Historic Norlin Quadrangle at the University of Colorado at Boulder will be a sea of cakes the afternoon of April 20th as thousands of guests gather to celebrate the university's 125th anniversary.
Traditions Catering of Boulder has been ordering supplies, including 125 heavy-duty cake boxes, for the past two months in preparation for the celebration. Baking begins this weekend on the centerpiece cake -- a replica of Old Main in chocolate filled with raspberries and whipped cream.
The 5-foot-tall, 400-pound confection will measure 3 feet by 4 feet at the base and will require three people to move it.
"We've never dropped a cake," said Traditions owner Kim Warshaw. "We do this throughout the year with wedding cakes, some much larger than this, so we're used to moving heavy cakes. We're very careful."
The brick-red frosted cake will have a white tower and slate gray roof, "just like Old Main," Warshaw said. Melissa Martin, pastry chef for Traditions, will begin baking the Old Main cake on Saturday and should have it done, single-handedly, by Wednesday. It will be decorated with trees and grass made of frosting at the base.
The remaining 124 cakes will be baked Sunday and Monday and decorated Tuesday through Thursday of next week. All will be two-layer sheet cakes and should appeal to every taste imaginable in chocolate, white, carrot, poppyseed, lemon, orange, spice and amaretti cookie flavors.
The sheet cakes will not be light either at about 10 pounds each, Warshaw said. "We use all fresh ingredients so these cakes are heavier than your typical sheet cake."
More than 1,000 eggs and 1,000 pounds of butter will go into the 125 cakes, she said. The cakes will serve the more than 4,000 guests expected for the anniversary celebration.
The weight and sheer number of sheet cakes provide perhaps the biggest challenge to the caterers, Warshaw said, because they present such a big obstacle in the shop at 2850 Iris St. in Boulder.
"One of the most challenging things about this order has been to find sturdy boxes that we could stack without crushing the cakes so that we can all move through the shop," she said. "One hundred and twenty-four cakes take up a lot of space."
But despite the size of this order, it doesn't top the record for big jobs handled by Traditions. That was set in 1994 when the caterers assembled box lunches for 60,000 Promise Keepers meeting at Folsom Stadium, Warshaw said.
"We had a team of 30 people working for a week to assemble those lunches," she said. "So this job, by comparison, is not that bad."
Piece of cake, you might say.