Posts Tagged ‘wedding cake’
Cyndie’s Story
Two weeks ago, I wrote about us attending a Moth story slam in advance of Cyndie’s plan to submit her name for an opportunity to tell her wedding cake story at the Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul. For those of you who weren’t able to hear her tell it in person last night, she has allowed me to post a written version for you.
Cyndie’s name was selected tenth –the last slot, out of twenty that had signed up for the chance.
Imagine Cyndie walking up on stage, standing under the lights in front of a microphone, and addressing a packed house. She is allowed only 5 minutes…
When my niece got engaged, she asked her mother to sew her wedding dress, and her grandma to knit a shawl and asked if I would bake a simple wedding cake. Thrilled, I said yes immediately… even though I’d never made a wedding cake before. Friends expressed concern over the huge responsibility I’d taken on given my lack of experience with wedding cakes. But I love to bake and was inspired by my niece’s invitation. I embraced this cake-baking opportunity with equal measures of optimism and naiveté.
That year, I baked dozens of practice cakes to test out on family and friends. I was blamed for inches added to waistlines and my reputation for baking in excess soared to new heights. It took me about 40 hours to mold sugar paste into candied pearls and colorful, edible flowers. With all that practice, my confidence grew and so did the cake. What started as a simple wedding cake had become a five-tier, white chocolate, lemon-raspberry layered masterpiece, stuffed with extra love.
Days before the wedding, my friend asked me how I planned to transport the cakes to the venue. I’d been so focused on baking, I hadn’t given it a thought. I quickly discovered that my mustang convertible with bucket seats is NOT the car for the job. My friend bails me out by loaning me her practical 4-door sedan as long as I drive and relieve her of any responsibility for the safe delivery of the cakes.
On the big day, I load up the car with boxes of cakes, buckets of extra frosting, edible decorations, and fresh flowers. I’m so nervous about transporting the cakes that I drive like a Sunday driver, on a Saturday! Thankfully, all the cakes arrive intact.
I carry the boxes of cakes like they are newborn babies and begin to carefully assemble the tiers of cake with the stands and pillars. I’m so meticulous about frosting and decorating each level to perfection that it takes me 2.5 hours just to finish the first four tiers. But I’m happy- already the cake is nearly 3 feet high and it looks as stunning as I’d hoped it would be.
As I reach to place the final tier, I hear a loud snap and then another one, as the pillars give way under the weight of the cake, and, in horror, I watch the cake topple over and crash onto the floor. A busboy says, “You are so [effed]” as he and the wait staff all run for cover in the kitchen. I can barely breathe but I manage to warn my friend, “DO. NOT. SAY. A THING.” She doesn’t and takes cover behind the bar.
I can’t believe I have just ruined my niece’s wedding day. This is exactly what my friends had warned me about. I can hear all the “I told you so’s” and the “what were you thinking’s” and see the evidence of not being enough piled high on top of the inglorious mess. I want to scream but I can’t because the only thing separating the wedding chapel from the reception hall is a thin, moveable partition.
Then the organist begins to play, “Here Comes the Bride.” I AM SO [EFFed]! My friend appears next to me with a shot of whiskey she’d stolen from the bar. I don’t drink whiskey, but on this day, I did. She asked, “What are you going to do?”
I have two choices- I can succumb to the despair of this epic fail or I have to rise up and fight with all the love in my heart to make the simple cake my niece had asked for. The fight is on. Baking in excess is now my saving grace. I have enough backup cakes. The groom’s cake is still intact and I can use fresh flowers to decorate so I kick my inner critic to the curb and ask for help.
The busboy –yeah, that one!– comes to my aid and scoops up the four-tier disaster on the floor, a waiter brings a fresh tablecloth and my friend fearlessly rips open the boxes and hands me back-up cakes as fast as I can frost & decorate them. I have to finish Wedding Cake 2.0 by the time the ceremony ends in less than 20 minutes.
I finish the second cake just in time to see the mother-of-the-bride walk into the reception hall, look at the cake, and, burst into tears. She says, “I didn’t cry at all during the ceremony but when I saw the cake… It’s so beautiful.” And it really was!
Sometimes, even I have a hard time believing the miracle that happened that day. But the radiant look on my niece’s face when she thanked me for baking her wedding cake helps me remember that anything is possible when I let love lead the way.
