse and Reva has more than once mused about becoming a cheese maker after she retires from cake. But let's be real, that girl ain't ever retiring from cake, and with clients like Gina and Joseph, she won't have to!!
Like Reva mentioned during the consultation, the biggest obstacle in creating something like this is temperature. Cheesecake is not meant to get warm and with the addition of a layer of fondant, we weren't sure how it would hold up. The overall design wasn't the most challenging thing we've ever done, but the constant need to put it back into the fridge made the process longer than usual. Maintaining temperature was key, and you know what? Those lights they attach to our ceiling for filming are hot!!!
Construction started like any other cake (plus the maintaining temperature angle). Reva stacked the (very large) cheesecakes and crumb coated them, scooping out some little cheese holes before covering the cakes with the yellow fondant.
When they cut the slice out, I was transported back to the 80s and the epidemic of Pac-Man cakes I used to see at my friend's birthday parties!! Am I alone here? You know, originally he was gonna be called puck man but... I'll stop quoting Scott Pilgrim now.
Something they didn't show was we added some airbrushed touches of a darker yellow inside the holes of the cheese wheels to give them some shadowing and depth. And yes, pay attention to the beginning of the show and you might just see where we pulled those gum paste grapes from! Well, at least a couple bunches were on a display cake behind Reva, literally right underneath our noses. So, we cleaned them up a little and put them on the cheesecake and they looked super cool. As someone from the North Bay region of Northern California, you can't have cheese without some grapes!!
Marc did an awesome job on the little mice. They were so cute, and as Reva pointed out, displayed his "pipeability." We specialize in coining phrases here are Merci Beaucoup, so look for our trademarked Pipeability t-shirts this Holiday season! Here's a shot of his "plate sketch" and the final squeaky couple.
The delivery was pretty easy, but one drawback to being in Hollywood, is everyone has an idea how the industry works and wants money. So, I guess the site we delivered too (a pretty big wedding venue out here) has come to know what is what and wanted some compensation that was a little too steep for our tiny TV show. Sucks for you, because the place looked incredible, but wasn't that picture of our couple with the cheese cake so cute?
Interesting anecdote, while we were there a couple of the catering staff kept referring to us as the TV cake show. As I was walking out the door I heard someone say "oh, Ace of Cakes!" Oh brother!! For the last time, I do not look like Duff! Argh, here's some beauty shots of the Cheesecake Cheese Cake for you while I go shave and burn all my hockey jerseys:
I guess the big question is, "did the cheesecake ever melt on you?" The short answer is yes. We did have some leakage in the early stages after the fondant was on and as you saw in the show, Reva put a little dam of fondant on the bottom to keep leaks contained. Basically we had a couple drops of "melt" I guess you'd call it come out in one spot, but overall it was a big success story for cheesecake fans everywhere! So go ahead friends, don't be afraid, we want to see some cool cheesecake ideas out there!!
A super huge gigantic happy sugar "merci" to our couple, Gina's delightful mother, and their whole family for being amazing clients. They were involved, trusting, generous, and so excited to be a part of this process. They really were just perfect and when you have a great connection with a couple like them, it makes it so much easier to create a beautiful cake. In fact, we love them so much, they will be back on Amazing Wedding Cakes in a few weeks! Hey, we filmed in October, there's not a lot of weddings in October that don't involve Jack Skellington, so Gina & Joe will be back on October 17th with a masquerade cake!! Although astute viewers already figured that out during the consultation ;)
Look at our kick ass crew up there!
No Merci Beaucoup next week, but we will be back on 10/10/10 with the "Taylor Stripe" cake and let me tell you, it is one sexy pastry. Then we're on every new episode all the way til the end of season 3!! Yeah us! Thanks again for watching everybody!!
It is Friday so what better way to celebrate than some silly cake news!! First up is a little quip from 30 Rock star Keith Powell as seen on the New York Post's website. He answers a couple questions about working on the show and then throws in some tips for buttering up his co-workers:
PW: Have you been doing anything to try and ensure Toofer gets into the episode? Like bake Tina a cake?
Keith: [laughs] I bake cakes for everybody! I leave nothing to chance. The PA that comes through, I bake him a cake – because you never know if he’ll be a writer next year.
Words to live by, bake everyone cake!! We're big fans of 30 Rock here at Merci Beacoup, so stop by any time Keith and bake some cakes with us.
Secondly this week in silly cake news, a world record cake was created in New Orleans on Wednesday. Local shop Haydel's Bakery and the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints teamed up to make a record breaking king's cake that, get this, wound around the Super Dome!! Twice!! Good luck finding the plastic baby in that puppy! Estimated to be about 5,300 feet in length, the two rings of braided cake broke a record held by something known as "Fiesta Mart" in Houston. Seriously? Listen, I'm not even from New Orleans and I can tell you that no Fiesta Mart in Texas is gonna hold a king cake record over NOLA!
Thankfully Haydel's stepped up and brought the king cake crown back to Louisiana. After Guinness officials verified the record, pieces of the no doubt delicious cake went for $7, or $12 with a baby. Well, not actually a baby, but a chance at a raffle prize with proceeds going to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure New Orleans. Great cause, great pastry, what else do you need in life people! Well played Haydel's and be sure to click here for a great article on the event from Nola.com!!
That's it for silly cake news this week! I've been doing these off and on here on Happy Sugar Baking Land, but I think I'm gonna make it more regular. Don't be shy in letting me know about fun and silly cake happenings in your town and I'll post them up here! Have a great weekend!!
