Exclusive Lifestyle Report From New York City: Rolling with the Cake Boss

Leaving New York City through the Lincoln Tunnel the weather’s terrible — a wintry mix of snow, sleet and rain — but we don’t care. We’re headed somewhere warm, fragrant and hopefully welcoming: the 100-year-old Carlo’s Bake Shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, which happens to be the lair of the Cake Boss.

Do it for the family: Buddy runs Carlo’s Bake Shop together with his mother, Mary, sisters Grace, Maddalena, Mary and Lisa, and their husbands Joey, Mauro and Remy.

Cake Boss is the No. 1 hit TLC show by Discovery Communications. In it we follow the trials and triumphs of Buddy Valastro, a master baker famed for his eye-popping special-occasion cakes (Harley-Davidson or roulette table in cake form, anyone?). Buddy and his livewire family run Carlo’s, and how these amazing creations are made — and the family drama involved in making them — is the stuff of the show.

Stepping into Carlo’s is a little like stepping into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The shop has an Old World Italian feel to it, but the contents of the display cases are pure modern eye candy: rows of floral cupcakes in a riot of colors, Italian baked goodies like cannoli, biscotti, tarelle cookies and the house specialty, glorified cream puffs called “lobster tails.” And then, of course, there are the themed cakes. Today there’s nothing too outrageous on the shop racks — one cake features baseball paraphernalia while another has a chocolate roller-skate on top of it — but it’s a whole ’nother story in the back of the house.

Upstairs it’s Buddy and his cake factory. One baker is putting together a cake that’s already a foot high; other “cake elves” are sitting on stools making mini-sculptures out of modeling chocolate, or drawing designs on bonbons with food-coloring pens.

Deeper into the room I first glimpse Buddy surrounded by children. One child in particular stands out because he’s completely bald. He’s Clayton, a four-year-old who until recently was suffering from a cancerous brain tumor. The tumor has since been excised and Clayton’s receiving radiation treatments, but he’s still a Make-A-Wish child whose dearest wish is coming true today.

“His wish was to make a cake with me,” says Buddy, who is an honorary board member of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. “He wanted to make a NASCAR cake because that was his favorite cake I made on the show.”

Wish upon a cake: Buddy and Make-A-Wish cancer patient Clayton make the four-year-old’s dream NASCAR cake a reality.

While Buddy and Clayton lay checkerboard fondant squares on the racing car-red cake, a constant stream of patter issues not from the TV chef but from Clayton’s older sister, who’s excitedly talking to Valastro about every episode of Cake Boss she’s ever seen.

And that’s the beginning of the epiphany I get about Cake Boss. Though Buddy has made cakes for the likes of Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, Britney Spears and Oprah, his biggest fans are young children and their families, who perhaps see much to relate to in this modern-day Willy Wonka who brings people’s dreams and flights of fancy to life.

“We have a huge kid following,” Buddy affirms. “American families love the show, like 5-, 10-, 12-year-olds, all ages. They repeat the whole thing: ‘I’m Buddy. I’m the boss…’ I love it when kids imitate me. I think that’s part of why people like the show — they like my accent.”

There’s no doubt that the Cake Boss’s New Jersey accent is a tad Sopranos. His cakes even appeared in an episode of the show, when wise-guy Christopher and fiancée Adriana go to order their wedding cake: “All those wedding cakes were from my bakery, and that was way before I was the Cake Boss,” chuckles Valastro.

Now that he’s his own “boss,” Buddy fields client requests that are as off-the-wall as any favor called in to Tony Soprano.

Cake Boss ladies draw designs on candies with food-coloring pens.

“The craziest cake I ever made was a toilet bowl that flushed,” Buddy says. “(The client) had a plumbing supply house. Their grandfather sold so many toilet bowls, so for their 100-year anniversary, they wanted an old-fashioned yellow ’60s toilet. And at the end he goes, ‘I want you to make it flush.’

“It’s a cake; how am I going to make it flush?

“‘You’re the Cake Boss, right? You can do anything.’

“So he called me out, and the devil on my shoulder said, tell him to go flush his system. But the angel says, you know what? Think of your fans. If you can make this flush, it would be phenomenal. So I made it flush.”

It was this willingness to make cakes that didn’t look like cakes that is one of the secrets of Cake Boss’s success, and got Buddy his reality-TV gig.

Get your baked goods here: The 100-year-old Carlo’s City Hall Bake Shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, specializes in classic Italian pastries and eye-popping special-occasion cakes.

“I’m a good listener and I’m good at connecting the dots, so if a client comes in and I hear 20 words from him, certain cakes come into my mind by just hearing those keywords,” he says. “Anybody can make a round cake that says ‘Happy birthday, Joe’ on it, but what is Joe like? It’s taking it to the next level and hearing your client’s wants and needs.”

Buddy was 17 when he had to drop out of high school to run the family business when his father, Buddy Valastro Sr., passed away. Buddy Sr. bought Carlo’s Bakery from its founder, Carlo Guastaffero, in 1963, and built it into a thriving business, teaching his only son everything he knew along the way.

Layer cake: Stacking up different layers on one heck of a tall cake

“My father was my biggest role model,” Buddy says. “I try to be the same, and if I could be half the father he was, my kids will be just fine.”

Buddy is proud of the fact that he inherited his father’s gifted hands, and sincerely believes they are blessed. The one skill he couldn’t master while his father was still alive was making Carlo’s signature lobster tails, an Italian classic involving sfogliatelle pastry filled with the most divine sweet cream. Rolling and pulling out the sfogliatelle to see-through thinness, then fanning out the dough cones so that they telescoped into delicate hollow “tails” ready for filling, brought Buddy to the brink of tears many times.

But his father still showed him the way. Buddy recounts the dream he had one night, in which the late Buddy Sr. guided him in vivid detail on the proper way of making a lobster tail. When Buddy Jr. woke up, he found that his hands automatically knew how to do it.

“My philosophy is that I’m not going to fail,” he declares.

Valastro films three shows a day, and is currently finishing the 40 episodes in Season 4. For each episode 90 hours of film gets cut down to 22 minutes before being broadcast in 96 different countries.

Cake my day: Elaborate themed cakes tailored to clients are Buddy Valastro’s specialty.

“This new season the cakes are just getting crazier, like last week we made a cake that was a foosball hockey table and the players all spun on top of it. It was 500 pounds but it worked.”

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Season 2 of Cake Boss currently airs on TLC every Wednesday at 7 p.m., with encores the following Wednesday at 1 p.m. Season 3 will premiere on April 3.