Cake Decorating with Duff Goldman

One of the many highlights of attending the Mixed Conference (my very first food blogging conference…yeeaaah) was our cake decorating class with Duff Goldman, cake decorator extraordinaire and owner of Charm City Cakes. Most people probably know him from the show “Ace of Cakes”, which can be found in reruns on Food Network.

When we arrived to the class, we all paired up and sat at a tables, which were already geared up with a cake all ready for decorating and lots of Duff cake decorating supplies. With your partner, you were encourage to come up with a theme for your cake. My partner, was Lauren from Climbing Grier Mountain. Her idea was to create a watermelon cake. Why? Well, the location of our Mixed Conference was Mountain Lake Resort which was where the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed and one of the memorable quotes from the movie is when Baby says to Johnny: “I carried a watermelon”.  {it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie, so that’s about all I can tell you}

We knew that we needed our cake to have a lot of reddish-pink, so our best bet was to use the airbrushing tool. Neither of us had experience with an airbrush tool, so Duff gave us a one-on-one mini lesson on how to use it.

I even took a short video of him getting our watermelon cake started (don’t judge my crappy video taping skills):

Both Lauren and I took turns airbrushing our cake. It easy, but I know I would need more practice to get the color even.

After we were done with airbrushing, I asked Duff if he had any black fondant because we needed it to create watermelon seeds. He told me he didn’t, but that we could add the black food color to the blue fondant. There was no gloves and I quickly determined that this was gonna be MESSSSSY. You gotta do, what you gotta do. I grabbed some blue fondant and started working in black food color. And then more black food color. It was hard work getting it to be black!

The heat of my hands, plus all the food color, turned the fondants to a big pile of goo. Duff came to the rescue and fixed my wanna-be black fondant mess.

While I was goofing off with making black fondant, Lauren took some green fondant and put it around the sides of the cake. She also topped the edge with some Duff icing.

And within the hour, our cake was done! I’m pretty happy with how we did.

I was a wee bit star-struck meeting Duff. To me, meeting someone who’s a Food Network star, a celebrity chef, or one of my favorite foodie type of people, is just as great as meeting an Oscar award winning actor….if not better. Those are the type of people I have on my “who I want to meet” bucket lists. So, meeting Duff was a really cool experience. He was VERY down to earth and seriously within the first few minutes, you forget that he’s a guy who’s on Food Network with a famous bakery. I love how casual he is and he seemed like the type of guy you’d like to hang out and have a beer with.

Of course, we couldn’t leave class without a photo with Duff and our Dirty Dancing Watermelon Cake.

And guess who else I got to meet? Two of the cake decorators from Charm City Cakes came to help Duff with his classes: Elena Fox (left) and Mary Smith (right). I was so excited to meet them too as I’ve probably seen ever Ace of Cakes episode and seen their amazing work. I seriously would love to just sit and watch them work all day.

Here’s some of the cakes by other food bloggers…aren’t these awesome? I don’t know who did all of them (if I find out, I’ll link their blogs here), but I do know the one in the front with the flames and bacon on top is by Kelly at Evil Shenanigans.

This cute tabletop cake was created by Angela of Angela’s Kitchen and Farihah of  Spices Bites.

And these festive cakes were from Katie of Katie’s Cucina and Linda of Me and My Pink Mixer.

Since I know lots of you like to get all creative in the kitchen just like I do, I thought it would be fun to give you a chance to win some of Duff’s stuff! I’ve put together 3 fun items for one of you to win: 1 Duff Food Color Brush Set, 1 package Duff Decorative Cake Wires and 1 Duff Cake Tattoo package (Spring Dots and Stripes).

Just use the Rafflecopter below to enter. The only required entry is to leave a comment on this post telling me: who would you surprise with a cake (or cupcakes or cookies) you make decorated with Duff Goldman by Gartner Studios products?

If you wish for extra entries, I have provided you with several other ways to gain more entries (all optional).

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thanks for reading about my Duff experience — it was a lot of fun and something I’ll never forget. Stay tuned for my big recap for the entire Mixed conference! I got lots more to share with you.