The Making of a Cake

Day one:  2:00 pm start time.

(~ 85 degrees and humid)

Materials (actually 3 boxes more than this, plus three dozen eggs and three lbs of butter)

The first layer of the day: disaster!  Panic ensues, as I had no backup plan in the case of an epic fail.

A closeup of the extent of the horror... I seriously thought about still using the layer, then realized that there was no way it would hold up the weight of the upper tier..

First successful layer, after leveling (at which point, my panic began to die down; I cooled subsequent layers far more thoroughly, and pounded the heck out of my pans before tipping them out):

Truth-in-blogging disclosure: here is what my kitchen really looked like (look for the avocado on the table - that was LW's dinner, after my cake making assistant had left for a meeting, and my husband was off to the bachelor party):

My dinner on the run:

And my other kitchen surface (banana = LW's other dinner item; note that our kitchen is quite small for this sort of project)

Here's where I finally felt like it was going to come together.  Three layers completed and leveled; a fourth was cooling on the stove, and layers five and six were in the oven (sushi and cake: that's all I ate all day):

Baking nicely...

I took a midway point break to clean up; this was around 9:30 pm, after putting LW to bed:

(This is what my kitchen more usually looks like, minus the remaining cake making tools)

A shot of the floor before I cleaned it up:

What you can't see in the above picture is the *crumbs*...

The mess re-emerged when I switched to stacking, filling, and inserting the supporting columns.

Finally, all three tiers were leveled, filled, supporting columns were in, and ready for stage two the next day.  Day one end time (with cleanup): 11:30 pm.

Day two:  9 am start time

(~75, cool, windy, comfortable and thankfully not humid)

Crumb coating the layers (a light layer of icing to "seal" the crumbs onto the cake, then back in the fridge to crust before the thicker, "real" layer of frosting went on):

All tiers crumb coated (note: my fridge also is not really big enough to accommodate this type of project, along with our regular foodstuff):

Frosted the cake (neglected to take a picture at this point - it became clear that time was going to be of the essence), and then practiced a pattern for the sugar pearl border:

My good friend and cake-making assistant, moral support, and general girl-Friday - Beth - putting sugar pearls on the cake (I did most of the rows, but towards the end we put the pedal to the medal and started working in double-time - it took about four hours of individually placing the sugar pearls with tweezers to do all the borders):

 

The completed cake, minus the ribbon and topper: this was our pre-transportation shot.  We popped it back in the fridge for about 15 minutes while I got dressed for the rehearsal (to which we were about 45 minutes late :P), then loaded it in the car and took off (the top was not actually crooked - just the angle was a little weird).

At the rehearsal, we applied the ribbon, which immediately soaked up grease despite the completely crusted icing.  However, this is basically what the cake would look like the next day (Beth modeling the cake topper, just for picture taking purposes:

Day two end time ~ 5:15 pm for frosting/bordering, plus an additional 15 minutes or so to apply the ribbon, an unsuccessful late evening trip to the craft store for replacement ribbon (they were all out of that particular color and texture), followed by late-night Googling for ribbon solutions (real end time: 11:30 pm).

Day three: immediately after the wedding Mass, we quickly took the ribbon off the cake, applied shortening to the backside of the ribbon to make it *evenly* grease saturated (which darkened it slightly but was otherwise unnoticeable: thanks Google!), and reapplied.  Loaded the cake into the car again, after which Beth and another friend took it off to the reception.  There they added an inspired touch of rose petals scattered around the base, and officially put on the flower topper.

I didn't make it to the reception until about an hour later, due to needing to pick my daughter up on the other side of town, etc, and thus didn't get a picture of the finished product.  However, I'll post it as soon as I get one from one of the various other people at the event.

Anyway, I received many compliments, everyone seemed to like the taste as well, and no-one died after eating it, so I call the whole affair a success. Oh yes, and my brother-in-law and new sister-in-law were very happy - with the cake, but much more with the celebration of their marriage, which was, after all, the important thing about the day :)