Tune into Food Network's "Ace of Cakes" and you might catch rock star pastry chef Duff Goldman and his team at Charm City Cakes creating culinary masterpieces that would even get Vader to remark, "Impressive. Most impressive."
He and his team bake and decorate impressive edible creations including both a Death Star and a Star Destroyer cakes that could double as ILM models. StarWars.com chats with Goldman about his rise from a graffiti artist to a master pastry chef, as well as a closer look at his drool-inducing Star Wars confections.
What is your culinary and arts background?
When I was 13 or so I was a graffiti writer and I used to paint bridge underpasses and freight trains, so that's where my artistic streak started to surface. Then one of my school teachers explained to me that it would be a bad idea to continue down that route, so I instead started to do metal sculpture and really took to it. I took some classes at the local art school, but I wasn't into it because the school was full of freaks and didn't really teach you anything practical about what to do once you were done with school.
The whole time I was doing all this, I was cooking at fast food joints to pay for my paint, metal and various art materials. It turned out I was a better cook. I realized there was probably more money in cooking than there was in making sculptures or painting trains. I wanted to go to culinary school. My parents, however, really wanted me to get an undergraduate degree instead. Basically, I think they were afraid I'd be a dishwasher the rest of my life given my sketchy past. I went to college and got a major in history with a minor in philosophy. I was also a hockey player, too, and there are no culinary schools with hockey programs.
There should be culinary school hockey teams!
Exactly! [laughs] Not even the Canadian culinary schools have them. So I figured I would go to college and play hockey, lacrosse and rugby and have a good time, and then get on with my life. But while I was in college I was working for chef Cindy Wolf at a really nice restaurant in Baltimore called Savannah to help pay for tuition. Initially, I walked in and showed my resumé to Cindy, which of course listed every fast food joint you could name -- I'd cooked at pizzerias, greasy spoons, diners, and places like that. She wasn't that impressed but had me come in a couple days a week to make corn bread and biscuits.
We had this grumpy, straight-from-France pastry chef. He was sick of cooking and was totally burnt out, and here I come into his kitchen and I'm totally stoked about cooking. He probably thought he could get me to cook anything he wanted. So from him I learned all these serious techniques of how to make true French pastries like éclairs, and use special dough to use for different desserts, and how to make sorbets and of course, cakes.
So in a way he was the Master and you were his Pastry Padawan.
More like his slave, but close enough. [laughs] At this point, though I wanted to be a chef, not just a pastry chef. One day in the kitchen I look over and all the guys that are cooking are sweating and freaking out over all the meal tickets piling up. Meanwhile I've got my list of desserts I need to make but I can leisurely chat with the waitresses and do my own thing. And I realized, I liked my job a lot better than theirs. So I ended up going to school in California for pastry instead of culinary. In the mornings I worked at a place called The French Laundry, then went to school during the day, and at night I would bake bread. And bread-making guys are the salt of the Earth. They're burly men. If you see "Ace of Cakes" you'll notice I'm not a slight guy.
I take it if there were a mosh pit full of bread makers, I should be scared?
Yes! [laughs] So at school everyone saw me as the bread-baking redneck. I could take apart a car and put it back together. I would show up to school with part of my leg missing because I rode mountain bikes pretty recklessly. I had a Jeep with a roof rack, and I'd be blasting some kind of death metal. The other students probably looked at me like a psycho. Towards the end of our semester we started decorating cakes. Nobody knew I already had an art background. So I started making crazy stuff.
What was the first cake you decorated that impressed everyone at school?
It was a three-tiered cake with New Zealand-style string work with icing from bottom to the top -- totally not what you're suppose to do. And everyone was like, "Who is this guy?!" And when they handed me an airbrush to decorate with; I figured it was like a can of spray paint only smaller. My graffiti art skills came into play. Same thing happened when I was given modeling tools, my sculpting background came in handy.
My teachers said I should go into cake decorating as a career, but at the time I still wanted to be a pastry chef. After school, I ended up going to Vail, Colorado to hang out with some friends and went in search of a high-profile position at one of the restaurants there. I ended up at Vail Cascade which was a fancy hotel/spa/gym. The head chef checked all my references when I handed him my resumé, probably because I didn't look anything like a typical pastry chef. [laughs] But I ended up getting a job as the executive pastry chef and I was only 23.
Well, you do look more like the bass player for Clutch.
You know, Mary Alice on our show? Well, her older brother is the lead singer for Clutch. His wedding cake was the first cake I ever did on my own. I made their bass player -- Dan Maines -- his wedding cake as well.
After I worked in Vail, I went to Washington D.C. for a while to work with chef Todd English. I was the pastry chef sent around the country to help open up Todd's latest restaurant and train the new chefs about the desserts he wanted on the menu. I was starting to get really overworked. My day began at 3 a.m. baking, and then I had to work dinner shifts too. So I decided I should quit and start working for myself in Baltimore.
My first employee was Geof who was making architectural models at the time and was burnt out and wanted to do something different, so he started decorating cakes. My second employee was also a model maker. Everyone who works at Charm City Cakes has an art background as opposed to culinary school training.
