Janice Ceperich and Jeff D'Andrea visited the Web site of Charm City Cakes and saw what makes Duff Goldman unique -- cakes in the shape of dogs, popcorn boxes and motor scooters, and cakes that look like they just landed from Venus.
Instead, for their August wedding, the couple were thinking of something small, white and relatively plain. "We saw this stuff and we thought, `Whoa,' " says D'Andrea, sitting across from Goldman at his bakery, a renovated church in Remington. Not their style.
"The Web site just shows what's possible," says Goldman, smiling easily despite looking worn and jet-lagged. He pulls out a sketch pad and draws a white cake with delicate willow branches crawling up the side.
He tells Ceperich and D'Andrea that he can make the cake small, but they will need a second cake to feed all of their guests at the wedding. The couple wonder if two cakes will cost more than one big one.
"Nah," Goldman says, then quickly adds: "I mean, if the second one is hanging from the ceiling, spinning around and shooting fireworks, well then ... "
If a pyrotechnic wedding cake is your style, it's entirely possible with Goldman, whose elaborate, sculptural cakes are quickly making him a celebrity, even beyond Charm City.
Days before the meeting with Ceperich and D'Andrea, Goldman was on a whirlwind tour of Hollywood, where he appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and blew white-hot fireworks out of a cake shaped like a hot-rod engine.
Over the next several weeks, a film crew will be shooting Cake It to the Limit, a reality-style show for the Food Network, set in his bakery. Goldman is the show's "extreme baker," its iconoclastic star.
"Duff has a personality that will stand out on the Food Network," says Kelly McPherson, the supervising producer of Cake It to the Limit. "He moves to the beat of his own drum, but he's very likable."
Short, thick and powerfully built, Goldman, 31, has tough-guy looks that contradict his soft-spoken, easygoing nature. He does not appear the type to wax philosophical about the complexities of pastries or the chemistry of bread, but he does.
His life is largely consumed by his work. He and his girlfriend live in an apartment adjacent to the bakery. Many days, Goldman wakes up, lifts weights in a home gym in the basement, then walks 20 paces to the bakery and spends at least 12 hours there.
