Jim & Catherine's Wedding Cake
Last week’s big cooking emphasis was a wedding cake. Not just any wedding cake, but MY wedding cake. By Monday I was 98% sure I wanted a heart shaped cake. I have the pans for doing a small tiered heart cake. What could be more romantic than a heart cake? Still hadn’t decided on the flavor for the cake, but at least I knew the shape.
Chocolate? No, even chocolate lover I am, I’m getting tired of chocolate cakes. Then I started debating about trying a new recipe. Hey it was my wedding! I figured I could experiment with the cake if I wanted. Have been reading on http://www.cakecentral.com about orange cakes. The most popular icing with the orange cake has been vanilla to give the cake a creamsicle effect. The more I read about it the better it sounded.
By Wednesday, I had decided for sure I wanted the orange cake. Go hunting around in http://www.cakecentral.com for the recipe. You know how it is. Having made the decision, I can’t locate the recipe I had seen on there. Tried searching but all I was coming up with was a doctored cake mix recipe. I’m not totally against cake mixes, but to me, they’re emergency cake stuff. Certainly NOT what I wanted for my wedding cake. I much prefer scratch cakes.
Spent a great deal of time Wednesday looking for the recipe & could not find it. Thursday morning I get up & know I’m running out of time to be able to do the cake I want unless I come up with the recipe immediately. I don’t have time to search. I’m supposed to go pick up my flowers that Sue Bee bought wholesale for me. I post a plea on http://www.cakecentral.com for a scratch recipe for an orange cake. When I get back home, I check the computer & have several suggestions for doctoring a yellow cake to make it an orange cake. I also have a kind soul that sends me an excellent orange cake recipe with a few notes on things she does when she makes the cake.
Why is it that when it’s most important for the cake to easily bake & come out of the pan, it doesn’t? I have a couple of ziplock baggies full of orange cake crumbs that will soon be cake balls or trifle because of that. The cakes were finally on the racks cooling off. Orange cake. Oh but it smelled so good. You could smell it all through the house. Yum.. Was guilty of nibbling on a broken layer of the cake & it tasted really good. Ahhh wedding cake. Hopefully it’ll be as sweet as our relationship. But if not, it’s ok. It’s cake. It can’t be all bad.
I finally get the 6 layers of cake baked. I made the vanilla frosting & put the crumb coat on it. With any luck, it’ll make everybody think of a creamsicle. While working on that, I also baked 2 6” round layers for a sales presentation I was pitching that evening. This cake was being used to sell an open house & hopefully recitals at a studio that gives music lessons of all kinds. Didn’t have much time to decorate it with everything going on, but I put a large music note & several small music notes on it. Finished it just shortly before I needed to leave the house.
I was pushed for time on the 6” round cake, but it didn’t present many difficulties getting the icing smooth. This pleased me. I felt like I’m finally getting some speed on smoothing the icing on a cake. That delusion lasted until I tried to ice & smooth my wedding cake. I swear I could hear that cake laughing at me. The more I tried to smooth it out, the rougher it got. Determined to have it perfectly smooth, I go to Porter Paint Friday to buy a couple of high density foam rollers to do the cake. This was MY cake; I wanted it to be perfect.
Then reality struck. No matter what I did this sucker wouldn’t smooth out. The tip of the heart is the worst! Determined to beat this cake into submission I stayed up until 3:30AM in the morning working on it. Is that crazy or what?! When I got up in the morning, I slipped on another thin layer determined to try again. I had slept; it would go better. Right? Wrong! I finally conceded the cake had beaten me & piped some shell borders on it. Then I quickly get started setting up the food tables.
When Shannon got there, she brought me beautiful deep red buttercream roses to finish decorating the cake. We’re standing in the kitchen working companionably on two projects. I’m finishing the cake & she’s mixing punch. So picture this: she’s scooping sherbet into the punch bowl. I have one rose on the cake and one on the tool for moving roses. She’s telling me about a conversation a neighbor’s child just recently had with her children describing graphically for Shannons’s children the details of how an abortion is performed. This was a young child! I’m horrified & absolutely shocked at the particular detail Shannon is telling me about when in reaction I jerk to look at Shannon instead of what I’m doing. One red rose is now on the floor upside down.
I stared at that rose horrified. Shannon laughed her head off at me & reassured me there were plenty of roses so the loss of that one woudn’t matter. Finally the cake was finished. It wasn’t horrible, but I would have been happier if I had won instead of the cake. At least on the tip of the hearts.
Tags: buttercream icing, buttercream roses, cake, cooking, heart cake, heart shaped cake, my wedding, my wedding cake, orange cake, scratch cake, vanilla frosting, vanilla icing, wedding cake