- Husband Mic
Ahoy Happy Sugar Citizens! Husband Mic here with another behind the scenes from the kitchen of Merci Beaucoup. This week on Amazing Wedding Cakes we battled scurvy and that obnoxious East India Trading Company to launch our very own pirate ship wedding cake for Mike and his favorite wench Michelle. (Sorry Michelle, we know you're not a "wench," but this whole talk like a pirate thing is so catchy!) Speaking of, HAPPY TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!! I'd like to think this was some sort of stroke of genius from the network to schedule our pirate ship on Sept. 19th to coincide with "Talk Like A Pirate Day," but the ache in the joint that connects the peg to me leg says otherwise. Oh well, it is a happy fluke for sure!!
Sculpted cakes are always challenging and this one was no exception. Our plans had railings and masts and sails and canons and all sorts of piratey goodness. I say "piratey" because that is the word Marc used to describe his ship to the clients. A "piratey" pirate ship? I think someone is getting a word a day calendar from their Secret Santa this year. Land ho!!
Take a shot, Marc called himself an artist! Oh what, you weren't aware of the Amazing Wedding Cakes drinking game? Too bad, down some grog matey!
We started with a styrofoam base that Marc carved into a basic boat bottom with a serrated knife. There's a number of ways to deal with carving and cutting styrofoam including rubbing rough edges together to smooth them out. No matter what you do, it is always messy!! We even dedicated an entire trash can to just styrofoam so we can cut over it and smooth and hopefully catch all those pesky styro pieces! (Hint: it doesn't! I sweep up that damn stuff for days after a project with styrofoam in it!)
Rough seas lay ahead! We had a little trial and error on the sculpting. The bow of the ship was pointing down a little too much which I doubt is a sea-worthy design. Thankfully, cake is easy to manipulate and a simple slice or two from a sharp cutlass and we were back in the sailing biz. Here's some snaps from the sculpting process:
I carved the masts out of large diameter wood dowels and we painted them with some food coloring. (Editor's Note: Reva seems to think a friend of Marc did the masts. Honestly, I just assumed I did since I do stuff like that all the time! It seems so familiar! Either way, masts were carved.) The sails went through a couple revisions. We started with pastillage and did a test sail, but ended up using gum paste because it was lighter. We were all really happy with how those sails came out because they really made the cake something special! Add in all the little details like the canons and the rum barrels and it was quite a site.
They actually showed quite a bit of the process this week, and it came together fairly easy in the end. We sailed around any major difficulties and even the delivery was uneventful. Not that they showed any of that. You know, my part, Mic's part, the hubby's role... the delivery. *SNIP* Le sigh....
Love the gold details! Speaking of the delivery, the "parrrrrr-ty" was at Senor Fred's in Sherman Oaks which had a great dark interior and red and gold accents that totally fit with the pirate theme. It also had an Alabama football game on the bar TV that someone from the AWC crew had a hard time pulling his or her eyes away from! I'm not gonna name names, but Brian, you know who you are!
I don't think they held on a really good shot of the cake in the show, so here's a treasure chest of shots we took of our buttercream vessel:
The water came out pretty neat huh? I think the water, the little details, and the sails all really made this sculpted ship pop and gave Mike and Michelle a memorable cake for their wedding day. By the by, those two were so cool! Forget those Jersey Shore morons, these two Jersey natives are the real deal! We wish you all the best together!!
Outside of my Star Trek reference, my absolute favorite moment from filming this episode was during the delivery. I picked up those pirate props for us to play with and when we hopped in the van for the delivery, I had a plastic pirate hook on and our camera girl Ashley filmed me shifting the van into gear with the hook. We laughed hard in the van but it didn't make it on the show. Also not in the show, any formal interviews with me... where I had a fake parrot on my shoulder. It was awesome and funny, and apparently no one likes such things. I'm not saying the network hates me, but it is kind of obvious so far they do. Oh well. It's their show right? But, I did get a picture of our sound guy Brian using the hook to monitor our mic packs!!
Well, that's cake number two out of the nine we did for season three. Thanks for watching and tune in next week for the glory of the "Cheesecake Cheese Cake!"
Hey everyone, Husband Mic here and I don't know if this falls under "silly" or just plain "weird" cake news, but my brother Bill, who is a connoisseur of odd military history, sent us this link recently and I knew I had to share it here on Happy Sugar Baking Land. It seems that in 1946 there was a little party in D.C. to celebrate the end of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the group that oversaw the atomic testing at Bikini Atoll. So how does one commemorate such an auspicious accomplishment? See for yourself:
BOOM!!! Look at that cake! Duff's little fireworks canon ain't got nothing on this mushroom cloud laying buttercream bomber! Wait, what's that? Oh, I'm sorry, the State Department can neither confirm nor deny the cake was in fact buttercream. Also classified is the flavor (there is a tidbit about "angel food puffs' though) but the article does talk about the cake being ordered from a mysterious East St. Louis, IL bakery and delivered by car to Washington by Eugene Kuehn and bakery supply salesman L.Y. Stephens.
The original post from the blog CONELRAD Adjacent can be found here
It is a lengthly discussion, well written, by Bill Geerhart and addresses the controversy that surrounded the cake, including Soviet reaction to the now infamous photo and a sermon that sparked much of the public debate over this unique piece of pastry history. If you want to know more about it and maybe pick up some interesting cocktail party anecdotes, head on over and read up!!
I wonder what kind of cake this atomic monster would've had at his party? ......
I bake the cakes that make you go mmmmmmm......
Recent Comments