Getting All Up in That Grill

I rarely go for reality shows, and when I do, they're almost never about food. But somehow, I've found a soft spot for Netflix's Nailed It! Hosted by the hilarious Nicole Byer (who manages just the right blend of sweet and caustic), this is a bake-off show featuring contestants who can't bake. Each episode presents impossible challenges of elaborate cakes to be made on ridiculously short timetables, and the results are predictably (and laughably) horrible.

In my circle of friends, I'm not the only one who has been enjoying Nailed It! Indeed, it seems I'm not even the one enjoying it most, because someone floated the idea to do a "Nailed It party" and try it ourselves -- an event that came together this past weekend. We selected a particular cake from an episode of the show that seemed not too far out of reach, stocked up on fondant, dyes, edible markers, and colored sprays of all sorts, and gathered together to try our luck.

We selected the "Barbecue Grill" cake from a second season episode:

This involved multiple stacked-and-carved cake layers, fondant covering and replica food, Rice Krispies beer bottles... and a lot of effort.

Amazingly, so many of us went in on this crazy way to spend an evening that we had couples, families, and friends all teaming up to create six different cakes! Obviously, we didn't have enough oven space or mixers in one place for all that, so we made a few concessions on the time limit: everyone baked their cakes ahead of time, and got a chance to make their butter cream icing before the time officially started.

We gave ourselves two hours. This is as much time as contestants on the show had to do the entire thing -- without partners. But then, they had so many supplies on hand that there was no need to share, as well as professional tips should they need them. Oh, and a $10,000 prize for motivation. (No such stakes for us.)

It turns out that cake decorating done this elaborate is -- unsurprisingly -- both fun and really hard. Fondant is really hard to work with. You want to roll it out as thin as possible to minimize the weight you're adding to a precariously stacked cake. (Also, does anyone actually like the taste of fondant?) But roll it out too thin, and it tears as you try to drape it onto your cake. Oh, and good luck smoothing out the wrinkles, hiding the joins, or dyeing it to the right color.

The grill itself turned out to be quite the challenge. That inward slope to the stacked cakes caused more than one of our group's efforts to collapse at some point during the night.

...but hey! Paste it together with butter cream and cover it up with fondant. It still tastes good, right? (Good enough, in fact, that the cake above would, after all was said and done, "win" our little "competition!")

Where everyone seemed to shine was in sculpting the food for the top of the grill. Every one of the six cakes had one piece or another that looked really good -- from shrimp kebabs to perfectly browned hot dogs to convincing corn to Swiss cheese on a tasty-looking burger. There were some great beer bottles too.

The cake me and my husband made landed somewhere in the middle of the pack, but we had a good time making it. (Even if hunching over the table to work on it for two hours gave me a backache that followed me all the way to bed.)

I'm in no rush to do this sort of thing again. For one thing, it results in a truly preposterous amount of dessert. I doubt that I'll be looking to make some fondant-draped piece of cake art for the next special occasion that comes along. Still, we all had great fun at this unconventional party.

Perhaps you have yet to discover that cake is your true medium as an artist. Give it a try! How hard could it be?