Building the Army a birthday cake

by Nicole Weston, Posted Jun 17th 2006 @ 5:05PM

The US Army celebrated its 231st birthday with cake. A very, very big cake. The ingredient list included 540 eggs, 100 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of butter, 30 gallons of milk and 30 pounds of sugar and it took 17 chefs about 1 week to create. How did it work? It was constructed from layered individual sheet cakes - 50 of them, to be precise. 35 gallons of icing were used to cover and decorate the cake. The finished product was 8.5 feet long by 3 feet wide and weighed more than 250 pounds. It was served at the Pentagon June 14th to approximately 1,500 people.

Elsewhere in the country, individual divisions had their own celebrations with even more cakes.

Granted, this cake - which is still very impressive - doesn't come close to rivaling the world's largest birthday cake, which was built last year in Las Vegas and used 30,000 half-sheet cakes and 40,000 pounds of frosting. The end result was a cake which weighed in at 65 tons.

There is one more cake close-up after the jump, as well as a picture of the world's largest birthday cake.