We’ve all seen the show.  A bunch of crazy artists loving their job, meeting insane deadlines and using entertaining problem solving techniques to complete the task by the skin of their teeth

Their weekly antics on the Food Network were enjoyable to watch and yet strangely familiar.  One can say that they were making psycho cakes for crazy connoisseurs.

When I first watched the show I never ever thought we would ever have the chance to work on product for the show.

You can say that it started with 2 fanboys.  Back in SDCC of 2007 Duff Goldman’s brother a minimate and popculture fanatic ran into Michael Leavey.  Coincidently Mike gave him the DST Fanboy minimate which bore an uncanny resemblance to Duff.  That moment it clicked.  The Ace of Cakes Minimate concept was born at that moment.

Couple of weeks after SDCC 2007  ___________ Goldman sent us some rough guidelines.  One of the main criteria in designing the Duff minimate was some how incorporating their usage of unorthodox  tools in creating the menagerie of off the wall cakes.  Most of all the Goldmans wanted the product to be fun for kids and adults.

When seeing the show again, this time with an eye for product, we saw that Duff and his crew typical used construction hardware in their cake fabrication such as saws, blow torches and drills.  We took this concept and took it one step further.  If he used a small saw, let’s make it a chain saw, instead of a little precision blow torch, we had a hand torch with a giant flame, we added a giant blending tool to drill and instead of a small icing gun, we gave him a giant icing backpack complete with tanks and hose.

We also wanted to include some of the more traditional tools of cake baking including a spatula and spoon.  The Goldman’s also wanted to make sure we had some of Duff’s trademark personal items such as his baseball cap, bass guitar and most of all 2 of his famous cakes.

The decision on which cake to go with was probably the hardest.  The Goldmans wanted 1 cake to be based on Duff’s slightly more traditional award winning cake designs.  After pouring through pictures of Charm City Cake’s design portfolio, we notice that some of the novelty cakes had several variants and were repeat orders.  The decision was close but the “You Rock” cake won out convincingly by all involved.  Next step was “minimatizing” the cake by making the hand on the cake in the shape of a minimate hand and having the tray fit in hand of a minimate.  On a side note if you remove all of duff’s accessories and his chef’s jacket, he is wearing one of his charm city cakes shirts underneath.

At the end of the design phase we came up with 2 versions for Duff.  One in his trademark white chef uniform and  the second in a more traditional blue with long pants.  See attached picture.  It was decided that only one version be made which is reflected in the final product.  The graphics department did an excellent job in displaying the item we were all quite pleased.