If you like cake (and who doesn't?)...

Alessandra Stanley has an article in The New York Times about television shows about cakes and their makers:

By any logical standard, say the collapse of Holland’s tulip bubble in 1637 or Mrs. Fields filing for bankruptcy in 2008, cupcake mania should surely by now be waning. Instead, there are as many cream-filled series on cable as there are cupcake flavors at Crumbs. TLC features DC Cupcakes as well as Buddy Valastro’s Cake Boss and his two spinoffs, Kitchen Boss and Next Great Baker. The Food Network offers Cupcake Wars, Have Cake, Will Travel, and Last Cake Standing, while the Cooking Channel has, among others, Sweet Dreams and Unique Sweets. These kinds of programs offer a rush of butter cream, nougatine and fudge every bit as addictive and heart-stopping as the Bering Sea adventures of crab fishermen on the Discovery Channel—The Deadliest Batch.
Television keeps piling on more swirls, sprinkles, and filigree. We TV is introducing Staten Island Cakes, starring Vincent Buzzetta, a 21-year-old pastry chef who owns the Cake Artist in West Brighton and is known as Vinny to his overbearing Italian-American relatives who hover and holler as he constructs elaborate cakes the size of shopping carts.
That’s the same day P.O.V. is showing Kings of Pastry. And it’s telling that P.O.V., a PBS series best known for searing looks at issues like war, poverty, and human rights, is devoting an entire documentary to French bakers. The film follows three bakers who compete for the highest artisanal accolade in France, to be one of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, which, in cookery circles at least, is as prestigious as the Légion d’Honneur. (Winners wear a tricolor collar on their white chef’s smocks.) These aspiring MOFs train for months; they practice the dreaded spun-sugar sculpture with the kind of anxious determination that grips Tour de France cyclists before L’Alpe d’Huez.
And as long as hard times linger, these exaltations of dessert have staying power, because bakeries are the ultimate take-this-joblessness-and-shove-it fantasy. The small-business impulse is at the core of the American dream, and this one dovetails with the foodie-ism of the moment. Owning a restaurant is an ambition whose perils are writ large, whereas a bakery seems so much more accessible and do-it-yourself. As Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne, two sisters who traded white-collar careers for pink aprons to open Georgetown Cupcake in 2008 prove, almost anyone can bake cupcakes in her kitchen. Their gamble turned into DC Cupcakes.
Gourmet cake shops are so common that the fad is easily parodied. Kristen Wiig’s character in the hit movie Bridesmaids is a failed baker.
Dessert shows are particularly suited to television. Few would contemplate scaling Chef Ferran Adrià’s recipe for Cloud of Carrot With Tangerine Concentrate, but almost anyone can pull off a cupcake or even a three-layer red-velvet cake. It’s simple, and the only complications are visual. The act and possibilities of decorating a cake are so much more camera-friendly than even the most erotically shot shrimp risotto or blanquette de veau. In a single cupcake there is color, heft, vertical reach, and turrets and glazes galore.
We TV and P.O.V. examine the opposite ends of the baking world: a Staten Island baker who uses a glue gun and plastic foam, and French chefs who have worked at Lenôtre and made desserts for the president of France and the sultan of Brunei. But both shows offer the same basic payoff: food that feeds the eyes.
It’s tempting to view Kings of Pastry, which had a theatrical release last year, as a European corrective to the outlandish extremes that American bakers reach for entertainment’s sake. Buddy of Cake Boss uses vats of batter and tubs of mustard-yellow icing to fashion a jumbo model of a Transformer Bumblebee Camaro for a Chevrolet promotional event; the result looks about as appetizing as if were made out of actual metal. Vinny, on Staten Island, takes playing with food even further. The cake he concocts for the Taste of Staten Island contest— a towering inferno of cakes, circus tents, lion cages, clowns, and chocolate-covered popcorn— isn’t actually edible. He bakes a plainer cake for the taste portion of the contest. He might as well have used Play-Doh.
It’s the kind of divergence of form and function that inspired giant wigs topped with sailing ships at the court of Louis XVI, and, more recently, the fascinators worn by guests at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. (Princess Beatrice’s antlers suggest she might be ideally suited to a cupcake career.)
There is nothing grotesque or slapdash about the spun-sugar eggs and hazelnut and raspberry chocolate cream-filled domes of Jacquy Pfeiffer, a founder of the French Pastry School in Chicago who returns to France to compete in the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France contest, which, like the Olympics, takes place every four years. “I have sacrificed pretty much everything,” he says. “No pressure, no pressure, but if we don’t get this I will never get over it.”
The documentary captures the perfectionism and artistry that go into a seemingly simple pyramid of cream puffs as well as the heartbreak behind each cookie that crumbles. When one contestant bumps his elaborate spun-sugar wedding sculpture against an overhead light and snaps off the top, everyone cries, even the judges.
Kings of Pastry is a tribute to French artistry and tradition, but the sad truth is that even many of those exquisitely wrought buffet displays and wedding cakes are quite hideous— a pileup of birds of paradise, modernist sculptures, and flowers— that represent the triumph of technique over good taste.
On television, it’s hard to have your cake and watch it too.

Rico says Mrs. Fields made cookies, not cakes... (But his ladyfriend's daughter is an excellent cake artist, and he hopes she gets on one of these shows one day.)