What should have been a cake walk …

Dan Kulin, Las Vegas Sun

Thursday, May 11, 2006 | 7:22 a.m.

In any number of categories - number of trade shows, hotel rooms, slot machines and job growth - Las Vegas can lord over the likes of Orlando, Fla.; Chicago; Atlantic City; and Phoenix.

But for the last year, Las Vegas has been unable to knock Fort Payne, Ala., off its lofty perch.

At issue: Which city can claim to have assembled the world's largest cake?

Fort Payne, population 13,000 and big in the sock-making industry, won recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating a 58-ton cake in 1989, marking that city's centennial.

Organizers of the Las Vegas centennial decided last year to stick it to Fort Payne and make an even larger cake. Sheet cakes were baked by Sara Lee, shipped by the truckloads to Las Vegas and stacked seven-high at Cashman Center.

The individual cakes held together with white frosting - think bricks and mortar - creating a megacake larger than a basketball court and weighing about 65 tons.

And that should have been that. We're in the record books!

But efforts to secure our cake's place in the Guinness Book of World Records seems to have crumbled along the way.

Las Vegas Centennial Committee officials say they sent video and documentation of the cake's size and weight to a Guinness official, and had discussions with the keepers of world records.

But Guinness representatives said this week they have yet to receive an official entry from Las Vegas.

"At the moment we haven't seen anything substantial or complete on the cake," said Stuart Claxton, a Guinness representative who last week certified Mike Metzger's record-setting motorcycle jump at Caesars Palace.

The supporting material, Claxton said, needs to be sent in one package to Guinness' London office - where about 1,000 world-record claims land weekly.

This was news to Betsy Fretwell, Las Vegas Centennial Committee vice president and a deputy city manager.

"We sent them all the material we thought they needed to make a decision," Fretwell said.

World-record confusion notwithstanding, the Big Bertha of birthday cakes was still a success, Fretwell said, given the amount of international media attention the city received.

But civic pride rests in the balance. When it comes to records, we know we can equal Fort Payne's cake, and beat it too.