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Out of the ten storytellers, Cyndie’s performance earned a second place score from the judges, losing out by half a point to a tale that included both a tornado and nudity. The evening was a smashing (pun intended) success and made all the sweeter by the support of family and friends who showed up to cheer her on.
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New Adventure
I was at a wedding yesterday. The weather provided a nice September backdrop for an outdoor wedding. Everything was beautiful. If you can imagine this, Cyndie made the wedding cake. I have already written a story about her first experience as wedding cake provider. I didn’t think she would ever try again. But that is just like Cyndie, to dive right back in again.
Her style is so different from mine that I tend to get out of the way and let her do her magic. I just can’t help, because I end up getting in her way and cramp her style. The result is the exact opposite of what I mean to offer. So I back off. It feels kind of dysfunctional, but I think it is part of our codependency. It becomes a dash of her mania and my depression, and they clash. A wonderful opportunity to discover a solution to a next level of learning about ourselves as a result of having a relationship.
I don’t know how soon that lesson will be revealed, because there is a very great probability that Cyndie will be moving to Boston for a while. She is mulling a job offer that just appeared, unexpected. At first, this may seem contradictory to our plan to move to a horse farm. Maybe, maybe not. Cyndie is thinking that this might be an opportunity to save up some extra money toward financing our jump to the paradise we are dreaming of. It might add a year or two to the process, but she negotiated the time off to continue the horse training that she already has scheduled.
Her move to another city will be a different test for our relationship. I enjoy my time alone when she is traveling, but this takes it to another level. However, we are both feeling that now is a very good time for us to give this a try.
We are on the verge of another new adventure. It’s not one I expected, but that’s part of what makes it an adventure. Maybe it’ll be as easy as baking a cake.
The Wedding Cake Story
I know this girl that professes to dwell in possibilities. Someone in my family asked her to bake a wedding cake. She said, “Yes.” She said yes, even though she had never, ever baked a wedding cake before in her life. She had never talked to anyone who had baked a wedding cake, decorated a wedding cake, or transported a wedding cake. It’s possible that simply saying yes would lead to more stress than she anticipated dwelling in.
It doesn’t really matter that she could have probably purchased a trouble-free wedding cake from a bakery for the amount of money that she spent on ingredients and accessories for this project. Nor does it add much to the point of this story to reveal the number of ‘test’ cakes baked in practice for the final event, or what one does with so many practice cakes once they have been prepared.
This tale begins with a side-story that helps establish a baseline of stress that provides important perspective. Try to imagine that this girl is a career girl. A ‘meetings long into the night’ type of career girl. Let’s just say that this girl works in a capacity of very high responsibility for a public institution that was recently cited for spending beyond their means and placed in very public reprimand by the laws of the state. While managing that crisis for the, pardon my editorial opinion, ‘buffoon’ who is ultimately responsible, she is also actively pursuing alternative top-level employment options.
On the very Friday that she took leave from work to stay home and bake, she got up early to compose a letter to go with her curriculum vitae formatted late the night before, in order to have it finished with little time to spare for a courier to deliver by the deadline for a job she has her sights on. After that, she has nothing to fret over except making her first-ever attempt at a successful wedding cake for a group of about 200 guests of her husband’s niece’s wedding.
Nothing to fret over, that is, until her daughter gets home from college that afternoon with a fever and flu-like symptoms seeking a sick-bed to crash in and hoping for some tender loving care. And her husband gets home from work suffering with prednisone withdrawal symptoms, useless to the world, and collapses in that same bed for the night. So the girl does the best she can with what she’s got and holds together long enough to finish what was planned for the day and make her way to a bed in the spare room for a night’s sleep before the big wedding day.
The next part of this tale requires another side-story. It probably deserves it’s own telling, and it may seem hard to comprehend, but the point here is how it really throws this cake adventure over the top. On Thursday, the girl’s brother sends out a mass-email announcing he is taking his wife out of the country for over a week to celebrate her birthday and leaving their three young children home with his father-in-law. But grandpa is not from this country and his grasp of the English language, based on listening to his efforts, is pretty much represented in single-syllable, one-word sentences. This presents no real problem for the kids, because they speak his native language. However, for the bulk of care-givers generously included in the mailing as enlistees to provide support, it is an additional challenge.
