Las Vegas Centennial: Dessert passage: Las Vegas prepares for biggest cake

Thursday, May 12, 2005 | 8:57 a.m.

Las Vegas doesn't really need to do anything extraordinary to put itself on the map.

It doesn't need to, say, build the world's largest birthday cake.

But here we are, closing in on Las Vegas' 100th birthday, and truckloads of frozen Sara Lee cake sections are making their way across the country.

As of Sunday, if everything goes as planned, Las Vegas will have a birthday cake weighing 130,000 pounds, stretch 102 feet long (approximately one-third of a football field) and stand 20 inches, roughly the height of seven stacked standard size cakes.

"The plan is to break the current world record," said Esther Carter, special event coordinator for the Committee for the Las Vegas Centennial Celebration. "We will have Guinness on hand to verify everything."

To ensure the Guinness World Records distinction, officials will use time-lapse photography and provide proof of poundage. The reigning champ is a 128,750-pound cake, a record set in Fort Wayne, Ala. The Las Vegas cake would beat that cake by about 2,000 pounds.

"We are going to be prepared," said Brian Averna, a corporate executive chef at Sara Lee. "We're going to have an extra 5,000 pounds, just in case we have a problem. It's almost another truckload."

Of the cake, Averna said, "It's a big math problem. You have to make sure you cross your T's and dot your I's. We feel, from a product standpoint, we're in good shape."

The cake's ingredients include 23,000 pounds of flour, 35,000 cups of sugar and 130,000 eggs. The frosting, which will weigh roughly 34,000 pounds, will be made using 42,000 cups of sugar, 10,200 cups of shortening, 5,200 cups of butter and 5,200 cups of corn syrup.

More than 200 volunteers will converge on Cashman Center on Saturday night to start building, and work from midnight to noon Sunday.

"We can't yet say it's the world's largest cake," Averna said. "We can say we're trying to build the world's largest cake."

Averna worked with Lynn Mansel, executive pastry chef at the Mohegan Sun casino in southeastern Connecticut, last year to build the World's Largest Wedding Cake. Averna said both he and Mansel will be in Las Vegas to work on Las Vegas' birthday cake.

Sara Lee is sponsoring the event and has been baking the cake sections for weeks.

Carter said she's not worried about losing the title anytime soon, saying, "Nobody in their right mind would want to do this. It's quite an undertaking trying to figure out how to put 130,000 pounds of cake together."

The cake will go on display at 2 p.m. Sunday at Cashman Field and be cut at 5:15 p.m. The public is invited -- and asked to come hungry.

"There's no way we're going to be able to eat all of this cake," Carter said. "We've got a lot of cake."