MANILA, Philippines - • The big trends in wedding cakes right now are groom’s cakes and vibrant colors. “People are wanting not just the traditional white cake but colors like black and white are very hot this year. Black on a cake years ago was taboo, but done elegantly it’s really nice.”
• For a straight guy, Buddy’s very hip about fashion. “When I buy my suits they’re always designer: Canali and Brioni.”
• He considers his most successful cakes to be his train cake and the life-size NASCAR cake. “That cake was actually 20,000 pounds. We used about 2,400 five-pound-cakes, 3,000 pounds of icing, and about 4,000 pounds of modeling chocolate fondant. It took 56 people four days to make it and probably six months off my life because I was stressed.”
• He knows some real-life Mafiosi. “Absolutely, everybody does. They exist but you’re talking about a tiny percentage of millions of hardworking people.”
• He would like to do Prince William’s cake when he gets married. “Call London, tell the prince the Cake Boss wants to make his wedding cake,” he instructs the Discovery peeps.
• The only thing Buddy will not show on-camera is a really bad fight between family. However, the new season will go even more in-depth into his domestic life. Wife Lisa is due to give birth any day now, and it will be filmed. “Cake Boss is really the reality of my life,” says Buddy. “It’s what goes on day-to-day at the bakery.”
• He gets six million hits a month on the Cake Boss website. “People want us to ship cakes which we weren’t able to do, so we are expanding our business right now, building a 35,000 square-foot factory in Jersey City. It’s going to be state-of-the-art and we’re going to be able to ship cakes all over the country first and then potentially all over the world.”
• He’s not only a master baker, he’s also a great cook. “One dish I make is a delicious pasta with a pink sauce and pancetta in it. It’s simple: tomatoes, onion, garlic, a little sugar to take the acid off the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Then I put heavy cream in there, the pancetta, fresh basil, and pour it over penne, farfalle, whatever pasta you want to do.”
• Though he’s obsessed with his hands, they are currently not insured. “They always have to feel clean. I wash my hands about 50 times a day; if you look at my hands they’re immaculate at all times.”
• His biggest challenge is making a cake move or defying gravity. “If you do a sculpture of someone and their arm is hanging like this, what’s keeping the cake from falling off?” he asks. “I’ll push it to the edge so gravity will not make it fall.”