Jeffrey Adam "Duff" Goldman (born December 17, 1974 ) is the star of the Food Network reality television show Ace of Cakes. He is a baker and food artist who has been described as both audacious and creative. He owns a cake shop in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., known as Charm City Cakes.

His work and talent have also been featured on the network television special Food Network Challenge competitions and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Goldman was born in Detroit, Michigan. When he was four, his mother caught him in her kitchen wielding a meat cleaver and watching food personality Chef Tell.

After the divorce of his parents when he was ten, Goldman spent time living in both Northern Virginia and in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. From the age of fourteen, he began to work in kitchens, his first job being at a Burger King[citation needed]. Years later, he attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Goldman has said that when he was a sophomore in college, he went to what he considered the finest restaurant in Baltimore, Charleston, where he was inspired to apply as a cook there. The head chef, Cindy Wolf, looked at his résumé and noted that it consisted of irrelevant experience. However, Cindy did offer him a job to make cornbread and biscuits only, and this is what Goldman cites as the turning point in his career.

He received his undergraduate education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he graduated with a degree in East Asian History with a minor in ethics. Shortly after, he attended schools such as Corcoran College of Art and the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley, California. After working under acclaimed chefs in California, including a job at the French Laundry and the Vail Cascade Hotel in Colorado, he returned to Washington, D.C., to work at the Olives restaurant baking bread.

In 2000, Goldman opened his own business called Charm City Cakes. Initially, his cake sales began as he worked out of his house in Charles Village with the help of two assistants he employed. As the requests for his unusual cakes increased, he hired more employees – many of whom did not have any culinary experience as pastry chefs, but were instead experienced painters, architects, and sculptors.

Today, Goldman's bakery shop is unusual in that blow torches, as well as power tools such as grinders and drills, are used to help form the underlying supports of the unique edible creations. With his crew, Goldman has done unusual cakes such as the likenesses of Elvis in the form of a 3-foot butter cream sculpture, an anatomically correct ear, a smoking volcano, a three-dimensional German Shepherd, as well as a replica of a CAT scan, a jeep, and an edible Wrigley Field.

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