Rick'n'Abby's Wedding Cake (Part 3)

Thursday morning I was up far earlier than I wished to be even though it was no earlier than usual... If that makes any sense. My fitful sleeping had done nothing to ease the cold that was coming whether I liked it or not. Exhausted as I was, there were too many things to do to spend the day in bed. I knew that my landlord would be coming in the next few days and I figured that I really should clean out the oven before such time as he went poking around in it. That and there was a wedding cake to get going and I had decided to skip out on making buttercream in favor of sleep the night before.

Off to the store I went once again. I picked up a scrubby sponge, Easy-Off Heavy Duty and a pair of "long" rubber cleaning gloves. I realize that lots of people clean their ovens on a regular basis... I am not one of these people. In fact, I had NEVER cleaned this oven even though we have lived here for almost 18 months. I thought I was pretty good about not dripping things into the bottom, etc. What I didn't realize was the amount of grease and other gunky stuff that builds up with regular oven use. Who knew? Probably everyone reading this! Since the oven couldn't heat, I chose the no heat cleaning method which left me waiting for 20 minutes while the oven "soaked." Hmm... Set the timer and that's a twenty minute nap! You bet your butt I took advantage of that! After my short drift in Sleepyland I wiped everything down and was amazed at how much better it looked. That's when I noticed that I'd forgotten to spray the inside of the oven door. Hmm, again... Another nap? Well, I had to be thorough so I sprayed everything down again- this time remembering the door- and took another twenty minute rest on the couch.

After the oven was done, I tackled the icing. Eight pounds of powdered sugar, two and a half pounds of butter and more shortening than I want to admit later, I had a very large bowl full of delicious American Buttercream. Now to dye it. Rick'n'Abby had requested that their cake be iced with off-white or ivory-ish icing. No problem! Done that plenty of times. They had chosen "warm brown" food coloring to be used on their cake and it didn't seem like there was any reason that one or two drops of that shouldn't make a nice slightly-off-from-white color. So I pulled it out, took off the seal and carefully dropped two drops on top of the mound of buttercream. Thank the powers that be that I didn't add even a little more because I began to mix and... The buttercream turned a light pinky-orange! WHAT?! Horrible, horrible! I didn't have eight more pounds of powdered sugar! I didn't have two and a half pounds of butter! Breathebreathebreathe, thinkthinkthink... Okay, I decided to wash my hands and dig out a bowl scraper. There was BOUND to be more white icing at the bottom of this bowl and when I mixed that in the color would lighten and be closer to what I wanted. I scraped all the sides, I scraped the bottom, I folded the icing and mixed 'til the color was as even as I could make it... And it was still pink-ish! Next thought: Florescent lights! My kitchen is lit by a strange florescent light that makes the yellow walls look green-ish. Maybe if I took the buttercream out into NATURAL light it would be a different color. So I headed outside with my icing-covered hands to see what I could see. Yeeeeeesss, it was a liiiittle bit less pink and almost an ok color. I was going to make this work!

With that, I decided it was time for the bottom layer of the cake. Out from the chest freezer came the two 14x14x3" layers of chocolate cake. I allowed them to defrost just a bit while I trimmed the cake board to the correct size and cut the drain hole in the center. The tops of the cakes were trimmed off with ease. Off came the papers from the bottom and with some minor leveling I was ready for the real challenge: the carving out of the pond. So far things were great. Then I realized something that I SHOULD have seen WAY back when Rick asked me about the placement of the pond's drain... It was in the wrong spot! The only way I could make this work would be if I turned the heart-shaped pond so it looked more like a bean than a heart! THIS was NOT the plan! And right then it hit me that I was in WAY over my head. So I did what any sane person would do when they realized that they actually were not sane: I called up Katie and had a complete nervous freak-out over the phone.

