Inside Ultimate Cake Off

We did it! Our show aired last night. I was so anxious and nervous before it aired. All day long I played the competition out in my head and thought about everything that happened and everything that was said. I was so curious to find out what parts were included in the final cut.

The show turned out amazingly well! I am so happy about the way we were portrayed. Out of 9 hours, I’m sure there were plenty of goof-ups and silly things that we did. I’m sure that the final show could have been much less flattering. But as it was, I felt like they showed the real events of the competition and emphasized the things that really were as they were. Great Job TLC and whoever it was that edited the show.

Ok. Enough about the editing… lets talk competition! A lot happens in 9 hours! And that’s not even including the preparation before or the aftermath. Here are some behind the scenes things that weren’t shown that might be interesting to read about.

• I got a phone call 2 weeks before the competition and was asked if I could compete. Normally, contestants are given a bit more notice… not the case here. When all of the deciding and traveling was added into the picture, we had pretty much one week to prepare for this extreme competition. When we got there, we were met by everyone telling us how brave we were to take on something so huge in so little time. I think we were a little crazy to take it on, but how do you say no to such a huge opportunity?

• With us being so pressed for time, we actually didn’t bring all of our own cake. We ordered it through a company in California. I won’t say much because my mother taught me to be nice… but the cake was terrible and it was very difficult to work with. We struggled a lot with that awful cake which put us back on the clock quite a bit. But, being the skilled decorators that we are, we were able to work through that fiasco.

• When it was time for the piping skills test I was nervous. I was going up against years of experience. If you watch the show and look closely at each of my tiers, I tried to tie the borders together by using a star tip and round tip alternately throughout the tiers. It was not just a test to see how many borders we could think of but having an overall pleasing look. After the test was complete and I saw the work of the others compared to mine, I knew I had won that test.

• About the wires! My husband was the man behind the wires and in his defense, the wires were long enough. We just made the fatal mistake of pulling the wire too far through the bottom end of the cake and then we taped it to the shaft. The structure worked perfectly. Just one small oversight… and hundreds of cake pounds later, it was a catastrophe.

• You may think that showing the final minutes as rushing to the finish is just silly and drama. Well, it may be for some, but for us I think they mellowed it out. At about an hour left in the competition, we didn’t even have half of our tiers stacked. After the issue with our wiring, we had to just kick it into high gear and get about 6 tiers of cake stacked, finish piping the details that we didn’t get put on before like we had planned, put on all of the flowers, pipe all the borders…. what else? It was a circus act in the last 10 minutes. We were climbing over each other on the ladders, running circles around the cake… we were everywhere. But we did it!

So now that you know a little more, here is a picture of our sketch along with a picture of the final cake. I think it turned out so amazingly beautiful. My team was amazing and I am so proud of us for pulling it together.