The Cake

So I've been thinking a little bit about what to write in this post just because of the fiasco it ended up being. But here it goes...

Before I had left to go to Oregon, I had done a practice cake, but wasn't able to do much of it due to lack of time. So I packed all my cake stuff up (or so I thought) and left. Well when I got ready to bake the cakes the Thursday before the wedding, I took all my stuff out of the car to get things started. My plan was to make a 3 tiered, square cake. The bride and groom wanted a chocolate cake with peanut butter filling that they had a specific recipe for and a butter cream icing. So after taking everything out, I realized that I was missing one of the cake pans. CRAP! So I looked up an address for a Michaels to see if I could find it. I knew it would be near impossible, because it was only sold in a package deal or at specialty stores. Well, the address I ended up with was for an old Michaels that was closed. But there was a Walmart right there. So I went into Walmart and ended up buying a whole brand new set of round pans. It was upsetting (and expensive) knowing I wouldn't be able to do what I had hoped to. But oh well. I got back to the house and baked the cakes. That went perfectly! The cakes came out just great and cooled well. After cooling, I made the filling and filled all 3 tiers. Again, that went really well. I was feeling really good about everything, because I had had nightmares about all the things that could go wrong during that process. After they were filled, I did a crumb coating of icing and put them in the fridge to await decorating the next day.

I knew that decorating would take a really long time but I wasn't terribly nervous about that part. I got the cakes covered in icing and got them all stacked. The plan was to do leaves as a border at the bottom, dots as a border on the top part and then a celtic design around the top sides of each layer. Then on the top they wanted to have the celtic trinity knot. It was pretty intense for a first cake, but I was going to do my best. I got all of the leaves done and they actually looked pretty cute. Then I did the dots and finally the celtic design. It did take almost the whole day, but I did it! I waited until Saturday morning to do the trinity knot, which turned out really well. The cake looked good. Not perfect and not spectacular, but pretty dang good for a first wedding cake.








I needed to get to the wedding early for set up, so my cousin Megan agreed to come with me to help with transport. Alex stayed with my Aunts and I brought Darek along. Megan got in the car and I handed the cake to her. It looked good and sturdy, so I was feeling that transport wouldn't be a problem. We started down from my Aunts house. The road leading to her house was very curvy (well, a lot of the roads in Eugene are), so I took it very slow. I was talking to my cousin, not really worrying about the cake. But I looked down and saw the bottom layer shifting where the filling was. It wasn't terrible, but with every curve we hit, it shifted more and more. By the time we were down the hill and pulled the car over, it was looking really bad. I was thinking I could probably still fix it, although it wouldn't look nearly as good. We decided to try it on the floor of the car instead to see if that would help. Megan sat right next to it. We got another mile down the road and it had slid so much that one side of the bottom layer was completely off. I was devastated. I wanted to scream and cry and hit something. But I just wanted to get what I could of the cake there. So we took the top 2 layers off and put them on another platform. They held up pretty well, but had shifted a little when the bottom layer was falling apart. When I got there, I had not brought enough green frosting to do a whole other border of leaves, so I just put a simple layer of gold frosting around the bottom. We ended up figuring out that the reason for the shifting was because of the peanut butter filling. It had so much oil, that even with dowels holding it together, the oil from the peanut butter made it impossible to stay together.

Notice a tier missing?

Anyway, it was awful and made me want to never make a cake again. I cried all the way home from the wedding, but my sweet husband and adorable son helped me feel much better. In fact, on the way back Alex said, "Mom, don't cry. You make the best cakes ever. You could even work on Ace of Cakes because they're so good." Nothing like a sweet boy to make things all better. So it was a bit of an ordeal, but I'm really glad to have had the experience. I'll just go forward from here... right???