‘Only in Petaluma’: 30-pound, pig-shaped ice cream cake turns heads

In last week’s happy birthday message to my ma, what I could not include about our birthday plans was that along with dinner at Table Culture Provisions, we were also going to surprise her with a custom ice cream cake from Samantha “Sam” Mahan and her staff at Baskin Robbins. What with Sam’s creativity and Baskin Robbins’ delicious cake/ice cream combos, we use any celebratory excuse to order up a surprise ice cream cake for friends and family.

What really set this ice cream cake apart from the rest was its sheer size. I told Sam the sky was the limit and so she made a cake that was nearly the size of an actual end table and weighed in at a whopping 30 pounds! Even before we picked it up, the cake had the community buzzing.

A few days before our scheduled pick-up, Sam texted me, “People keep gathering around me when I’m working on your cake! One person said, ‘Only in a Petaluma,’ shaking their head on the way out.”

I found the same when I picked up the cake. There were four gentlemen in the shop, all in assorted farming clothes, two even wearing cowboy hats. Even though it was multicolored and buried deep in a protective box, they immediately exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a pig!”

The cake was that it was completely filled with cake and ice cream, even the base, helping to explain the extreme weight. There were no short cuts here. The head featured chocolate peanut butter ice cream and vanilla cake, and the body consisting of cookies and cream ice cream and and alternated between vanilla and chocolate cake.

Not having faced an ice cream cake of this size before, I had not anticipated just how hard it was going to be to divvy up. Thankfully, my editor had just days prior reminded me of a past article in which I had given three pieces of ice cream cake advice. One was to have a large sharp knife, as regular cake knives are not made for ice cream cakes. (The other two bits of advice were to make sure you have room in your freezer because these things take up more room than you think, and to make sure to keep it covered so it doesn’t take on bad freezer smells. We always bring lots of Tupperware so that we can send people home with the extras, or store them for longer periods in our own freezer.)

In this case, even having the proper knife did not answer the question of where to start when “carving” a 30-pound pig ice cream cake. Because I knew the kids would get a laugh out of it, we started by removing the head, which also expedited getting some pieces out into hungry hands while we strategized on how to properly dress down the rest of the hog. In the end, we simply cut it into cross sections, like cutting rings of a tree, and then dissected from there so the pieces would actually fit on a plate or in a bowl.

With a cake of this size, we were not even going to contemplate trying to fit left-overs into the freezer. For this reason, we set up our little outdoor party on the street and harassed passersby to take a piece, or three. Most initially said no, probably thinking something silly like “winter is no time for ice cream cake.” However, most changed their tune on their return trip by our driveway and helped off polish off all but a few Tupperware bins, which we gifted to neighbors. And for dessert, Mom and I ate the remaining scraps on the tray, which had reached the perfect melted consistency.

Although mom was apprehensive as to why more family and friends than normal were gathering at her house at noon last Saturday, when she finally saw the cake, she was laughing as hard as I was. Maybe it’s just us, but ice cream cakes make us happy, and fun ice cream cakes make us laugh. Sam, who understandably is quickly becoming part of our family, joined our outdoor celebration and got to hear my mother’s parting words on the topic. “I feel like Houston ordered this cake as much for himself as he did for my birthday.”

She was not entirely wrong. I need little excuse for cake and ice cream, and in times like this, even the smallest pleasures can go a long way to keeping family and friends happy and healthy (mentally). …at least mentally healthy, if maybe not so dietarily healthy.