Rick'n'Abby's Wedding Cake (Part 2)

I finished all the cake baking Tuesday which was a great thing because Wednesday our oven broke.

Wednesday was a day for getting the last few things I was going to need to make the cake work. After a couple hours running errands, I came home to make the filling for the cake. They wanted real Bavarian cream, which wasn't a big deal but can be somewhat time consuming. After all, this is the REAL stuff, not the vanilla pudding you get in a donut. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the fake stuff. I even enjoy a "Bavarian cream" filled donut every once in a very long while. But for my brother, I was going to make only the best!

Everything was going smoothly. The creme anglaise base was nearly finished when Branden called from the store asking if we needed anything. At that point I was still thinking I might be making the buttercream that evening so it just made sense to do something really easy for dinner. With this in mind, I suggested he pick up something like chicken strips that we could just pop in the oven.

I should also mention that Rick called to make sure I was ok. I thought it was very sweet of him to be worried but reassured him that everything was on schedule and I was really ok with doing this. Rick'n'Abby were SO cooperative and helpful. Without them, this whole experience would have been a true nightmare... Ok, without them, I would have said NO to anything even resembling this cake.

Branden got home as I was waiting for the creme anglaise to cool and I turned on the oven to preheat for dinner. This is when everything goes downhill. About three minutes after I turned the oven on, the heating unit started to spark! I've seen fires in ovens- I've accidentally LIT fires in ovens- but I've never seen anything like that before. Because I have great thinking skills, I LUNGED across the kitchen and turned off the oven. The sparking died down but a large stretch of the unit was bright red and part of it looked melted. Branden asked what I'd put in the oven to make it do that- how rude of him!- but nothing that I've ever baked in my entire life would have caused that kind of reaction if it had dripped onto the heating unit.

So I called the landlord and gave up on using the oven for the night... We did test it and it had no intention of heating up ever again. During all of this, the anglaise got too cold and I had to re-heat it on the stove until it smoothed out. This was a not-great thing as I was risking the chance that I'd end up with sweet scrambled eggs instead of dessert sauce. I finished the filling with the realization that my head hurt, my throat was scratchy and I was just not feeling great in general... I was getting sick. :S Things had gone from fine to not-fine in the course of an hour and all I wanted to do was sleep. So I went to bed. I did not make dinner, I did not make buttercream, I just curled up in bed and had bad dreams about wedding cakes.

And that is the end of the second day of the creation of Rick'n'Abby's wedding cake.