Cake Boss Season 2

I’m sure you’ve heard the warnings: Going into business with family is fraught with danger. Especially if your family consists of three generations of fiery Italian-Americans, who spend as much time engaged in finger-waving tirades as they do actually working. But what do you do, fire your sister, who’s just told a paying customer to ‘go shove it?’ Or your bumbling cousin, who’s just dropped your niece’s birthday cake down the stairs? Welcome to Buddy Valastro’s world. 

Cake Boss is all about Buddy Valastro and his famiglia, who run Carlo’s bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey. Buddy has inherited a reputation and a weight of expectation from his father: Everybody knows that if you want the most outrageous, intricate or gravity-defying cake in town, you have to go to Carlo’s.  

Each episode is built from a template, much like season 1. Buddy commits himself to at least two mammoth cake projects, and the cameras follow him and his crew as they struggle against the clock to finish them off before the due date. The ultimate is, of course, seeing the final product and the awed reactions of Buddy’s clients. 

After you’ve seen one or two episodes, you have a good idea of what to expect from the rest of the series. Cake Boss is structured in a way that’s instantly accessible. The whole production has a cut-to-order look about it, from the unobtrusive title to the token soundtrack. Each episode is an easy-to-digest chunk of television, and for the most part it tastes pretty good. 

The cakes are of course the stars of the show, so I won’t ruin the surprise, but among the attractions are a zoo cake (crammed with edible wildlife) a giant replica of sesame street, and the biggest cake Buddy has ever designed. 

Of course, Cake Boss is as much about the drama as it is about the awesome cakes.

It wouldn’t be much of a drama without conflict, but there’s no shortage of that inside the walls of Carlo’s Bakery. Whether Buddy has pushed his team too far by taking on more orders than they can fill, or his sister is being a pain by ordering her birthday cake from a rival baker, there’s always some minor crisis that needs hosing down. All in all there are enough squabbles, failures and cake-flinging outbursts to keep Buddy’s blood pressure (and our interest levels) up. 

Special Features: 

Cake Boss, Season 2 would have received a lower score had it not been for the bonus material on disc one. The one element that was missing from the episodes was a tutorial segment. After all, this is a show about cooking and decorating cakes, and it would have been remiss, and a little odd, not to include something for the home chefs among us.

Thankfully, Buddy provides in a series of quick featurettes, where he explains and demonstrates various techniques such as making your own flowers out of icing and how to embellish a cake, old-school style. Even if they do have a ’blink and you’ll miss them’ air and the video quality is rough, these featurettes are still a welcome addition to the DVD. 

Unfortunately the rest of the bonus features aren’t as informative or entertaining. Most are simply uber-quick recaps from season one. There are some definitive moments there, such as when a stone cold ’Bridezilla’ decides to vandalise her own wedding cake, but these aren’t much value if you’ve already seen the first season. 

Closing Comments: 

I know it’s meant to be all about the cakes and how they turn out, but would you really want to watch the same show if it featured a bunch of stiff German engineers building a cake to perfection? Of course not. The things that elevate a show like this above the ordinary are personality and attitude. Buddy and his crew have both in spades. I dare you not to like them.