Chef Duff Goldman has been cooking since the age of four, when his Mom caught him in the kitchen watching Chef Tell and swinging around a meat cleaver. A few years later, his culinary curiosity almost cost him a finger when he decided the best way to carve a pumpkin was with the largest knife he could find in the kitchen. Despite the incident, Chef Duff found his calling and started working professionally when he was just 14 and has never turned back.
When people ask how he got into making cakes, you might say he really had no choice in the matter, coming from a long line of cooks: Duff’s Great-Grandmother, "Mamo," who came to the U.S. from the Ukraine at age 16 was a legendary baker and cook. Her daughter, Duff’s Grandmother, "Nana", was a professional artist whose early works included water color painting, printmaking, stunning works in silversmithing, enameling and later in her life - photography. Duff’s Mom, Jackie, is also an artist who began printmaking in college, created and taught ceramics in her own commercial studio, moved on to stained glass for over 30 years, and is now incorporating her love of all into clay silver and gold creations. Duff studied art himself while still in his teens at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. and was at one time a graffiti artist of some notoriety.
Duff started working for acclaimed Baltimore Chef Cindy Wolf while attending the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. After graduating, Duff left Baltimore to study pastries at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, California. While in Napa, Duff was a stagiere at the French Laundry, working under acclaimed pastry Chef Steven Durfee. Duff left California to become Executive Pastry Chef of the Vail Cascade Hotel and Resort in the mountains of Vail, Colorado, where he spent what little free time he had snowboarding. There he worked with such notable chefs as Jessie Llapitan, now Executive Chef of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and Chef Jason Rogers, late of Olives in Aspen and now at the Borgota of Atlantic City.
Duff then left Colorado to cook and bake bread for Todd English’s Olives in Washington, D.C., where he worked under Executive Chef Steve Mannino. Inspired by the chefs he'd been working for, Duff entrepreneurial spirit took him back to Baltimore in 2000, where he finally realized his dream and opened Charm City Cakes - in his apartment. He wasn't there very long; as word-of-mouth, the media, and even the health department all began to take an interest, he soon found himself in a real bakery of his very own. It was small, but it got the job done. While the health department was happy, more coverage in the press, and a growing clients list helped propel Duff into an even bigger location: an old church he retrofitted into his current modern bakery. The Charm City Cakes as we know it was firmly established.
Following several appearances on its cake competition Challenge series, in 2006, Food Network tapped Chef Duff and his fellow cake baking artists at Charm City Cakes to star in Ace of Cakes. Three years, and eight seasons later the show is still wildly popular. In addition to Ace of Cakes, Duff also stars in the Food Network series, The Best Thing I Ever Ate and he just completed several guest-starring roles in both TV and film, including Fox's King of the Hill and Walt Disney Pictures You Again. Chef Duff has also made his first foray into the publishing world with the recently released "Ace of Cakes: Inside the World of Charm City Cakes" from HarperCollins/William Morrow.
In addition to owning and operating Charm City Cakes, Duff is also a sculptor, artist, and musician - he plays bass in the indie instrumental band “so I had to…” and is an all around good guy with the cleanest hands in town.
More information about Chef Duff, Charm City Cakes, and …soihadto… can be found at the following:
