CAKE BOSS

TLC, 10pm et/pt

By Kevin Downey

 

Anyone who’s ever seen Ace of Cakes on Food Network pretty much knows the premise of TLC’s Cake Boss, a reality show that kicked off its first season a few weeks ago.

 

In Cake Boss, as with Ace, the entire show revolves around a baker whose specialty is making gargantuan cakes – elaborate, huge, colorful creations that, underneath fondant, often hide metal, wood and sometimes moving parts.

 

But watching people design cakes, however elaborate, isn’t quite enough to keep a viewer’s interest.

 

So, there’s always something more. With Ace, that’s baker Duff Goldman – a character, a hairy gentle giant – and his motley crew of misfit twentysomethings.

 

In Cake Boss, the focus is on baker Buddy Valastro and his motley crew of family members, including his mom, sisters and friends from the neighborhood.

 

There’s an added wrinkle in Cake Boss that Ace doesn’t have – Hoboken.

 

Whether this added element has appeal or not will depend in good part on your fascination with New York City and its surroundings, specifically New Jersey.

 

For me, that’s definitely a good reason to watch Cake Boss.

 

In between zeroing in on the baking and building of cakes, the show veers into profiles of Valastro’s family, including his mother, Mary.

 

Another element of the show, and in a sense another character, is Valastro’s late father, who died 15 years ago. He and Mary first opened the bakery, Carlo’s City Hall Bake Shop, in the 1960s.

 

An underlying theme in Cake Boss is that Valastro is struggling to build Carlo’s into a bakery that would make his father proud.

 

That doesn’t come up in tonight’s episode, though.

 

Tonight, Valastro and his team create a gigantic replica of a gigantic prehistoric animal for New York’s Museum of Natural History.

 

And one of his crew, a longtime friend out of a Wall Street job, takes on his first cake design, for a sweet-sixteen party. If you ever wanted to see one of these elaborate cakes come up on the wrong end of gravity, stay tuned.

 

Video Clips: tlc.discovery.com/tv/cake-boss/cake-boss.html

Content: Appropriate for teenagers and adults

 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Worth Watching This Weekend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.