Baking in Place: Baking Rises During Stay-at-Home Order

A new hashtag has arisen out of staying at home during the coronavirus outbreak: #coronabaking. With lots of hours to fill in a day, many Buzz residents are taking to their kitchens to create cakes that commemorate the coronavirus in comical ways. It’s a lighthearted way to be entertained - which some home-bound cooks are calling a "Bakecation" these days.

For three families, the combination of a baking challenge between their socially-distanced teenagers was the perfect recipe for some pandemic amusement. Chris Artzer, who notes that he is a managing director of Ocean Park Advisors “when I am not masterminding baking challenges,” came up with the idea to stay connected with their friends, the Larsen and Weaver-Martin families.

“We like watching the show ‘Nailed It’ on Netflix,” says Chris, of himself, wife Marisa and daughters, Isabel, 14 and twins Pia and Tess, 13. “So many baking shows are about perfection and being neat but ‘Nailed It’ is like if we were to bake things ourselves because we are messy.”

From left: Genna, Natalie and Ty Larsen join a Zoom call with the Artzer and Weaver-Martin families in their “Nailed It” bake-off challenge.

Bryn Larsen, co-founder of Foto Relevance, adds that “Nailed It” is also a favorite of her family. "My kids love it,” she says of teenagers Natalie, 17 and twins Genna and Ty, 13. “The people on the show are terrible bakers - sometimes the judges don’t even want to taste it. The show asks people to bake a very beautiful, complicated cake that is too difficult to copy.”

Because they were all in their own kitchens, Chris came up with a twist. “We did not do the ‘copy’ part of the show so we got creative and asked the kids to make a coronavirus-themed cake,” he says. “All we wanted to do is make a little light out of the situation. Then we gave every household 2 1/2 hours to bake their cake. On the show, contestants are usually given two to three hours, which usually is not enough time to have everything really work out — they make a lot of mistakes.”

Siblings Talia and Max Martin designed a toothy coronavirus design to decorate their cake in the pandemic-themed “Nailed It” baking challenge with the Larsen and Artzer families.

Up for the challenge, the Artzer kids and the Larsen kids put on their aprons and took on the Martin kids: Talia, 15 and Max,13. The families all met up via Zoom and the parents video chatted while the bakers took over their respective kitchens. The families stayed on the call for one and one-half hours - and then turned off the Zoom for the final stages of the bake-off. 

At the Weaver-Martin household, a chocolate cake with a toothy replica of the virus was piped in blue, green and white icing. The Artzer crew created a cake named “Cirque de Solitude,” complete with gingerbread elephants and a fondant Purell bottle.

Sisters Isabel, Pia and Tess Artzer created the “Cirque de Solitude” cake sporting a fondant Purell bottle in the “Nailed It” baking challenge with the Larsen and Weaver-Martin families.

The Larsen kids created a Clorox cake, which had a white chocolate “wipe” pulled out of the top. “Pretty immediately, Genna said we have to do the Clorox bottle because it is the cleansing thing that has taken off,” says Natalie, noting that baking is a constant pastime of theirs right now. “It was a lot of fun to mix it up and make that bottle!”

Once the cakes were complete, the group shared their photos with one another via text. All of the cakes were declared winners, but Chris adds: “the parents were the ones that won because the kids were busy for three hours! The kids had a blast. We are trying to figure out when we will do it again. The parents have to get together for a Zoom call to come up with the next theme. It’s important to do this right now because it’s survival to be able to laugh.”

Houston novelist Coert Voorhees gets a kick out of baking cakes for special occasions - and he loves to bake them for wife Molly, son Dayton, 13 and daughter Annie. At the beginning of Spring Break, he was pondering what kind of cake to create for Annie’s 11th birthday on April 10. “In the past, I made cakes like an earring, a mermaid tail, cake pops - whatever Annie was into at the moment,” says Coert, noting that with the cancellation of Spring Break and a special Disney cruise for Annie, his creativity was getting put to the test. 

“A friend of mine sent me a photo of their family calendar,” he says. “Their first grader had put Xs on all the fun events and said: ‘stupid Covid ruined everything.’ As far as this birthday went, what are we thinking about right now? The virus. Annie was supposed to do these fun things and this ‘stupid Covid ruined everything.’” Mulling on that calendar photo, Coert decided to bake that phrase into a cake. “We will remember this cake and look back at this time,” he says. “We will memorialize it.” Coert is a self-taught baker who enjoys the time-consuming work associated with cake decoration. “I have always done sculpture and worked with clay,” he says. “One day I realized I could do the same thing with fondant, which opened up a lot of possibilities.”

Annie Voorhees, on left and brother Dayton, on right, celebrate Annie’s 11th birthday with a coronavirus-themed cake made by dad Coert. 

Coert replicated the structure of the coronavirus in red and gray fondant, replete with the club-shaped spikes that give the virus its distinctive, crownlike appearance. He set the fondant virus on top of a circular cake that he decorated as a calendar and then wrote “Happy 11th Birthday Annie!” in bright, pink icing. The inside of the cake was chocolate, and not without a story in itself.

“It ended up being chocolate on the inside because I set out the yellow cake on the counter and then went upstairs to put the kids to bed,” says Coert. “When I came back downstairs, our dog had eaten everything: the plastic and all the cake mix. I could not even be mad at Chile because I like vanilla cake too!”

Coert Voorhees used red and gray fondant to create a facsimile of coronavirus on his daughter Annie’s birthday cake.

The cake was - pun intended - a viral hit. “I was like: ‘Corona!’ as soon as I saw it,” laughs Annie, who was delighted with her birthday cake and will surely remember it forever. 

“We just have to embrace this time,” says Coert. “Within our house, we want our people to be happy. We just have to laugh right now because I just cannot believe this is happening. We have to say: ‘let’s go all in on the corona situation.’” Which is why a virus-themed birthday cake was some of the best medicine around for adding a little joy to a home-bound birthday.