| home cakes chocolate gingerbread |
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Seasons of Love |
by Barbara Jo
Once the structure of the entire cake was together, it remained only to arrange and attach all of our pre-made decoration. For some reason I expected this to be much easier than it was.
The sugar plates actually were easy - they just plopped right down in place. We wet the icing on top of each tier first to make sure they stuck, but that may not have even been necessary. Incidentally, it would have been quite a neat, elegant looking cake with just the sugar plates and no other decorations.
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I then piped bead borders around the top and bottom of each tier to hide various and sundry imperfections, then set about attaching the decorations.
We had decided not to attach the figures or the snowflakes until we arrived at the reception site because we didn't want them to break en route, so I had nothing to do on the winter layer for the moment. Which was fine with me because the autumn layer gave me more than enough trouble for two. It took me while to figure out the best way to arrange the autumn leaves around the side of the autumn tier because they were too tall to really fit under the sugar plate and not curved enough to go to the outside of the sugar plate, which extended in some places several inches beyond the cake. After a few abortive attempts, I settled on angling all the leaves so they would fit under the sugar plate and eventually managed to get them all stuck on with royal icing. (Quite a few of them fell off in the car on the drive to the church, but we just stuck them back on once we arrived.)
The summer layer was much easier, because the lily pads were just the right size, possibly because Barbara May made those, since everything I made for this cake for some reason came out too big. They stuck on easily and the lilies were laughably easy to stick in between.
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Spring was also a breeze (again, Barbara May made these flowers). The gerbera daisies had big wire bases, which I stuck right into the sides of the cake. I placed a delicate royal icing mesh over the hole in the center of spring's sugar plate out of which the flower was to bloom and spring was finished.
That was it for the home assembly - the rest would have to wait until we arrived at the church, which, by the way, is a saga all by itself. There may be no more stressful car ride in the world than a car ride with a cantilevered cake in the back seat. Fortunately for me, Barbara May drives a station wagon, while I drive a truck, so she was the logical choice for cake chauffer. Because our plans on the day of the wedding called for her to drive to get the bride while I drove to get plastic supports for the cake we needed to take two separate cars, so I couldn't even be in the car with her to offer to moral support. The best I could do was to give her the occasional thumbs-up when she glanced in the rear view mirror.
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Even just moving the cake from our table to the car was scary. It was pretty darn heavy for a cake, let me tell you, and the round board it was sitting on was only a few inches smaller than our door. We got it safely ensconced in Barbara May's station wagon, on top of some non-slip material that Barbara May had to keep it from shifting. To protect it against dust and such we built a box of foamcore around it and, making sure that our temporary dowel rod supports were firmly in place, we were ready to go!
I can't even imagine how nervous Barbara May must have been, listing to every creak or snap from the back of the car and cringing at every pothole. It was bad enough just following her. We only pulled over once on the forty minute drive to the church when Barbara May heard a noise which turned out to only be a few of the autumn leaves falling off.
We made it to the church unscathed and it remained only to get it in the building and onto its table, a process that was greatly assisted by the presence in the church kitchen of a rolling cart.
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Once the cake was safely in place on the designated cake table (around which the bride and her helpers had erected a lovely ribbon canopy) Barbara May set about repairing the fallen autumn leaves while I rushed off to the local TAP plastics to get thick plastic rods to use as temporary supports for the cake (much more attractive than the temporary supports we had been using which I made out of dowel rod and foamcore.) I returned to find that the leaves were mended and that my plastic supports were, indeed, quite attractive.
At this point I took over the project of putting the finishing touches on the cake so that Barbara May (who was also the matron of honor) could scamper off to help the bride prepare. The snowflakes were simple to attach with a little royal icing, as were the various animal couples. I was very careful to position the caterpillars on the top tier so that they wouldn't be crushed by the giant flower when it bloomed out of the cake. That done, I headed out for a well-deserved manicure and pedicure.