Mohegan Sun Casino Chefs Shattered A World Record—

A Confection That Takes The Cake!

By Shannon Hicks

Mohegan Sun executive pastry chef Lynn Mansel has proven that brides can have their wedding cake and eat it too — with plenty left over.

The official response may not have been received from Guinness Records staff, but there is no doubt that if Chef Mansel and his crew at Mohegan Sun Casino followed the requirements, Connecticut was home to the world’s largest wedding cake earlier this year.

On Sunday, February 8, visitors to the casino’s 2004 New England Bridal Showcase expected to see an array of photographers, caterers, dress designers, and the like, but not everyone walked in to the bridal show anticipating the sight of a 22-foot-tall wedding cake. The vanilla wedding cake of seven tiers covered with vanilla and almond buttercream frosting and chocolate bows and hearts had been built by Lynn Mansel and a team of more than 55 members.

Assembly began Monday, February 2, and the final decorations were finished by the early morning of Sunday. Chef Mansel came up with the idea of doing the cake as a way to draw attention to the bridal showcase.

The world’s largest wedding cake was assembled atop a scale that kept tabs of the confection’s weight as each layer and then frosting was added. A steel disc, accounted for in the weighing process, separated each tier.

“It’s like a house, it settles,” Chef Mansel said a few days after the bridal show. “Pieces sink, and parts of the buttercream shifted as we worked with it.”

The Food Network filmed the entire decorating process.

“They were shocked. They just couldn’t believe it,” Chef Mansel said. “We tested a few pound cake recipes — we decided that pound cake would be good for this project because pound cake by its nature should mature before it’s consumed — and we picked what we thought would be the best recipe.”

The cake’s two top ingredients were more than 10,000 pounds of pound cake batter and 4,810 pounds of frosting. Layers were assembled in blocks, and as each block was laid onto the scale, the outer edge of a block was trimmed so that the cake was continually kept fresh.

Forklifts were needed to raise and carefully place each tier, and the crew used a boom to decorate the top of the cake.

The bride-to-be who cut the cake on Sunday afternoon was the winner of the bridal showcase’s honeymoon winner.

“She was shocked,” Chef Mansel said. “She didn’t know what to expect when she tasted it, and she couldn’t believe how fresh everything was. The cake, the frosting, the decorations… everything was very fresh.”

The cake was large enough to serve four-ounce portions to 59,000 people.

“I had to think a lot,” Chef Mansel told Associated Press. “I had to think of all the wedding cakes I’ve already done and then multiply that by 100.”

Decorations were created to scale.

“As with any cake, you just make the bows and ribbon to fit the cake’s dimensions,” he said. “We tested different sizes to compare, and the cake was pretty. I was pleased.”

Mohegan Sun typically handles more conventions than weddings, but Chef Mansel and the bakers at the casino still managed to create cakes for nearly 30 on-site wedding receptions last year. Another 25 cakes were created for outside events.

Names and contact information were collected from people who tasted the cake and promised to send affidavits to Guinness, which would be expecting documentation on the cake’s appearance and taste from nonbaking participants. Photographs and documentation were immediately sent off to London, where the main office of The Guinness Book of World Records is located.

It takes anywhere between four and eight weeks for an entry to be accepted or denied, but Guinness Records spokesperson Kate White offered a positive look in February.

“I would say this has a good chance of making it,” she told The Associated Press. “It’s more than double the weight of the first cake.”

The February 8 cake cutting ceremony, said Chef Mansel, “didn’t even put a dent in the cake.”

Leftovers were shipped to a pig farm in Montville.

The previous record holder was a 5,334-pound cake created in June 2003 at Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla. The cake was tied in to a celebration of the wedding of Shrek and Fiona, the animated characters from the original Shrek film, and a celebration of the opening of the park’s new Shrek 4-D ride.

“My pastry team wasn’t too pleased with me at first,” Lynn Mansel said of his first suggestion of creating the world’s largest wedding cake. “It was difficult to get them excited about adding extra work to an already busy casino schedule. But as we began baking, decorating, and constructing the cake, they really got into it.”