Record cake could lead to record waste

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 | 9:50 a.m.

Let them throw away cake.

What is not eaten of the "world's largest birthday cake" to be made Sunday for the Las Vegas Centennial Celebration will wind up in dumpsters destined for the county landfill.

That's what the Las Vegas Centennial Board was told Monday at its monthly meeting at Cashman Center in a meeting room several hundred feet from where the 130,000-pound cake will be prepared in honor of the city's 100th birthday.

Las Vegas Centennial Director Stacy Allsbrook told the commitee that shovels and large bins donated by Republic Services will be at the ready at night's end to cart away what could be thousand of pounds of uneaten cake that will be donated by Sara Lee at no cost to taxpayers.

"All of the cake will not be eaten," Allsbrook said after the meeting. "It's huge. If we tried to get it all eaten, I'd be putting people into diabetic comas."

Allsbrook said service groups and charitable organizations that service the needs of the homeless have been asked to pick up the leftover cake to serve to their clients.

But homeless groups might not be able to take it because of logistics and health issues related to picking it up, transporting it at temperatures where it will not spoil and storing it.

"We are very careful about what we serve to our clients," said Charlie Desiderio, spokesman for the Clark County Salvation Army, one of the larger homeless services organizations. "Generally, the only cake we accept is donations of packaged ingredients so we can make it ourselves or packaged cake."

"The problem is on Sunday you have a cake that will be sitting out all day. There are potential spoilage issues. Also, I do not have people working Sunday night nor do I have refrigerator trucks to move it from Cashman Field to our kitchen refrigerators. Also cake tends to fall apart when you move it so I don't know if we can do it."

Desiderio said after clearing the expenses of paying employees overtime, renting refrigeration trucks to haul it and making enough storage space available in its refrigerators, "it probably would be cheaper and more convenient for us to buy (fresh, packaged) cake."

Desiderio said his organization will have a meeting this week to determine if it can overcome those logistics and help the city save the leftover cake.

That and help avoid the potential embarassment of international news media coverage of Las Vegas wasting food for what critics might call a silly and unnecessary publicity stunt.

Sara Lee bakers used 23,000 pounds of flour, 35,000 cups of sugar and 130,000 eggs to make the sheet cake. The frosting contains 42,000 cups of sugar, 10,200 cups of shortening, 5,200 cups of butter and 5,200 cups of corn syrup, Sara Lee officials said.

Centennial officials, meanwhile, do not believe the 250 volunteers lined up so far are enough to make the cake in time for the celebration.

"We're looking for about 100 more volunteers," Allsbrook said.

The cake will be made from midnight Saturday until about noon Sunday.

There will be no baking. The cake is being donated in small frozen sheets that will be stacked about 100 feet long by about 50 feet wide by about 3 feet deep, Allsbrook said. Volunteers are needed to stack and frost each layer, she said.

When completed, the cake is expected to break the world record currently held by a 128,750-pound cake that was built in Ft. Wayne, Ala., according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The cake will go on display at 2 p.m. and be cut with a carpenter's saw at 5:15 p.m. The public is invited to attend and eat as much of it as possible, Allsbrook said.