University President Dan Mote cuts the first slice of the strawberry shortcake with his wife, Patsy.
Under a curtain of darkness, nine Dining Services employees descended on Hornbake Mall at 1:30 a.m. Saturday like a small army. Their weapon of choice: sleeves of icing.
To kick off this year’s Maryland Day festivities, administrators decided the only way to celebrate a 150-year-old university was with 50,150 slices of cake.
Assembled in the middle of the night, the roughly 16-by-24-foot cake was unofficially the largest strawberry shortcake in the world and the perfect answer to the swarms of confection-hungry Maryland Day attendees.
The watchful eyes of the University Police and police auxiliary guarded the enclosed tent on Hornbake Mall as two white trucks backed down the sidewalk and unloaded their contents – 170 slabs of cake, a stainless steel cooler filled with cake decorations and white cake icing in dozens of 30-pound tubs.
As soon as head chef Jeff Russo entered the tent, his crisp, white chef’s shirt tucked beneath a dark hoodie, the no-nonsense tone was set for the evening.
Six long cafeteria-style tables marked the center of the tent and the center of the enormous pastry. But by 2 a.m., not a single slab of cake had hit the table, and tensions were running high.
As hours passed, the diligent workers fit sheets of cake together like bricks and mortar. Each hunk was pre-frosted on the top and cemented to its counterparts with icing that was spread, flattened and perfected until cake-eaters could be fooled into forgetting the confection was actually 170 mini confections fit together like a puzzle.
“Some of the tables were a little different in size,” Russo said, “so we actually had to take off a few inches of cake in different directions to compensate.”
But slightly resizing the cake wasn’t the only obstacle Russo dealt with in the early hours. He originally planned to have the Maryland seal slanted at a 45-degree angle, but instead he decided to build the cake up so the seal was slightly raised in the center.
“In the long run it looks much better lying down,” he says. “It gives dimension to the cake.”
By 6 a.m., one side of the cake had been pieced together and the basketball-sized roses were secured. Russo began the decorative icing with the precision of a man who has iced a few thousand cakes in his lifetime, but the unexpectedly cold temperatures – about 40 degrees – added an element of difficulty to the swarm of employees and their piles of icing sleeves.
“What’s happening is the icing is colder and it’s turning to rock,” Russo said as his teams worked to ice the cake. “I should have had this done 10 minutes ago.”
As workers struggled with the hardening icing, a witty employee looked at the bright side.
“Well, it ain’t gonna melt, that’s for sure,” he quipped.
About 6:30 a.m. the tone of the workers visibly changed. Everyone seemed to be a little more relaxed.
Maybe it was because the cake actually resembled the monstrosity it was meant to be. Maybe everyone was just a little delirious from lack of sleep. Either way, the end was in sight as the final chunk of cake hit the table at 6:40 a.m.
Russo and his workers had been assembling the cake for about five and a half hours when Dining Services administrators begin to stroll in, congratulating Russo on his progress and basking in the excitement that has enveloped the tent.
“The chef is a master planner,” said Pat Higgins, director for dining services. “It is phenomenal … The campus should be very proud.”
As Russo overlooked the process and tried to fight the overwhelming exhaustion, Joe Mullineaux, associate director of dining services, gave Russo some uplifting in sight.
“We don’t have to do this again until 2056,” Mullineaux quipped.
When Russo added the final touches, “Happy Anniversary” written in lavender gel icing, to the cake about 7:30 a.m., hours of cake-building were taking their toll.
“Gimme a spell check on that,” he said, as an employee or two came to double-check his writing in the corner of the cake. “I’m so tired.”
As the morning crawled on and the opening ceremony approached, university President Dan Mote and the university deans of schools gathered for the moment everyone had been preparing for since January.
After a quick speech, Mote cut the cake and pieces distributed to the crowd of a few hundred cake-lovers.
The verdict on the cake was split, as one might expect from a cake that has been in the making for months.
“I think its great,” said Lynn Walker, a College Park resident.
But plenty of others thought the strawberry jam that replaced real strawberry filling and the various other preservative ingredients killed the flavor.
While not everyone had the palate for the unique concoction, most everyone could agree the project was remarkable.
“I got here at 4:30 and it seems like it was just two minutes ago,” said Gregory Thompson, a technician for Dining Services. “This is my baby here.”
“I am so happy now we can kind of relax,” Thompson said.
As Maryland Day carried on, Russo returned home to do whatever it is one might do after building the world’s largest strawberry shortcake. But one thing he definitely won’t be doing is eating cake.
When asked when he would go near a strawberry shortcake again, Russo’s answer was quick and simple: “Not any time soon.”
Contact reporter Sara Murray at murraydbk@gmail.com.