Shortly after midnight, the phone in the girl’s house is ringing. Her number-one son trudges upstairs with the phone to find she is not in her bed, but soon finds her in the next room. Who could be calling at this hour of the night? It is her 7-year-old nephew to report he is throwing up, over and over, and wants more support than Grandpa can provide. The girl is up in a flash and dashing out the door to head over and help nurse what sounds like the saddest of situations. It lasts all night. Vomiting every 45 minutes or so, and then, diarrhea, too. When he finally seems to be able to sleep at around 6 a.m. she finds that his little brother is now awake and wanting attention for the morning. She goes the whole night with little-to-no sleep.
Eventually, necessity drives her back to her own home where she must frost and decorate cake. She tries to shower off all memory and any trace of the sickness from the wee hours just prior and takes on the most important task before her. By the allotted time she is packed and ready to go: cakes, boxes, flowers, decorations, display components, frosting, and tools. The cakes travel just fine. The setup goes well and it is looking beautiful. And then she hears a “snap”.
While the wedding party poses for the last few pictures and the guests are beginning to arrive, the girl turns to see the tiers of wedding cake tipping and crashing before her eyes. Was she dwelling in this possibility? Let’s just say that she isn’t so naive as to have not prepared for the need of ‘backup’ cakes. But what she probably didn’t plan on was the accumulative buildup of these unrelated stresses all precipitating this not so unlikely situation that she now found herself in. I guess that is the point of this whole story. It is at this point that the reader is supposed to try to imagine what it must have felt like to be the girl at that moment the upper layers of cake smashed to pieces on the table and floor.
It’s quite a spectacle. Who knows what life lessons the girl is destined to learn as a result of all this? We could dwell in the possibilities.
The girl reported that the catering staff that had been busy setting tables and preparing the room seemed to suddenly have a pressing need to be someplace else, but not before one paused to exclaim, “You are so fucked,” before leaving the room. Even the girl’s friend, who was along for support that only true close friends can provide, recognized this moment as beyond category and sought extra-ordinary response. She stole behind the bar and poured a shot of whiskey, offering it to the girl, who, without hesitating, despite never having been a whiskey drinker, downed it for whatever possible assistance it might provide.
By the time the wedding ceremony was complete, the backup cakes were in place and the display modified on the fly to no longer involve plastic towering parts. The uninformed were none-the-wiser. Mother-of-the-bride, who reported making it through the ceremony without crying, suddenly lost her breath and was overcome with teary emotion when she first saw the cake. In the still somewhat shocked state of the sudden aftermath, this is one of the possibilities the girl is allowing herself to dwell in: how moved and amazed the mother of the bride was to see, what to her was, the most beautiful wedding cake ever prepared.
Wedding Cake, The Preface
The following is a little something I composed for my niece and her fiancé shortly before their wedding day…
For Liz and Nick, March 2006.
At first it started as just subtle cake baking smells. There wasn’t really anything out of the ordinary to see in the normal goings on in our kitchen. The smell from the oven was just really enjoyable. Wait–no, that’s not quite accurate. In reality, it started back before the first of the year. We were invited to a New Year’s Eve dinner party and instructed to contribute a dessert.
Cyndie not only baked up one, she did several. The seven couples were presented with a dessert plate loaded with more choices than the main meal. She said she was ‘testing’ some ideas for a wedding cake. Whether they could eat it all or not was not the point. They needed to provide honest feedback as to which they would want for a wedding cake. That was the beginning of the great cake-baking training regimen of 2006.
It’s a miracle there haven’t been any hyperglycemic emergencies in the household since. Well, we have had some help. We sent a cake to Cyndie’s workplace. I took a cake to my workplace. That saved me big time. By late afternoon that day, I was ready to give in and snitch a piece to ward off the day’s doldrums, but by the time I got there, there was no cake left! Thank goodness.
I have sampled frostings till I can’t discern a difference. I have used the bathroom sink when I couldn’t find one in the kitchen under all the baking pans, bowls, measuring cups, spoons and display trays.
Throughout it all, one fact stands out the most. There is this magical abundance of joy and love floating about our home. It is permeating the kitchen. I think even the pizzas coming out of the oven have tasted sweeter.
It seems brighter here, too. When Cyndie is working, there seems to be this angelic glow around her. For all the projects she buries herself in, I cannot recall one that has made her appear nearly as satisfied.
For as long as I have known her, I have been trying to convince Cyndie that you cannot have your cake and eat it, too. That is going to have to change now. For the last few months of my life I’ve been able to do just that!
Relative Something 