Ok, maybe not everyone would call KATIE but she's a great sister and it was a better plan than calling the groom and having a freak-out which would most definitely get to the bride. Katie was really great about just listening to me for the whole thing. As the tears subsided and my breathing returned to near-normal, I bit my lip and made the first cuts. I carved out that pond while on the phone with Katie and I made a couple other decisions with her support. The first decision being that I needed to re-freeze the cake if I had any chance of getting the top layer off and the cake filled without reducing things to crumbs. Once I was calm and the cake back in the freezer, I let Katie get on with life. Things were good again. I could do this. I would MAKE this work. So what if the pond wasn't facing the right direction? So what if the icing was just the tiniest bit pink? This was all going to work! :) That's when my landlord showed up with absolutely NO warning.

Two things you should know: 1)We have two cats and our landlords don't know. 2) I haven't fully cleaned the house since the BEFORE Jason's wedding cake. Oh, yeah, I'd picked up garbage, dishes and socks and done a minimal amount of laundry just so we wouldn't be naked and would have towels. AND I'd scooped the litter box as well. BUT the house was a WRECK! There were boxes everywhere, dirty laundry in baskets in the kitchen, chunks of chocolate cake piled on a sheet pan on the stove-top next to the huge bowl of icing, dirty bowls from icing creation filling the sink and spread across our one and only counter, crumbs on the floor, various cake tools and my tool box on the table and floor respectively... And two cats who are normally hidden well away (along with bowls, etc.) before the landlords show up. If he had called, I would have told him to give me at least 30 minutes before he came.

As it was, I had to crack the door open a little and literally BEG him to wait on the porch while I cleaned up the kitchen just a bit, PLEASE?! As soon as he caved I shut the door grabbed my cat, looked about wildly for Branden's cat and, upon not finding her, PRAYED that she'd be her typical self and STAY HIDDEN. Dropping my cat in the bedroom and shutting the door on the unmade bed and the overflowing laundry basket, I reached over and shut the bathroom door as well with the hope that no cat had used the litter box recently enough for any smell to be obvious. I grabbed the cat bowls, stacked the laundry baskets, tossed all of that into the laundry room, shoved some half-packed kitchen boxes in there as well and closed the door, looked around the kitchen... And gave up. I let my landlord in and explained that I was in the middle of my younger brother's wedding cake so please excuse the mess that was still there. He was pretty cool about things. This was ok. And then his WIFE walked in the back door and through the laundry room with NO warning. I just about died on the spot. The mess I was trying to hide- complete with cat bowls- was now out there for all to see AND she'd walked through it. Oh, to have this over with quickly! Could I get a bolt of lightning or something? Maybe just spontaneously combust? And then they wanted to linger a bit and talk about my brother's cake and our move. He also discovered that the heating unit in the oven had to be taken out with tools which he hadn't brought so he'd have to leave and come back. And all this time there's a cat on the loose SOMEWHERE in our house. They finally left, her for the evening and him for just a few minutes. I FLEW through the house, found the cat and shut her in the room with moments to spare before his return.

Since I was, after all, making the cake I decided that this would be a good time to get it back out and be really obviously busy so he would leave faster this second time. It worked. After stepping over and around him multiple times trying to fill and ice a large cake in a pathetically small kitchen, he got the hint and left quickly. I finished the base icing in peace and was feeling a little more relaxed when I realized that there was no way I could hold up the cake, hold up the pond AND thread the drain tube through the drain hole without help. So I once again placed the cake in the freezer and decided, as I was obviously still sick, I needed to rest until Branden got home.

I was on the couch with a book when he arrived and I very quickly got him to help me fasten the cake board to the wooden base we were using and get the pond in place. I had another minor freak-out when some of the icing cracked and the cake around the front of the pond bowed out but I recovered much more quickly this time and inserted skewers into the bowing cake to help hold it in place. That done, I decided that all decorating could wait until I was decorating the other layers and placed it once more in the freezer so it would survive the one-hour trip from my house to my mom's house. I spent the rest of the evening washing/gathering necessary tools and assembling all supplies needed. I did manage to make dinner, though we went to bed pretty much as soon as we finished eating it. We were going to need to leave our house by 6 AM in order to meet Rick at my mom's house at 7 AM and, especially since I was sick, I was going to need all the sleep I could get. Unfortunately, I didn't get it... But that's a story for Part 4. :)