194/365 Stacked
Rather than today’s picture of the day being the first in the series as is usually the case here, today it will be the last one. You’ll have to make it through this series of pictures, imagining some missing parts, to fully appreciate the ending.
Once upon a time there was a panicked bride. On the Wednesday before the Saturday she was getting married, the source for her wedding cake informed her that she would not be able to make her cake. (Something about just having had a baby.) With only three days until the wedding, what was the bride to do?
She remembered that she had a colleague with a young, trying to get experience, daughter who had recently graduated from culinary school and moved back to Texas. She sought out her colleague who in turn phoned said daughter with the bride’s dilemma. In a moment of weakness (and poverty), the young baker said yes to making the cake.
Soon more pounds of butter, flour, and sugar than one normally consumes in a year appeared. Eggs were cracking.
NOTE: The band-aids have to do with sharp edges on cake pans and plastic wrap boxes.
Soon , the last lonely egg joined the others from its dozen in a scrumptious cake batter.
Being that the bride’s dream was a four tier cake that would feed two hundred people, there was A LOT of batter. A lot of batter means a lot of baking. Here we go with pan number one.
The young baker decided that she would also make all of the fondant from scratch.
Tier two successfully covered.
There are zero pictures of the cake assembly process. We were all too busy praying. Okay, I was praying; the young baker was frantically working to the mantra, “I will never do this again. I will never do this again. I will never do this again.” I tried to be the picture of calm. That did not work to calm the young baker. She said that the only reason that I was calm is because I had low standards and therefore did not stress out. Yeah, whatever.
The young baker worked for an hour and half sticking dowels on the tiers of the cake so that they could be stacked. She added the trim to each tier and then added the flowers, none of which broke in transit! The florist came by and offered a few left over rose petals if they could be used to add a final touch.
The young baker added the final touches . . .
. . .and the cake was done. It was done in three days, by one young baker who had never made a four tier fondant covered wedding cake before (and may never again).
The young baker has come a long way. from this in 1993 . . .
. . .to this in 2013.
And they all ate happily ever after. The end.
. . . except for the beer that happened at the Mexican restaurant on the way home.