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Rocky Mountain News (CO)
February 11, 2004
Section: Food / Spotlight
Edition: Final
Page Number: 3D
WHIRLWIND ROMANCE
Marty Meitus, Rocky Mountain News
When
most of us think of a wedding cake, we probably think of three or four
tiers, piped with white flowers and with a bride and groom on top. But
the five pastry chefs competing in last week's Food Network Wedding Cake Challenge at Beaver Creek spent the day thinking outside the cake box.
Each of the cakes had to be decorated to reflect the four seasons, and
everything had to be edible, except the dowels or pillars that connect
the tiers and the florist wire that attaches the candy flowers.
"This is architecture," Keegan Gerhard says as one of the chefs tops
her cake tower with a spun-sugar "snow globe" enclosing sugar wedding
rings. Gerhard, an executive pastry chef, is emcee of the Food Network Wedding Cake Challenge,
which will air June 19 as part of a Wedding Weekend package, along with
shows such as Emeril Live: Wedding Cocktail Party and Disney Fairytale
Weddings. The chefs at the competition - Sue McMahon of England,
Colette Peters of New York City, Michelle Bommarito of Bloomfield
Hills, Mich., Stanton Ho of Las Vegas, and Mike McCarey of Redmond,
Wash. - are competing for a grand prize of $10,000. Each has an
assistant: Bommarito brought her sculptor brother; Ho brought his son,
a computer expert; McMahon brought her pastry-chef husband; and McCarey
and Peters brought pastry assistants from their bakeries. They
have six hours to ice, decorate and assemble their cakes in front of an
audience. By the last hour, all the chefs are feeling the pressure as
they play beat-the-clock, hand-painting tiny dough balls to form
grapes, airbrushing flower petals and assembling flower parts with
sugar heated to just the right temperature, between liquid and caramel.
The chefs brought their undecorated cakes with them so that elevation
wouldn't be an issue. McMahon, a walking advertisement for FedEx,
shipped her fruitcake across the ocean. "You know," I tell her before the competition, "Americans hate fruitcake."
She laughs, used to that reaction. "It's not full of cheap, horrible
fruits," she says, showing me a cake that's moist and plump. "It's got
cherries and sultanas, and the cake is steeped in a good brandy."
In the first 30 minutes, the cakes are iced and covered, some with
frosting, others with fondant, a sugar mixture the consistency of
Play-Doh. I watch as one chef, after draping the fondant over the cake,
uses a pizza cutter to cut away the extra that overlaps the bottom.
This is the easy part, like a painter stretching his canvas before the
real artistry begins. Although I'm looking for trends, there's
no common thread in what they say. The cakes reflect the chefs'
personal style and would cost several thousand dollars, but it's
possible to take away a useful element or two. "I think this is
fascinating," says Marlene Brush, of West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., an
audience member who's visiting Beaver Creek. "You have to be patient
and creative. It's really an art form." Ho and McMahon have the
most traditional cakes - round tiers decorated with flowers - but this
is cake decorating on a whole new level. No one takes a break. "If
they're thinking about lunch, they shouldn't be here," says judge
Michael Schneider of Chocolatier magazine. The other judges are
Susan Stockton, senior vice president of culinary for the Food Network,
and Patrice Caillot, executive pastry chef at the Ritz-Carlton in Las
Vegas. By the end of the competition, the relaxed atmosphere
that marked the beginning of the event has been replaced by a "don't-
break-my-concentration" tension. It's like taking an exam, where you
seem to have yards of time and, suddenly, there's no time left.
The chefs are judged on such criteria as artistic expression,
techniques, difficulty, organization and cleanliness. By the end of the
competition, each chef has built a stunning cake with incredible
detail. Here's a look at the individual concepts: * McCarey, who
owns Mike's Amazing Cakes and ships all over the country, constructs
rectangular towers with "windows" on each level. Each side of the cake
is a different season, with seasonal flowers at each of the windows.
* Peters, who owns Cakes by Colette, has written four cookbooks and
baked cakes for the Clintons, Sting and other celebrities. She's famous
for her cakes that appear to be sloping precipitously. She has a
master's degree in art from the Pratt Institute. Each tier of her cake,
which looks like an ornate antique vase (and will take first place),
has a cameo with hand-painted seasonal flowers in bas-relief in the
medallion. * McMahon, food and drink editor of a British women's
magazine, designs flowers of gum paste so intricate that you can see
the pistils, stamens and petals. The brilliantly colored flowers are of
different types to reflect the seasons. The top of the three-tier cake
is separated from the rest by pillars and is slanted to show the
flowers to maximum effect. * Ho, executive pastry chef at the
Las Vegas Hilton, designs a variety of brilliantly colored flowers of
different edible materials and uses different techniques. Crowning the
cake is a curved plaid ribbon and Christmas-tree ornaments. *
Bommarito, who has worked with Martha Stewart, designs a multi-tier
cake in which two of the tiers rest on a rounded globe covered in sugar
roses. Snow is etched into the design of the top tier, and icicles drip
from the side. One of the support tiers is a snowflake. A hand-blown
sugar globe with wedding bands tops the cake. INFOBOX And the winners were... * First place: Colette Peters, New York * Second place: Sue McMahon, Kent, England * Third place: Stanton Ho, Las Vegas * Coming Saturday in Home Front: Wedding gowns shine in Vegas.
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