WASHINGTON — The crowd sported more biceps tattoos than bifocals. More body piercings than pacemakers. More geeks than grandmas.

And that was a bit surprising, because the event that night in Bethesda, Md., was all about cake decorating.

"I made Darth Vader's head once," one cake artiste told me. "It was red velvet cake on the inside."

"A dragon, that was my favorite cake I did," another said. "Claws. Fire from the mouth. It rocked."

"A bride of Frankenstein wedding cake," yet another said.

The world of cake decorating is not just sugar roses and buttercream basket weaves. I have watched this world change in the past few years. And I'll have to admit my own obsession.

It was about 2 o'clock one morning when my husband realized that my cake jones was worse than he thought.

I was hunched over the kitchen counter, hacksawing furiously at a wooden structure.

"I thought you said you were staying up late to make a birthday cake," he moaned.

"I am. This is the internal structure for the rocket ship. It's going to be at least two feet tall, so it needs an infrastructure so it won't fall over," I replied, having just finished my third Red Bull.

"You may want to start thinking about what it is that people say about you when you leave a room," he said, and went back to bed.

When my boys awoke in the morning (I hadn't gone to bed yet), there was a toddler-size purple rocket ship, with edible silver trim and dragee rivets, a bubble porthole and curled fondant flames bursting from its thrusters. It was lemon cream and raspberry on the inside.

"It's official. You have lost your mind," my husband said.

"Wow, Mom! I love it!" my older son squealed.

Case closed.

In addition to that 2 a.m. rocket, I've sculpted a train, a Mickey Mouse, a princess, a pirate ship, fat babies, a rubber duckie and a floppy hat. I am currently obsessed with how to depict the suction cups on an octopus.

Like most cake decorating addicts, I figured I was a little bit alone in this.

Then Duff Goldman showed up on TV. He's bald, has a soul patch, went to art school, can weld and spray paint and comes across a little like Shaggy from "Scooby-Doo." His extreme cakes, created by his art school friends, are the subject of one of the Food Network's most popular shows, "Ace of Cakes."

It can be argued that his shop in Baltimore, Charm City Cakes, has helped fuel a cake revolution.

Sometime in the past decade, a really cool cake went from being big and flat, with a frosting-piped drawing of a truck, to a sculpture of a truck, wrapped with an edible, Play-Doh-like substance called fondant, airbrushed with food coloring and gilded with edible silver dust. If it was made in Goldman's shop, the wheels probably move and smoke blows out the exhaust pipe.

This subgenre finds itself flourishing with a sort of geeky/rockabilly/goth/techie vibe.

"Oh, I'm totally a techie looking for another way to channel my creativity. We're techies by day, cakies by night," said Andrea Kojan, a Reston, Va., tech-support worker who makes wildly gorgeous cakes on weekends. "A lot of people cake."

I knew it. Cake is a verb!

Burton Farnsworth — I swear this is true — made a cupcake depicting an edible Lenin wrapped in a hot dog bun surfing a fondant chunk of dog poop. Farnsworth is a graphic designer in Fairfax County, Va., who wears all black and loves the sculptural quality of contemporary cake decorating. "I didn't even eat cake before I discovered this," said Farnsworth, who cakes on the side at CakeFX.

I met these folks this month at a Barnes & Noble in Bethesda. With several hundred others, we were there for a book signing by a woman who makes a living blogging about cakes gone wrong (www.Cakewrecks.com).

Because, of course, half the fun of any sport, especially for amateurs, is relishing professional bloopers.