A SWEET MAKEOVER

Delightful cake balls and an unsightly yard are Robin Ankeny’s two claims to fame. Not long after founding the Cake Ball Company, Ankeny’s product popped up on one of the Food Network’s Rachael Ray shows. Business boomed, and Robin and husband Jeff, a wine broker, bought an architecturally and historically profound White Rock Hills home. The mid-century home built by famous architect Bud Oglesby required widespread repairs, which the Ankenys tackled with gusto. One exception was the exterior.

“We did not know much about landscap- ing,” Robin explains, so they did little in the way of yard and curb appeal.

Robin’s mom suggested they submit their “ugly” landscape to the DIY Network reality show “Desperate Landscapes,” in which contractor Jason Cameron and crew rescue the country’s most dilapidated yards.

“I didn’t think our yard was desperate enough,” Robin says. Still, they sent in an application, complete with video of the neighbors “complaining” about the state of the Ankeny’s yard.

One of the show’s requirements, according to the FAQ section of its website, is a critical neighbor or two. “It’s important to include in your application the neighbors who will enjoy teasing you about your lack of landscaping skills.”

Two years later the Ankenys received the call. “Desperate Landscapes” was coming to North Texas. “They said, ‘Are you still desperate?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’” Robin recalls. “All we had done was a little painting. We still needed help.”

What you see on the show is quite authentic, Robin says. They came the day before for minor electrical work. The Ankenys put the whole project in the show’s hands.

“We had no idea what it would look like,” Robin says. “But we were excited. That whole day was like Christmas morning.”

In a span of about 10 hours, Cameron and his team tore down a brick wall that he said, “made the home look like a fortress,” built a composite deck, planted an architectural landscape with funky shapes and a fountain and added whimsical art to the outdoor walls.

The Ankenys were so thrilled that they invited the “Desperate Landscapes” crew to break bread once the job was done.

“They liked that. They said no one had ever invited them to stay for dinner before.”

The one complaint came from the Ankeny children, Luke and Jackson, who expected a little more airtime.

They were in school during the first half of filming, thus appeared only momentarily on the episode. Still, Robin says, “Desperate Landscapes” did an admirable job of editing and producing a relatively realistic reality show. “Plus they mentioned the Cake Ball Company,” she says. “Every time the episode airs, we get more orders.”

GEN-XTRAS

It was 1992. MTV was barraging viewers with grunge rock and intermittent attempts at socially conscious programming. One such effort was the short-lived “Like We Care,” which examined subjects of supposed interest to teenagers. A February, 1992 LA Times critic wrote that the show was in “a perfect position to counteract the MTV generation’s widely publicized apathy,” adding that it stood a better chance than most current affairs shows of the day.

Brian Cannon, now approaching 40, remembers recording his slice of the show at Lake Highlands North Park alongside a clique of Lake Highlands High School (and one Hillcrest High School) classmates including Josh Lawson, Jason Eskew (pictured), Jason Saba, Dusti Morris and Michelle Frustere. Specific memories about the program are sparse, a deficit Cannon owes to his former-stepsister. “My parents recorded all the episodes on VHS, then she went and recorded ‘90210’ over all of them,” he says feigning outrage.

A friend of a friend was an MTV producer, Cannon says, which is how they landed the gig. MTV sent videographers and producers to high schools worldwide to interview students about music, trends, politics and social issues such as teen pregnancy, binge drinking and gun violence. Filming all of the shows’ two seasons lasted just one afternoon. In a typical episode, the host (who happens to be a member of the “90210” cast) tosses topics to teens. A rapid-fire montage of their previously recorded responses follows. The Lake Highlands students were featured heavily on some episodes and altogether absent from others, Cannon says.

Jason Eskew says the experience taught him a lesson about watching your words, which can be twisted and used against you. For example, the producers asked him a question about feminism, he says, so he recounted a derogatory joke about women that had been going around, followed by an explaination of why he thought the joke was all wrong.

“The only part they used was me telling the joke,” he says. Later on, a girl came up to me and said, ‘You’re that jerk that was on MTV!’ When everything you say is being recorded — and that’s how it is all the time for kids these days —you have to be careful.”

It was all pretty low-key, Cannon, Eskew and Lawson recall.

“There were no makeup artists,” says Cannon. “We wore our own clothes. There was a lot of rayon worn in those years. It was basically a couple cameras and a producer off camera asking us the questions ... for some reason I most clearly remember the one about pick-up lines.” Ah yes, a subject approved by the LA Times critic: “The show is at its tongue-in-cheek best hashing out every permutation of that eternal dilemma: how to deal with the opposite sex.”

No one from the group went on to TV careers, though Eschew tried out for “Fear Factor.” Cannon still lives in the Dallas area with his wife and their five children. He sometimes wishes today’s technology would have been around in the ‘90s.

“All of the shows would have lived forever on YouTube and it wouldn’t matter that my stepsister erased them.”