A mind-blowing cake created in Redmond and commissioned by a Redmond High School (RHS) teacher is featured in the sixth edition of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’s “Seeing Is Believing: A Yearbook of the Weird,” recently released by Ripley’s Publishing.
Misty Doty, theater arts teacher at RHS, ordered a cake in the form of a dragon from Mike’s Amazing Cakes for her husband John Doty’s 30th birthday in December 2007. John is an engineer at Microsoft Corporation.
The cake’s theme was “Dungeons & Dragons,” Misty explained. “We provided a real ‘battle mat’ and 20-sided dice for the design. The dragon is on the mat and is holding the die in his claw and is surrounded by gold. We wanted to have little adventurer figures included, but it would have been too expensive for Mike to make them and we couldn’t find figures that we liked well enough.”
“Mike” is Mike McCarey, who established his custom cake business in Redmond in 1995. Mike’s famous clients — besides Misty, of course — have included Dustin Hoffman, Arnold Palmer, Rodney Dangerfield and Julia Child.
“We first learned about Mike on the Food Network and their Challenges,” Misty noted. “We were always very impressed with his work and vowed to have him make a cake for us once we learned he worked in Redmond.”
One of the Dotys’ friends, a graphic artist named Matt Kuphaldt, posted pictures from John’s birthday party on his Flickr site.
Kuphaldt said he was “literally flabbergasted” when he got a phone call from Ripley’s, asking about the cake.
However, he expounded, “Ripley’s found me because the Internet is fulfilling Andy Warhol’s prophecy (that in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes). I had gone to John’s party, taken pictures and then put them on Flickr. As time went on, I noticed some of the cake photos getting ‘favorited’ by people whose accounts were dedicated to photos of specialty cakes, but it wasn’t more than a trickle of viewers.”
Yet a little over a year later, “there was a sudden explosion around one particular picture. Within a day or two, my inbox was flooded with automatic e-mails from Flickr telling me that people were favoriting my cake photos. … The main dragon picture was getting dozens of favoritings and tens of thousands of views. I was also getting e-mails from friends telling me they were seeing the cake on Boing Boing or Digg,” said Kuphaldt.
It turned out that the cake had been seen on a site called CakeWrecks which normally pokes fun at ugly cakes but occasionally highlights great ones, Kuphaldt explained.
“Somewhere along the way, Ripley’s heard about it and decided they wanted it in their book. And now I’m being written up in a newspaper. Mr. Warhol, I salute you.”
Frank Wolff, a publicist for Ripley’s, said the company, based in England, “has a team of people looking for odd and unusual things.”
Other regional oddities in the new edition of “Seeing Is Believing” include Seattle’s campy Lincoln “Toe” Trucks; Ballard novelty store Archie McPhee’s crispy bacon-flavored dental floss; a Seattle man who spent two years living in a tree house; and a Blaine teenager who inflated 213 balloons in an hour, using his nose.
Getting back to the Redmond dragon cake, it resembled a sculpture but “the entire cake was edible except for the dowel support in the neck,” said Misty. “It was made of cake and modeling chocolate.”
In fact, it is standard at Mike’s Amazing Cakes to build cakes which look “true-to-life and accurate” but use all-natural flavorings and fillings.
What did her hubby think of the cake?
“John thought it was awesome,” said Misty. “Everyone did. We didn’t want to cut it up. It tasted good, though, so it was well worth carving up.”
For more information about Mike’s Amazing Cakes, call (425) 869-2992 or visit www.mikesamazingcakes.com.
