Eastern Excursion 11: Charm City

By popular demand ...

CHARM CITY CAKES

Ace of Cakes is a "reality" show on the Food Network that follows this Baltimore cake company and their adventures in crazy cake making. These cakes are amazing you guys!!! (You can see them here.) They also cost a fortune (they start at $1000) and are really hard to schedule (don't worry, the weeks of Christmas, Valentines, Thanksgiving are open in 2011!) I could meet Duff (the owner) ... if i could afford the $100 plus dollar tickets to the events he attends. Like the Girl Scout Cookie Convention. $115 a ticket. Ouch.


Alright, so I went to the store. Not that I expected much, since the website said this:

Can I come to your shop to watch you work?
We are a very small, very busy shop. Every cake we make is handcrafted to order, and while that makes for some really spectacular cakes, it doesn't leave us with a lot of time for visitors and jibba jabba. So we can't have people stopping in to watch. We do realize that you are special, but we simply do not have the time or resources for visitors.

Also, our evil lawyers have told us it's a no-no to have folks traipsing through here. Would you want a parade of visitors walking through a place you were ordering food from? Didn't think so.

If you ask to visit, we will be forced to say "no" (see above re: evil lawyers) and then we will feel like meanie heads. If you show up anyway, we will not be able to let you come inside and then we'll feel like mega jerk meanie heads. We don't want to let you down and we don't want to feel like mega jerk meanie heads. We are very sorry to be so stern and such, but there are no exceptions to this policy.

They aren't kidding. Not that we asked. But all the windows were covered with black plastic. When the mailman went to the door, he had to ring the doorbell, they opened the door a crack, and he slipped inside. Talk about stealth! Luckily, they had to deliver a cake right when we were taking pictures. So they pulled up their van while we were there, and started bringing boxes of stuff out. (I didn't have the guts to take pictures of it, though.) One had box had part of the cake in it, but they hid it from us. (Literally.) We still felt cool seeing all the people (except Duff and Mary Alice, of course.) We left before we became annoying. But then we drove around the block "innocently" so we could try to catch a glimpse of the cake. We didn't get much of a glimpse, but we did get in the background of their video taping! Look for a silver Corolla with a trying-to-look-innocent spying couple inside. :)


ps. They only deliver within 6 driving hours of Baltimore ... so if we want a cake, we have to get it soon. We're accepting donations.