Cake

Since Adam let the cat out of the bag on ALL that is going on with us... I thought I would share about the wedding cake first. Because honestly, that might have been the most stressful of the news. The cake, not the pregnancy kept me up in the middle of the night.

Since this was my first wedding cake, I thought, why not go big? There were 500 guests, yes Five.Hundred.Guests at the wedding. In case you are unsure how that translates to cake... it means A LOT OF CAKE. The couple was highly, possibly morally, opposed to serving sheet cakes purchased from anywhere. They wanted every one of the 500 people to have the same shot at the wedding cake. So, I made more cake than I thought was necessary. The actual wedding cake was four tiers, each tier consisting of 3 layers. That is 12 cakes. Then, I made 3 sheet cakes, each with 2 layers. That is 6 cakes. Add them together, throw in the extra cake I had to make when I destroyed the first one and you get 19 cakes that I baked in 4 days. It was HOT in my kitchen. And my stand mixer was very tired.

The couple decided to go with all one kind of cake. Simpler for me. Vanilla buttermilk cake with strawberry lemon curd filling and buttercream frosting. It really was yummy and the filling was a beautiful pink color. Tasted like pink lemonade. How festive.

So, here is how it went down.
Day 1- juice a million lemons by hand for the lemon curd because store bought lemon juice is yuck

Day 2- bake 4 layers of 16" round cake... because this is what the first layer looked like when I tried to transfer it too soon. I knew it was too soon but I was impatient. I took a deep breath, snapped a picture, threw it away and then baked another layer.

Day 3- bake 3 layers of 12" round cake
Day 4-5 move (more on this later)
Day 6- bake 3 layers each of 8" and 4" round cakes
Day 7-8- unpack kitchen in our new home with my life-saving mother
Day 9- bake 6 layers of sheet cake
Day 10- make vat of strawberry lemon curd involving separating 4 dozen eggs
Day 11- make even bigger vat of buttercream frosting involving approximately 15 pounds of butter
Day 12- set up shop in church kitchen to layer cake, filling, cake, filling, cake, frosting and repeat for 7 separate cakes
Day 13- WEDDING DAY! assemble cake complete with plastic dowels and "please don't let this thing collapse on itself" prayers, add ribbon and piping, wait for florist to arrive with flowers, "assist" the florist in adding flowers... then collapse in a heap of headache and sleep for 6 hours


But, here is the finished product...
Not too shabby for my first try, if I do say so myself. And the good news, I would totally do it again. In fact, I would love to do it again. Even soon.