Ace of Cakes Episodes
Wedding Bells and Shotgun Shells
One of the bakery's very own is getting hitched. Duff and the staff are heading off to a firing range to do a little target practice.
Hell Week
Hell week has arrived at Charm City Cakes! It's the busiest week of the summer, as Duff and his team are pushed to the limit—24 cakes in seven days. Lots of weddings over Memorial Day weekend. Duff and company have their Monday morning meeting to go over cakes for the week, assign cakes and troubleshoot potential problems. The main cakes of the week are a tequila bottle cake for some girls graduating from college, a replica of a German shepherd for a groom's cake, a four-tier deconstructed wedding cake for two men, and an elaborate four-tier wedding cake in which each tier represents a snapshot from a couple's many vacations. Another big cake for the week is a six-tier wedding cake.
Wedding Cakes & Headaches
Monday morning—Duff and the Charm City staff meet up to go over the cakes for the week. The cakes include a four-tier wedding cake based upon a knock-off drawing of the late artist Aubrey Beardsley, a cake shaped like a vintage hat for a woman's surprise 80th birthday, a massive wedding cake accompanied by 300 eight-layer cookies, and a surprise birthday cake for Duff's dad, who's coming into town from Florida.
Life's a Zoo
Duff is making a cake for Zoomerang, the annual benefit gala for the Maryland Zoo. This year's theme is Pink Flamingos, so he visits the zoo for inspiration. Duff makes a pair of flamingo cakes, explaining the difficulty of balancing a cake on the long, skinny legs of a flamingo. Geof invents a new dessert, the rice-krispie cannoli, to make the flamingos' beaks. The gang blows off steam at the end of a long week by dressing up and going to Zoomerang, where their cakes are a huge hit. Duff gets to collaborate with his old friend Warren Brown of Sugar Rush when a D.C. couple orders a Capitol-dome-shaped cake from Charm City that will sit on top of a cupcake tower from Cake Love. A bride orders an unusual groom's cake for her heavy-metal-loving fiance—a flaming Fist of Rock. Sherri must sculpt a realistic fist out of modeling chocolate and uses Duff's fist as a model.
Duff Goes Hollywood
The week starts with Duff giving cake-decorating lessons to a local troop of Brownies. Duff has been asked to make a crab-themed 50th birthday cake for Baltimore's most famous seafood restaurant, Phillips Harborplace. The gang decides to make a bushel (wooden barrel) of crabs with ears of corn around the base. Each crab has to be sculpted out of modeling chocolate and the barrel must be painted so it looks like wood. When Duff delivers the cake, he meets the Phillips family—and Mrs. Phillips bites into one of the ears of corn and is shocked to find it's not real but made of sugar. Duff has also been asked to appear on the Tonight Show, to make a birthday cake for Jay Leno. In Baltimore, Duff packs up, decides to take Geof, and figures out which tools he’ll need. Once they get to L.A., Duff and Geof must make the cake in their hotel room, with the help of Food Network Challenge's Mike McCary. Despite some setbacks along the way, the cake (and Duff) are a big success on the show. While Duff is in Los Angeles, he uses his power-tool skills on a Habitat for Humanity build and realizes a childhood dream when he goes to the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and gets to play a bass that once belonged to Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Cake Walk
A couple getting married at a local amusement park has ordered a cake for each table in the shape of a bumper car. But when the big day arrives, it's 100-plus degrees and humid–can the modeling chocolate on the cakes survive the heat? The Maryland Science Center has ordered a birthday cake, and Duff decides to make it in the shape of a dinosaur blowing out candles. The gang works out the specifics–which parts of the dinosaur will be rice krispies and which parts will be cake–and Duff takes the cake to the kids, who sing "Happy Birthday" to the dinosaur before digging in. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has a new building, and Duff has been asked to make a cake to kick off its grand opening. Duff decides to make two cakes for the event–a Peach Tree Cake, which combines cake and metal sculpture, and a Mendhi Cake, with intricate piping.
New Frontiers
This week Duff and his team are making a replica of the Moon, complete with an astronaut, a giant peanut butter cup and a giant sandcastle cake. Then Duff & Mary Alice travel to LA to explore the possibility of opening a Charm City Cakes West bakery.
