One for all is a win for Rockies
As a massive “happy birthday” cake for Fort Carson’s 4th Infantry Division was sliced with the swish of a saber recently, Sgt. Trevor Clark winced.
There went 60 hours of work.
“There’s a picture of the cutting and you can see me in the background — the pain in my face, the hell I felt,” said Clark, a six-year veteran of Army cooking. “When it’s all over in two seconds with the hack of a sword, it’s really all for nothing.”
The 60-pound yellow cake with strawberry filling took first place at a November post-wide cake-baking competition celebrating the division’s 95th birthday.
Clark, 26, and a couple of assistants spent most of a week baking 20 sheet cakes, fitting them together and meticulously replicating the crests of each of the division’s brigades with butter-cream rosettes.
Clark didn’t stop there. Using black frosting, he piped several paragraphs of division history on the cake’s center and lined its edges with photos depicting brigade’s history printed on edible icing sheets.
The cake’s final destination: the Stack Dining Facility, where 75 percent of it was consumed by the estimated 2,000 who attended the meal.
For Clark, seeing his biggest cake to date consumed was bittersweet — he witnessed his artwork mangled by mouths, but his cake was an apparent hit.
“I loved it,” said Clark, who has been baking since he was a teen. “The texture really held up throughout the entire cake. People ate that cake. That cake was cut and served.”
Clark was awarded a certificate and a gold medal for winning the competition. Being recognized in public meant even more than a piece of paper and hunk of metal, Clark said.
“It was very honoring,” he said. “The cakes I made in the past weren’t as high profile. It was more or less, ‘Good job. Carry on.’
“This was a personal victory for me.”
The Army has a reputation for serving food as old as the service, and not fare that rivals that of top restaurants. But in recent years the Army has strived to improve its menu. Baked goods are a big part of the program.
Cakes like the behemoth Clark crafted are meant to boost morale, he said.
“People always get excited when you mention free cake,” he said.
But for Army cooks who spend their lives around food, cakes aren’t necessarily morale boosters.
Cake competitions can be, Clark said.
“They bring us cooks to the forefront,” he said. “People are like, ‘Wow, they do that too?’
We’re not just the people standing on the line, giving you food every single day.”
Clark plans to continue to create cakes for the Army and for friends.
He hopes to soon participate in an annual military-wide culinary arts competition and earn a perfect score in the cake-baking event.
When he leaves the Army, Clark would like to open a bakery.
Maybe one day he’ll have the chance to wow the world on a TV show like “Cake Boss,” he said.
“I want to continue doing bigger, better, more elegant, more extravagant cakes,” he said.
“I want my cakes to be so simple, but so complicated that people remember them a couple years from now.”
Sgt. Trevor Clark poses Nov. 21 with the giant sheet cake he made for a competition at Fort Carson. Photo by MARK REIS, THE GAZETTE
Fort Carson’s 4th Infantry Division’s 60-pound birthday cake was sliced with a saber. Photo by COURTESY PHOTO/U.S. Army