Charm City Cakes aces display booth at the NSCAA

The 2011 NSCAA Convention is being held in Baltimore. Naturally, we had to get a Charm City Cakes, Ace of Cakes cake. Just had to! But what was it going to look like?

Back in June when we were planning the booth, we had all sorts of ideas. The one that finally emerged was a Maryland blue crab tearing at a soccer ball. The big problem was nobody here at TourneyCentral could draw.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just go to a toy store, find a soccer ball and a toy crab, put them together, shoot that and send it over to the cake folks.” Only in Ohio, Maryland blue crabs are hard to find. Any crab was hard to find. I was just about to give up when I tweeted:

Can anyone draw a Maryland blue crab attacking a soccer ball like a monster truck?

A few days later, I got an email with a sketch attached from Nicole Manzo. Nichole is a talented artist who loves being creative but was apprehensive about studying art. Art doesn’t pay the bills; business skills do.

But the world could not lose one more artist to “practical thinking” and her sketch was going to be my cake. I sent it over to Duff’s crew and they pounced on it, confident they could make an awesome cake from that.

And they did. And they not only made an awesome cake, they each signed Nicole’s sketch which we are going to frame and present to her when we get back home to Dayton.

And this is Nicole’s sketch Katherine and Ben used to build her cake. The Charm City Cakes crew is just awesome for doing this for us. We’re fans forever! (My favorite edit is the lipstick on the crab. Awesome!)

And just because Mary Alice’s voice was in my head, saying “It’s cake. Eat the cake.” and I didn’t get a piece the last time we got a Charm City Cake, we sliced into the cake at about 8:00pm and started serving pieces to hungry soccer coaches who stopped by the booth.

There may be some left, so if you are hungry, booth 1527. Remember, cake at 8:00pm is dessert, but at 8:00am, it is pastry. Yellow cake, chocolate butter cream filling. Awesomely delicious crab cake.

UPDATED
The Fairmont High School Newspaper published the story about Nicole. You can read it here.