Duff Goldman has given a surprising amount of thought to baking cakes in outer space.
The founder of the Baltimore bake shop Charm City Cakes who rose to fame on the Food Network show “Ace of Cakes,” Goldman has for a third year brought a space-themed cake to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s “Taste of Space: Celebrity Edition” culinary evening. A self-professed “life-long science and space nerd,” Goldman described the annual event in Florida as one of his most unique experiences.
“Here I am as an adult and I get to go down to Kennedy Space Center and cook food, meet astronauts and all of the people that work there, It’s really, for me personally, such a joy to do because it’s all stuff that I have loved my entire life,” Goldman said in an interview with collectSPACE.com.
For this year’s event held Saturday night (Nov. 2), after demonstrating cooking techniques alongside fellow celebrity chefs Jon Ashton (“TV Dinners”) and Amanda Freitag (“Chopped”), as well as former NASA astronauts Bob Cabana, Jose Hernandez and Janet Kavandi, Goldman revealed a cake creation inspired by the large, spinning NASA logo at the visitor complex’s entrance.
“Our cake this year is themed for the 55th anniversary of the moon landing. The cake, itself, is a giant sphere, it’s on a motor and it spins,” said Goldman. “One side of the sphere is the NASA logo and the other side is the moon.”
Related: Space food photos: What astronauts eat in orbit
Atop the moon is a hand-sculpted astronaut made out of modeling chocolate.
“Underneath [the sphere] is what’s supposed to look like empty space. So its black and has a lot of stars,” Goldman said. “And then probably my favorite part of the cake is that we pulled sugar and created nebulae.”
Easier in space
It took six cake artists about eight hours at Charm City Cakes to make this year’s cake. Unlike the Artemis Space Launch System (SLS) and Perseverance Mars rover cakes that Goldman unveiled at the past two years’ events, the shape of the moon presented challenges in overcoming gravity.
“When you’re designing a three-dimensional cake, any part of it that has empty space underneath it has to use something for structural support, like styrofoam or wood or PVC. Something that can hold its hold its own weight, because cake doesn’t do that,” Goldman told collectSPACE.
So in the case of the moon, everything below the equator needs to be made out of support structure and everything above it is cake.
And then there is there is the matter of it spinning.
“Anytime you make something spin, even if it’s going really slow, your difficulty level rises exponentially. Cakes really don’t like to move,” said Goldman. “Cake is very airy and the only thing that’s supporting all of its weight is gluten. When you start adding movement to it, any sort of vibration, you begin degrading the structural integrity of the gluten. So any kind of movement is risky.”
Both of the concerns could be more easier addressed if the cake was made in the microgravity environment of space, according to Goldman.
“This specific cake would be easier to make in space than it is on Earth because liquid in zero-g forms a perfect sphere,” Goldman said. “Cake batter has surface tension, just like water. So if we were in space, I could conceivably make a bunch of cake batter and then very carefully inject it inside of the oven. You then turn the oven on and have a perfectly-sphere cake that you could then decorate. You then would have no need for the support structure that we need on Earth.”
“Also, because you’re in zero-g, you would be able to spin the cake indefinitely with no motor because there’s no friction,” he said.
Serving up the moon
“I think I could pull this off in space. The trick here is convincing NASA that this science is worth pursuing. I will volunteer my time to be the first astro-pâtissier,” said Goldman with a laugh.
NASA would also need to agree on the design of an oven for such a project. Safety concerns and power constraints have limited the International Space Station to only having a food warmer, with the exception of a small oven launched and retired in 2019 to attempt baking chocolate chip cookies.
Back to the “Taste of Space,” in years past Goldman’s cake served — and was served — as the dessert for the evening. On Saturday, cupcakes and other pastries took the cake’s place, so it could be available for the next day’s Taste of Space: Celebrity Chef Ice Cream Social, a new event where families can have their photos taken with Goldman and the cake, as well as craft their own signature sundaes.
“We just wanted to make sure as many people see it as possible,” sad Goldman. “But at the social, we are going to slice into it.”
“When you think about it, to go to the extent of making something like this and then not be able to have the cake, then what’s the point?” he said.
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