By Beth
I am a big fan of food. Perhaps this is why I also hate size two people and avoid them by going to the beach in the winter. The older I get, the more exercise I have to do to burn off the food I eat so I don’t end up weighing three tons. I think eventually I’ll have to accomplish everything on my daily to do list in exercise form. That or stop eating.
Being a fan of food, I watch the Food Network regularly. I was introduced to the show Ace of Cakes years ago while watching reruns. I couldn’t believe that what I was seeing was an actual cake! It was amazing, the people on the show were hilarious and I was hooked. It used to be a regular Tuesday night thing for my mom and me, sometimes the kids too. Now that we have DVR, I can watch it anytime I want. Duff Goldman is funny and amazingly talented. Mary Alice is awesome and Geoff, although quiet, has a dry wit to him that I find so attractive!
There’s no way I could choose my favorite cake from the past several years of the show. The Hogwarts castle was awesome, the Lost cake too, and on the website there is one that looks like a box of crayons. There haven’t been too many cakes the group at Charm City Cakes have produced that I haven’t liked. Most recently, the Alaska cake has been a favorite of mine. When Lara and I were making the birthday list, we had thought to order a cake from Duff and the gang but as prices start at $1000 for a standard cake (and there’s no way we’d get a standard one!) we decided to leave that for another year, when we are both much better off, or have rich husbands. Somehow out of that discussion, meeting someone famous got on the list. The plan was to start with local book signings, just in case we couldn’t get anyone better. Sean Bean’s address is unavailable and that would require a trip overseas, as would meeting Johnny Depp. I hadn’t really given it much thought up until the weekend of April 11th.
That weekend we had plans to do the rotational dinner and the ice hockey game, a few days before Lara told me she had a surprise for me. She does this a lot. Then she sits back and laughs while I get mad and try to guess. I think it’s my fault though. Several years ago I bought tickets for us to a Reduced Shakespeare show in New Jersey for her birthday. I bought the tickets in August the year before (Lara’s birthday is in May!) and I kept it a secret until we were standing outside the theater! Of course I teased her relentlessly all year, so I guess I kind of deserve her heckling. At least she didn’t make me wait nine months to find out what the surprise was!
So I didn’t know what we were doing until Saturday morning when we headed to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. It was rainy that day and once Lara told me what we were up to, and I stopped squealing with joy, I worried the event would be cancelled. The Charm City Cakes gang was having a bake sale and raffle to benefit the Great American Bake Sale that helps fight world hunger. There wasn’t much of a crowd when we got there and I hoped it wouldn’t get too mobbed before Duff arrived.
After waiting a bit, getting soaked and getting laughed at by Lara and Kate for my middle-school-girl-excitement they came!!! Duff was there!! And Mary Alice!!! And Geoff!!! And cameras filming the whole thing! There were signs all over the place saying that by entering the area, we were agreeing to have our likeness portrayed on TV without compensation. Whatever, it was DUFF!! They set up some cakes to raffle off and started selling tickets and talking to the cameras and such. I got LOTS of pictures of them.
The crowd grew and it was difficult to get too close, but I put the tickets I had bought in Mary Smith’s bucket (I liked her cake) and waited. Turned out whoever won the cake got to go on TV. So when Mary Alice was selling more raffle tickets, I bought 20. She told me I was awesome! I nearly wet myself! I stuffed all my tickets into the same bucket, hoping against hope that I would win the cake. I was momentarily discouraged when the schedule said that her cake was not to be raffled off until after we had to leave to get to the hockey game. But the schedule went out the window and the time came to win my cake!!!
Of course, luck was not with me that morning. I did not win, although I put more than 40 tickets in the bucket. But it was really all for the best as we were heading to Hershey and having a cake in the back of the car wouldn’t really be good for the cake. Plus, I found out the flavor was espresso. Coffee is gross so I wouldn’t have liked it.
Kate got me Duff’s autograph, I was still working up the courage when we had to leave. We went and bought new shoes and/or socks as we were soaked. I’m sure there were some comments made about the fact that my new shoes were brown, Lara thinks I wear too much brown. We ate a quick lunch, got in the car and headed to Hershey to watch ice hockey. Perhaps someday we will be on TV, on that episode. I haven’t seen it yet, maybe with reruns this summer. And someday, we will order a cake from Duff and go there to pick it up and I might actually get to touch him!!!