Baking a cake on a campfire isn’t easy. But 30 years ago, 800 Boy Scouts proved it could be done.

Back in 1972, when Scoutmaster Bob Johnson was planning the spring Camporee for the boys in Minnesota’s Mustang District, he started thinking that every scout should have a Dutch oven that was light enough to pack. He shared the idea with his scouting colleagues, and the wheels began to turn.

Hundreds of these homemade Dutch ovens were given to Boy Scouts in 1972 to use for a cake baking contest.

With “Get ‘er Done” Bob driving the project, the district procured low-cost aluminum, inexpensive casting, donated bolts for the legs and anondized aluminum disks for handles.

District officials also contacted cake mix manufacturers. Local companies General Mills and Pillsbury responded, as well as Duncan Hines (then owned by Procter & Gamble). Together the three companies donated 1,200 cake mixes for the Camporee.

When scouts arrived on Friday afternoon at Camp Heritage (later named Camp Stearns), each boy received a cake mix and his own Dutch oven to keep as part of his $3.25 weekend camp fee.

The baking begins On Saturday, the scouts hosted a huge baking event with all 800 or so scouts baking their own cakes. The Dutch oven could hold a 9-inch baking pan, which was set inside the oven on small rocks allowing heat to surround the cake. The lid was added, and the oven was set directly into the campfire’s embers. Additional embers were piled on the lid to evenly distribute the heat.

Plenty of cakes got burned that day, but lucky for the novice bakers, there were plenty of mixes available for “do-overs.”

Johnson recruited newspaper “Ladies’ Page” editors from the Minneapolis Tribune (now the Star Tribune) to be the judges for the campfire baking contest. Intrigued by the idea, the women arrived at camp with photographers to document the cake baking event.

The result was a full front-page story in the “Home” section of the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune, and plenty of mentions on TV and radio.

As for the Dutch ovens today? “There are hundreds of Dutch ovens out there,” says Andy Wangstad, the Mustang district executive at the time and a 1972 Camporee attendee.

“Collectors still contact us looking for information about them, and I’m sure there are still hundreds out there being used or in storage,” he says. “As for mine, I still have it. It was such a great memory, I can’t give it away.”

And as for the cakes, most didn’t last the weekend.

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