This weekend David and I ventured to believe (or really I did) that we could pull off three wedding cakes for two weddings, nine tiers in all, two chocolate iced German chocolate cakes, and seven buttercream frosted cakes in flavors butter pecan, vanilla, chocolate, carrot, and strawberry!
We really felt blessed by several things along the way. First, a church that we no longer go to (but one I once worked for) allowed us to use their church kitchen space for free. Second, my industrial mixer broke halfway through the icing making process, but after seven or so hours it still wasn't going. So we prayed over the mixer (sounds corny, but we needed God to heal it through the laying on of hands :). David took it apart, looked around, got some goo on his pants, and then decided to put it back together. Then after a few times of starting it it magically worked the rest of the day!
The deliveries went pretty smoothly and I was proud of the weekends worth of work. God really help me not to stress out like I would have. Actually a friend of ours talked about the verse where the Israelites ask God to give them only what they need for the day (not too much so they would forget Him and not too little so that they would be angry with Him). Sounds weird to have a scripture motto for a cake making process, but it totally helped me!
Here is the first cake. Please ignore the fire extinguisher in the background. We set up the cake in the kitchen because the wedding and reception were all in the same place. So they did a turn around after the wedding-- everyone went outside and they transformed the sanctuary.
This next cake was of my friend Alyson Williams' wedding. She married Stephen Strickhausen (think about that monogram for a sec...and we'll come to that in a bit:) Her wedding was in downtown Franklin. Cute church and old historic home that is not a catering company. It was beautiful. This was the first wedding where I made a cake that I actually got to go to and hear peoples comments. I would try to be all stealthy and walk around the tables of people eating cake and watch their faces and try to hear their reactions :)
Funny side note: We had stored the cakes in the freezer the night before the weddings. Apparently the freezer was negative 100 degrees because after five hours the bottom two tiers were still frozen when they cut the cakes, well there was an outer perimeter of about two inches that they could cut. I was really embarrassed at first. The catering guy who was cutting the cake was like, "Oh don't worry about it, you're new at this.... you'll know for next time". HA! Little did he know this was my twelfth or so wedding cake + delivery! It turned out to not be that big of a deal. Except that they broke their lovely serving knife on the cake toward the end, oops :) But one of my friends I overheard saying, "Wow there is one chocolate cake that has a frozen strawberry center.. I've never seen that before!" Even though that wasn't the intended effect, I think the frozen thing turned out to not be too big of a deal after all.
Here are Aly and Stephen taking their first dance.
And here they are cutting the cake.
***WARNING*** ***CENSORED***So back to the monogram thing. Alyson and Stephen decided that it would be a funny joke to put their monogram on the grooms cake. They had been getting wedding gifts with their monogram (towels and mugs and such) with "SSA" and they just wanted to have one momento of the "real" monogram. Since their parent okayed it, I decided it would be alright to draw a lovely A** monogram for them, trying to make the middle "S" look significantly bigger and pronounced. Apparently someone took a picture of it and sent it to Jay Leno for his headlines bit!
