A baker attends a festival to make the biggest whoopie pie in the world

Transcript:

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Two years ago, when Rutland, Vt., hosted its first annual Whoopie Pie Fest, local baker Megan Wagner baked a 542-pound whoopie pie. So how can you possibly top that? How about one twice as big? Vermont Public’s Nina Keck reports.

NINA KECK, BYLINE: If you’ve never had a whoopie pie, imagine two layers of velvety cake with a silky marshmallow filling. Typically, they fit in one hand. The whoopie pie I’m going to tell you about is so big, it took up most of the space in a large refrigerator truck.

MEGAN WAGNER: Yes. That’s the…

KECK: There’s the cake.

M WAGNER: Yes, there’s the cake (laughter).

KECK: Megan Wagner owns Dream Maker Bakers in Killington. She says each of the chocolate cakes that sit cooling in front of me weigh 225 pounds. Now Megan and her husband, Joe Wagner, need to figure out the best way to bring them out.

HUSBAND OF MEGAN WAGNER JOE WAGNER: So this one we’re taking out and putting it on the board ’cause we really want…

M WAGNER: That one has to end up on the other board. The other one really needs to be done first.

KECK: This part is tricky because when the pieces are all assembled, this whoopie pie will weigh more than half a ton. And lest we forget, it’s cake.

M WAGNER: I think even I was surprised by how technical it is.

KECK: Besides cocoa powder and vanilla extract, problem-solving is a key ingredient. For starters, Wagner’s cookware wasn’t big enough. So she hired a local welder to make her a pan 4 1/2 feet in diameter. That meant she needed a bigger oven.

M WAGNER: Right away, that sent me to pizza places.

KECK: A local pizzeria let her come in after hours and use their 5-foot-wide oven. But part of the cake pan still stuck out. So her husband, who’s a plumber, Macgyvered a solution.

M WAGNER: He built me a stainless steel extender box, we call it. So we leave the door to the oven open, so we make the oven longer than it actually is.

KECK: For a dessert this size, you also need muscle to mix the ingredients – 300 eggs, for instance, just for the cake.

M WAGNER: Quite a lot of eggs – we were cracking eggs for a while (laughter).

KECK: One hundred sixty-five pounds of flour, 150 pounds of sugar, butter and marshmallow cream, plus 350 pounds of powdered sugar for the filling.

KATHERINE KEARNES: It’s really just – I mean, it’s just a total body workout.

KECK: Katherine Kearnes is Wagner’s head baker.

KEARNES: I mean, Megan and I are carrying this big mixing bowl up a flight of stairs in order to get it up to where the oven is. It’s just everything, your whole body.

KECK: Each cake takes six hours to bake, and getting them out of the oven is another nail-biter.

M WAGNER: That’s a terrifying moment, taking that 350-degree pan full of 225-degree batter out of the oven. That takes, you know, six of the biggest men we can find.

KECK: But this part, right now, where Wagner’s team is putting it all together and sliding the top onto the gooey filling in front of thousands of people at the festival is the most stressful part, they tell me. Sunshine and 80 degrees are not helping.

M WAGNER: One. Two. Three. Go.

(CHEERING)

KECK: The warm weather will take a toll, and by the time it’s weighed, there will be lots of cracks. But at 1,187 pounds, this whoopie pie beat the previous record set by a bakery in Maine by more than 100 pounds. So if anyone’s made a bigger whoopie pie, Rutland wants to know. For NPR News, I’m Nina Keck in Chittenden, Vt.

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