Ace of Cakes

I had to take a moment to tell everyone about Ace of Cakes. I remember seeing the commercials before the first season, and getting all excited because Duff Goldman was getting his own TV show.

I've been watching the pastry competitions on Food Network for years. I have most of them taped, and hopefully I can convert them to a digital format sometime soon. Recently, Food Network has been showing all sorts of competitions, and a lot of them seem to be about cakes. On one competition there was this guy, Duff, who was pulling out power tools for his cake. As a guy, I instantly got excited. He didn't win that one, but it was the start of an era.

He competed in a couple more, and I even saw him on another show called Sugar Rush, building a cake in the shape of a cannon, complete with fireworks. That's right, the guy was putting fireworks in a cake. It didn't surprise me to learn that before going into pastry, Duff had been a welder and a graffiti artist, and that while running his own cake shop, he was also playing bass in a band. It wasn't long before I started seeing commercials for the first season of Ace of Cakes. That season was disappointingly short, with only six episodes. But before the first one aired, Duff was already becoming a favorite of mine. By the end of the last episode, the guy was a hero.

Tonight marks the beginning of Season Two of Ace of Cakes. The show has its own website, and has even has a few commercials up on YouTube. My favorite is still the clown one, though I couldn't help but notice that the one on YouTube is a little different than the one I saw on Comedy Central a couple of nights ago.

For those who haven't seen the show, now's a good time to start watching. This isn't your standard cooking show, with some chef standing behind a counter telling you how to pipe roses. This isn't even like Good Eats, where he goes out and illustrates cooking principles in quirky ways. This is one of the only reality shows I've ever seen that I think is actually done right. This isn't a paid advertisement or anything, this is just me telling you about one of my favorite shows. Go check it out.