Chef Duff Goldman spins up moon-shaped cake for NASA 'Taste of Space'

A smiling man in a white t shirt stands on a set next to a fake moon buggy and a cake that looks like the moon.

Duff Goldman has given a surprising amount of thought to baking cakes in outer space.

The founder of the Baltimore bake shop Charm City Cakes who rose to fame on the Food Network show "Ace of Cakes," Goldman has for a third year brought a space-themed cake to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's "Taste of Space: Celebrity Edition" culinary evening. A self-professed "life-long science and space nerd," Goldman described the annual event in Florida as one of his most unique experiences.

"Here I am as an adult and I get to go down to Kennedy Space Center and cook food, meet astronauts and all of the people that work there, It's really, for me personally, such a joy to do because it's all stuff that I have loved my entire life," Goldman said in an interview with collectSPACE.com.

For this year's event held Saturday night (Nov. 2), after demonstrating cooking techniques alongside fellow celebrity chefs Jon Ashton ("TV Dinners") and Amanda Freitag ("Chopped"), as well as former NASA astronauts Bob Cabana, Jose Hernandez and Janet Kavandi, Goldman revealed a cake creation inspired by the large, spinning NASA logo at the visitor complex's entrance.

It took six cake artists about eight hours to create the rotating, 30-inch (76-cm) cake sphere using fondant, gumpaste and modeling chocolate, as well as hand pulled-sugar for the nebulae on its base. (Image credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex)