ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Where have I been for the last week and a half, you ask?  Well, what happened first is that we had to close the books for September at work, and then I immediately had to go into wedding cake overdrive and prepare the house for weddings guests to stay with us and worry about how much icing I needed to make and what if this happened and what if that happened, and bla bla bla bla bla.

The cake was finished Thursday night and served Friday night.  Before the wedding, it felt like I had emerged triumphant from a week long bear fight that ended in me walking away alive. After the wedding, it felt like not only had I defeated the bear soundly, but I also socially humiliated him, sexually harassed his bear wife, and sent him into bear bankruptcy.  So everything worked out in the end.  Yes, that well.

With all the labor-intensive aspects of this whole thing behind me, I can look back on the experience and feel relief, and if I’m liberal with my own personal standards and decide to trust the people who thought it was really good, a sense of satisfaction.  Still, I think I can safely consider this cake thing as one of the most hard-fought accomplishments of my adult life to date.  If I can decorate a cake that didn’t shame me and my family for a hundred generations, I can pass the CPA exam for godsake.  What the fuck am I waiting for?

And by the way.  Three people reported that it was “the best wedding cake I’ve ever had”, to which I did not correctly respond, “You have Duncan Hines to thank for that shit.”  Instead I took all the credit and thanked them for it like I was entirely responsible for how the cake tasted and everything.  I mean, I labored enough over this cake that I felt like by that point it was basically my birthright to accept those compliments.

So this is what happened with the whole thing.  Where I last left off, I had made the decision that since it was fairly short notice (six weeks, give or take), I would rely on mix for the actual cake because god knows I didn’t have the time or inclination to test cake recipes until I found the perfect red velvet cake.  Especially when the more pressing concern was learning to decorate for the first time ever.  Ever. So I practiced using the icing bag and decorating tip I wanted.  And I practiced icing.  And I got the bride and groom’s sign-off on the cake and icing combination my boss suggested to me (how incredibly lucky was I that she used to decorate cakes professionally?!).

And then a couple of weeks ago I realized I really needed to get my ass in gear and start baking the cakes and putting them in the freezer.  So little by little I baked all the pieces of the cake and wrapped them up and socked them away in the freezer.  Then this past weekend I realized that I really needed to get my ass in gear and start getting these things iced.  I knew it would take at least two separate coats of icing to get this red red cake covered with the white white icing.

Even though I didn’t expect it to be easy, I still wasn’t prepared for how readily and happily a red cake will taint white icing.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t been moaning so loudly with despair over all the pink streaks, I would have heard a tiny voice deep inside the cake shouting, “Fuck you if you think I’m hiding under this plain white icing.  Bitch.”  As it turned out, what it took to quiet that voice in the end was three separate applications of icing with ample time in the freezer between each coat.

So this week was the peak of the cake stress.  The plan was to go set up the cake at the reception hall on Thursday night so that it would be ready for the wedding on Friday night.  But before I could do this, I had to have each of the three tiers iced and ready to go, my decorating equipment packed, plenty of extra icing on hand in case of any mishap, and other things.  And since I was starting out with just a bunch of layers of cake that had to be turned into something resembling a wedding-cake-like structure, the magnitude of the commitment I had made began to fully dawn on me.

So Sunday I baked the last of the cakes and stuck them in the freezer.  For some reason, this felt like such a terrific accomplishment that on Monday night I did nothing.  NOTHING.  Then on Tuesday I assembled the middle tier and put a crumb coating all over it.  This is when I finally began to understand, in the panicky sense, what a challenge it was going to be to get the cake completely white.  On Wednesday the groom brought over the thick plywood cakestand I asked him to build for me.  I wrapped it in saran wrap and covered it with aluminum foil.  Shiny side up.

It turned out to be rather difficult to get the 12 inch layers lined up because of their weight, but once I had them evenly settled, the bottom tier was actually quite easy to work with.  Its bulk kept it from moving around or being shoved over by the force of my icing spatula, which meant I didn’t have to touch it or mess with it in any way to keep it from sliding around.  The toughest one, to my surprise, was the 6 inch tier.  It simply wasn’t heavy enough to stay in one place while I worked on it.  I wound up having to put a strip of non-slide drawer liner under it to hold it there.

So by the end of Wednesday night I had everything at least crumb-coated and I felt pretty good about Thursday.  I knew Thursday night was going to be challenging, but I was all set.  I went home from work, made two more batches of icing, transferred it to an airtight container, packed up all my decorating equipment and my mixer, got the cakes ready to go, and put the support columns into the two bottom layers.  The groom was supposed to call me to go over there around eight or nine, so my husband and I ran out to pick up some dinner and came back to the house to wait.  He started flipping through the channels and found some Jodie Foster marathon thing, so we started watching Silence of the Lambs even though I knew we wouldn’t get to finish it since it was already like 7:30.

