My parents will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this Saturday. Various family events will be going on during the weekend. On Sunday afternoon there will be an open reception at their church for friends and acquaintances.
I decided, as I am a baker, that my gift would be doing the cakes for the reception. A three-tiered wedding style cake and three big sheet cakes to supplement it. Now, I have decorated cakes before but never a wedding cake. My boss said I could do the cakes in my work area at the cafe, which is way cool of him. I took this week off, to be rested, and today I started the work. I baked all the layers, put them on their plates or boards, and iced them with a very thin coat of frosting to nail down the crumbs. Tomorrow I will give them their main coat of frosting, and on Friday and Saturday do the decorations.
What is puzzling me is how smoothly the work today went. I had all the ingredients I needed, didn’t drop or break anything, all the cake batter raised nicely, etc. So I must be missing something because it can’t be this good ALL the way, can it? I HAVE tried to plan as best I know how, and have all my equipment together. I’ve read manuals and decided on the colors. Things feel good.
There’s an ancient craftman’s custom of leaving a flaw in every piece of work. This is the worker’s way of reminding himself that only God is perfect, and the craftman is rightly humbled by that thought. Sometimes I bring that up when somebody finds a mestake in my work.
I envy you, Baker – with all the cakes I’ve done in my life, never once have I had one that’s come out as “perfectly” as I imagined it. I attribute it to my being hyper-prepared.
AskNott , that’s one I’m going to have to remember!!! Scout1222 , if you had been willing to come to Topeka you could have had the cake tops I had to level off of the round layers. My coworkers got there first though. The icing went on well today. I am glad I did the crumb locking layer yesterday, only on one small part of a chocolate cake did I get any crumbs at all, and they were wasy to remove. Tomorrow the decorating starts!
Well, in spite of all my dithering the cake seemed okay, and there were no disasters in transporting it or anything. People seemed to like it and I got a lot of compliments.
But I want to hijack my own thread and say how great it is that I have parents that have lived to celebrate 50 years of marriage, are still in decent health, and love each other very much. There were tons of people at the reception in the church hall, friends from all over, family, etc. And at the family dinner last night, and the gathering at my folks house after the reception, I got to see once again a family that loves each other and never seems to have fights(that I know about anyway). Sometimes when I am feeling sorry for myself I am going to have to call up these memories and remind myself how lucky I really am. Thanks be to God that I have had such a family to support me and each other when needed.
Congrats on hearing that everything turned out fine with the cakes.
I’ve only done one real wedding cake and it was a flaming disaster because the manager at the restaurant forgot to mention some really important details (like the reception site had NO refrigeration and was being held outdoors–on a very hot day in the middle of July). Needless to say, it melted.
I’ve done a few other cakes, but those were practice cakes while I was in culinary school.
Could you please explain what a “crumb locking layer” is and what it looks like so I can better appreciate the work that goes into baking (not that I don’t already, but I wanna better prreciate it). Please remember you are speaking to someone who has zilch-o culinary skills - my “silver-dollar panckaes” end up as a pile of “small change”.
JavaMaven1 - …at least it wasn’t left out in the rain…
The “crumb locking layer” is frosting. When you have the fresh baked cake sitting on whatever it will be served from(the cake plates for the round layers or the cardboards for the sheet cakes) you will realize that the outside is(please don’t hurt me) crummy. It can be difficult to keep them out of the frosting, and with wedding cakes you want as perfect a look as possible. So you take some frosting and smear it very very thinly over the top and sides of your cake layers. You will see the cake through the frosting. The layers are then refrigerated for several hours until the icing is set and the cake is firmed up. This locks the crumbs down. You then do the main frosting layer, which should go on more easily and smoothly, without crumbs getting into it.
