The Icing on the Cake

left to right: Berlin Mercado, Jeanne Nelson, Crystal Mazzarella, Tracy Latimer

Pasadena's having a birthday party (it's 124th) this Saturday, June 12th at the Pasadena Museum of History. Yesterday I had a chance to see the birthday cake in progress at the Pasadena west campus of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts.

Under the guidance of Chef Instructor (and the cake's designer) Alicia Boada, fourteen student pastry chefs are making a three-foot tall, six-tiered replica of the top of City Hall, complete with tiny tiles on a sugar dome, a sugar cupola and gorgeous sugar flowers. More photos on Overdog.

In a separate kitchen, these pastry chefs-in-training were working on the layers. Some layers will make up the base of the cake and some will be eaten at the (free, open to the public) birthday party on Saturday.

I took a series of shots of the student pastry chefs at work and they gave me a taste of the cake and frosting. There are two kinds of each. I should have written them down because they have fancy names and I've forgotten them but they are de-damn-licious and you have to go to the party Saturday and eat some.

I hadn't planned to use this photo. I asked the chefs to pose for a reference for the other shots, and I wrote down their names in the order in which they stood. But just look at them. I had just had a piece of cake with frosting. They had just seen and heard my ecstatic reaction. They'd been working hard for nearly two weeks. Can you see the pride on their faces?

Update 6/13/10: You can see more photos and the finished cake at Pasadena PIO.