By the time Hannibal had made his dramatic escape, I had begun to get kind of concerned about the lack of phone call from anybody, so I texted the groom to see if they were almost ready to go.  After the movie, I called to see what was going on.  I could almost feel the groom cringing over the phone when he answered, but I knew that whatever he was about to tell me probably was not really his fault.

Still, it was hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice when he apologetically explained that the other things they had to get done that evening had gotten out of hand and that they weren’t ready to get over there at all.  At this point I had three options left.  1) Go to the reception hall anyway and just plan on a very late night.  2) Get permission to leave work early the next day and go to the reception hall to finish the cake there.  3) Decorate and assemble the cake at home and let them come pick it up the next day while I was at work.

I hated all these options, so I thought for a moment and elected to freak out instead of making a decision immediately.  ”I’ll call you back,” I told the groom.

Here was the dilemma.  It was already almost 10:00, so I didn’t know if I would be able to stand to go all the way downtown to assemble a cake and get everything done and still function at work tomorrow.  And I didn’t want to wait until the next day, since that would leave me absolutely no time if something went terribly wrong.  But to assemble the cake at my house and have to worry about it possibly falling apart during transport?  It felt like my best option at that point, but I thought that might be very, very irresponsible of me.  As the cake decorator, I should know better.

In the end, my husband decided the matter by measuring each tier and estimating the final height.  ”It is barely any taller than it is wide,” he announced.  ”So you’ll decorate it here and let them pick it up.  And if they fuck it up, that’s their problem.”  I didn’t completely agree, but I didn’t see what else I could do at this point without it interfering with work.  So I called the groom and made sure that was still OK.

So I went in the kitchen and got the bottom layer out and started touching up the icing.  I felt very sullen about everything because visions of crushed cake and car wrecks and toppling layers were going through my head the entire time I worked.  It was a little tough getting the second tier lined up, but we managed.  It took quite a while to get things even kind of smoothed, and as I went on I began to get more and more pissed off at what I felt was a profound ineptitude on my part.  I couldn’t get all the damn pink spots out of the icing, and I also couldn’t get the thing perfectly smooth to save my freaking life.  I felt so grim I probably could have starred in a film adaptation of a John Steinbeck novel.

I got the cake itself as smooth and finished as I could, then began sulkily stuffing icing into the decorating bag I’d prepared earlier that night.  My plan was to decorate all the straight edges of the cake with simple pearls of icing to cover the raw edging.  And I’d practiced doing this on paper and had no trouble with it, so I expected the whole thing to go rather smoothly.  But what I didn’t bank on was how different this process would be on an actual cake.  Every time I pulled the decorating bag away, it left a little peak.

Not that I really noticed this right away.  When I finished the first row and turned the cake, I saw all the beads in profile and realized to my horror that they looked exactly like tiny, pure white naked breasts.  ”Shit,” I muttered.  Then I decided I was too tired to give a fuck anymore, so I might as well just keep going.  The next morning when I told my boss about this, she explained that this is a common problem when piping beads, and the best way to fix it, for future reference, is to wait a little for the icing to set up, then take a wet paper towel and smooth the little peak down to make a round shape.  So.  You learn something new every day.

When I finished the cake, we yanked all the shelves out of the fridge and put the whole thing on the very bottom shelf and left it there to sit overnight.  I went to bed in a very pessimistic mood, feeling that not only was the cake unforgivably substandard, there was a decent chance it would be destroyed somehow when people had to move it the next day.  I even had a dream that I woke up in the morning and read a news article saying that Kansas City’s tap water was tainted and unsafe for human or animal consumption.  ”BUT I USED TAP WATER IN THE CAKE!” I wailed in despair.

In the end it all worked out all right.  I went to work and spent all day worrying about the cake in the back of my mind and then the groom’s family picked up the cake around 3:00 and took it to the reception hall.  The groom personally phoned a half hour later to let me know that the cake had made it there safely and that I could relax.  The cake wasn’t ugly and some of the guests were actually surprised to hear it wasn’t made by a professional, and although I am guessing they were not cake decorating connoisseurs, I still appreciated the sentiment.

So I basically went from “I’m so stupid, why did I agree to do this and I probably ruined this with my extremely amateur cake” to feeling like, “Well huh, I did this once and with some more practice, damn sure I can do it again!”

It’s a huge relief to have this massive project over with and I feel great that I was so fortunate to have it turn out as well as it did.  The bride and groom were happy with the cake, the guests liked the way it tasted, and it didn’t collapse or fall apart during transport.  Really, considering I had never decorated before or done anything on a remotely similar scale or for a large important event like this, I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.  I’m so glad things worked out and that they were pleased and their wedding was nice.

And.  Good to know that I can pick a new project to obsess over now.  One with less pressure attached to it.