ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So last weekend I went over to visit with our friends who are getting married in October, and in addition to taking a cake I baked that day, I brought a bunch of cake books with me for them to look at, since no decisions had yet been made and I wanted to be able to get a practice run in before doing the final thing.  That’s because the idea of ruining their wedding cake terrifies me.  We discussed a few options and she sort of decided that a tiered square cake would be cool, with the tiers set diagonally on each other and made to look like presents. Today I finally got a chance to think about how I might want to approach this, because I was struck with the fact that there are only a few weeks until the wedding, and I am not exactly what I would call experienced with these things.  Sure, I made  a huge array of desserts for my own wedding, but that was much less stressful: it was my own wedding, and also, if any one dish hadn’t turned out all that well, it wouldn’t really have been that big a deal.

Today my crafty friend needed to go to Joann’s and I jumped at this because I really wanted to buy cake pans.  Their wedding is going to have around 50 guests, and it’s an evening affair like ours was.  Also, there is going to be other food there, so I think I’m going to go with a 10 inch single layer for the bottom “present”, an 8 inch double layer for the second present, and a 6 inch either double or triple layer for the top tier.  I’m debating how I want to do this - round cakes and standard layer sizes and shapes have little decorative plastic discs that you can use to assemble them.  However, I couldn’t find square ones and I don’t know if it’s really worth it to look, since I was also considering slightly shaving down one of the “presents” a little for a slightly different shape.

I’m thinking what I will probably wind up doing is cutting stiff cardboard just smaller than the size of each tier and covering it in aluminum foil.  And I’m thinking that a few dowel rods inserted into the bottom layer will support the cardboard for the second tier.  Then I can pick some tall dowel rods to support the third tier.  I have a decently good picture of this in my head, even though it might sound weird in words.   Luckily for me, the author of my new favorite blog recently did a wedding cake and I think I will probably end up relying heavily on her site for information about assembly, structural support, and oh, making sure the cake doesn’t taste like shit.

All the comments on her first post about the wedding cake suggest that you are supposed to assemble the thing on site.  This idea freaks me out a little, since I’m not sure what the site facilities will be like - I mean, will that even be possible?  Will I be able to do the decorations under that kind of pressure?  Or will this cake be small enough that it can be transported very carefully across town?  Seriously, that is the thing that concerns me the most.

I think I’ll bake and freeze and do as much of this ahead as I can.  I need to get with the bride and figure out how she wants it to be decorated.  Like, can we use real ribbon for a bow on top, or does the whole thing need to be 100% edible, decorations and all?  We discussed last weekend how annoying it is when somebody serves a cake with all kinds of crap on it that isn’t even edible.  But a bow on top might be okay.  I’ve been thinking about what would be a good way to make each “present”.  I might do an awkward effort to make some marshmallow fondant that I can make into decorations, like ribbon or something.  We’ll see what happens.

And as for the rest, I looked into signing up for the Wilton cake decorating classes at Michael’s, but they are every Sunday this month and really, that wouldn’t work even if I were able to get in, since we’re supposed to go visit his dad next weekend.  So today I bought some of that cheap, toxic canned icing to practice with, since I didn’t really want to go to the time and expense of making a bunch of icing that was just going to get wasted, basically.  Also, I didn’t want to make something that tasted so good that it’d tempt me to sample a bunch of it. Although, I felt a little ashamed going through the checkout line.

I bought the “Always Save” brand, which turned out to be so disgusting that I needn’t have worried anyway.  Seriously, this stuff doesn’t even really melt under hot water.  It was actually kind of difficult to clean up.  Can it get any worse?  Luckily, it was the perfect texture and consistency to play around with.  Piping icing turned out to be much less difficult than I expected.  I think with some practice and instruction, even if that instruction comes from a library book with pictures, I will totally be able to do some simple decoration on this cake.

Oh, and by the way, I really do know how to spell “apartheid”, but I was concentrating so hard on forming the letters that I forgot to add the H.