My First Wedding Cake!

It's a day that will strike fear and immense excitement into the heart of any home baker: the first wedding cake order. Luckily for me, this one was relatively simple. The roses were hand made from gum paste. Not the best I've seen, but I thought they turned out pretty well considering it was my first attempt at sugar flowers. The cake was a basic white wedding cake with swiss buttercream filling and crumbcoat and marshmallow fondant. On the night before it was due, my friend Shasta came over to help in the kitchen - she's definitely the best sous chef a girl could ask for! Everything went great and by 11:30 that night I was ready to put fondant on the tiers. And that's when the trouble started. For some reason it just didn't want to work out for me. After mixing, kneading, and rolling it out (not once but twice) just to have it stick to my work surface and tear to shreds when I tried to put it on the cake, we decided to call it a night. She went home around 1:30 AM and I went to bed by 2. The next morning I was up by 6 to make a quick trip to the store and then get back home to get it finished. By 10 I had made two fresh batches of fondant and had covered and stacked all three tiers. i took a break to take the kids to my mom's house and then made it home and had the cake totally finished and ready for pick up by 2:00 PM. I'd say in the week before the cake was due I probably spent 30 hours on it. That's no small task when I work 40 hours a week at a full time 'day job.' I think the lesson that I learned from this cake is that I need a fondant sheeter. Oh - and a commercial kitchen would be nice too...maybe one of these days. Oh - and the other lesson I learned was a delicious accident, and here's the recipe for what Shasta named a PattyCakes Peach Cooler: 1 bottle dry white wine, about 1/2 cup peach schnapps, 1/2 to 1 cup simple syrup - to taste. This drink proves that necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention since the only cold beverage I had in my house that night was a bottle of white wine I'd been saving for a chicken recipe (which I still have yet to make!)

The coolest thing about this cake? It was for a nearly 80 year old couple who were married on New Year's Day. I feel really honored to have been a part of their day, and I'm really hoping that it's the first of many wedding cakes that I'll have the honor of making.