"tlc reality show" news and stories

Glitter. Sparkles. Diamonds. Crystals. Baubles. Medallions. Pearls. No, we're not talking about Beyonce's wardrobe -- this is a wedding on TLC, after all, and it needs to be, in the descriptive words of the sister of the bride, "big."

If the wedding's going to be big, the cake has got to be, well, ultimate. And the contestants on Ultimate Cake Off have never met a big, shiny, gaudy challenge they didn't like.

Judging by the results, Dr. Seuss should've been one of the judges. A leaning, 30-tier "royal" cake where the layers all looked like little fez caps stacked on top of each other? A geometric triangular cake atop of a bunch of puffy red hearts atop a square cake with a grid design on it?

If there's one thing we've learned on Ultimate Cake Off, it's that when you ask the decorating teams to be "tasteful" and "honor" something, the results usually end up being anything but. So when we saw that this week's challenge was to celebrate a couple of fireman heroes, we got a little... worried.

This meant big statements and weird ideas. Almost immediately we starting hearing, "I wanted to capture the true meaning of unsung heroes," and, "My cake's about the inspiration these men and women give us!"

The designs followed the same sort of vague, kitsch-overload themes. We didn't quite get Barbara's concept: The seasoned decorating pro decided to craft a life-size cake fireman, lounging against a wall with his arm around a not-to-scale burning building, with a dalmatian laying nearby.

There was a time when we were in awe of the careful art of cake decoration: The sculpting of delicate fondant flowers, the geometric applications of buttercream, the stacking of fluffy sheets of vanilla cake into gravity-defying architectural wonders.

But now we're starting to worry. There's a fine line between art and madness, and in 2010, we've crossed over into full-blown obsessive-compulsive pastry disorder.

Between the Food Network and TLC, cake mania has reached insane heights -- literally. Like figure skating or Donald Trump's buildings, the bigger and kitschier, the better. A cake isn't a cake unless it spins like a ferris wheel, contains more sugar than a refinery and looks like a teetering game of Jenga on steroids.

Don't get us wrong, we love the pyrotechnic hipster creativity of the Charm City staff on Ace of Cakes. And the acquired-taste Cake Boss has its moments of sweet-tooth ingenuity. But the success of these big-city eccentrics is bringing all of the cake crazies out of the woodwork.