Bakery cooks up 852 pound, 1.8M calorie cake for soldiers' homecoming

How do you weigh a cake that serves 6,000?

By adding up the weight of the ingredients. That's how Rusty Bailey determined that the cake he baked for Fort Polk soldiers just back from combat weighed 852 pounds.

"I had to pre-figure it out because I had to let Dawn know how much of each ingredient I needed," said Bailey, owner of Bailey's Bakery in Leesville, Louisiana, outside Fort Polk.

And that's Dawn, as in Dawn Food Products Inc. in Houston. The international bakery supply company based in Jackson, Mich., has a distribution center in northwest Houston that serves the Leesville establishment.

To make the gargantuan sweet took 220 pounds of powdered sugar, 36 pounds of vegetable oil, 121 pounds of granulated sugar, 222 pounds of water, 156 pounds of flour, 41 pounds of shortening, five pounds of vanilla and 51 pounds of eggs.

Bailey estimates the cake to have 1.8 million calories.

Michael Croft, a Dawn sales manager in Houston, said he didn't know the details of the cake project but said he'd known Rusty Bailey at least 10 years.

"We probably sent him some product to help in the manufacture (of the cake)," Croft said. "Bailey Bakery is a longtime customer of ours." 

Served April 3 to the returning 4th Combat Brigade Team of the 10th Mountain Division, the cake was part of "Patriot Day," organized by the Vernon Parish Chamber of Commerce, said Bailey, a chamber board member.

Although his bakery he has owned for 15 years is a small business, he said he was happy to participate in the event. 

"We try to give back to the community and to the soldiers," he said. "Our little town woudln't exist without Fort Polk."

Most of the work to make the cake was done by Bailey, his mother Sue Bailey, employee Haley Harmon, Bailey's girlfriend, Erin Holland, and her 13-year-old son, Tennyson McNeal.

Sue Bailey did all the decorating with help from Harmon, who filled the icing bags.

"My hand felt every squeeze of the icing tube," Sue Bailey said.

The baking and decorating went on for a week, with assembly of the 55 individual sheet cakes taking about 2 1/2 hours, Bailey said. There was an odd number of smaller cakes because there was one extra on the bottom with the 10th Mountain Division's crest, he said.

An official cake-cutting ceremony, done with Army battle swords, kicked off the "block party" that included thousands of hotdogs and drinks and games for the kids, Bailey said.

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