Your Cakes Are Falling Apart, or: Why Cake Related Nightmares are the Worst

The night before my best friend's brother got married, I barely slept at all. And surprisingly, it's not because I shared a bed with a puppy and a small child (beds were hard to come by that night, lots of family from out of town and all that). No, it's because I had awful, terrible nightmares.

And honestly, I can only remember one other cake which struck such terror into my heart, and that was the peacock cake that I had to deliver the week my boss was out of town (and which went over much more smoothly in real life than it did in  my dreams). 

Why do I keep putting myself in these situations?

The central theme of these nightmares (yes, that's plural) was that the cake fell apart, which was a real fear for me because a) I was making this wedding cake completely 100% by myself (which some untrained help in the form of my best friend), and b) because I had to take apart and re-bake the 2nd tier on the cake mere hours before the wedding. Ok, so it was just the day before. But, still. Nail biting stuff!

Everything about the cake went ridiculously smoothly the day of and the day before the wedding. Before that? Not so smoothly. I completely understand all the ridiculous melodrama on cake shows now: that stuff is not made up. There was the fact that my A/C went out in my apartment, that I completely ruined an entire batch of icing, that I had to rebake 3 layers of cake because they cracked and crumbled, that I got Rickroll'd by Pandora (I mean, so traumatizing, right?), that I kept knocking over the green petal dust for the BILLIONS of leaves I made...

Can we just have a moment to admire how
smooth this fondant is?

But once I started frosting those cakes and covering them in fondant (ok, I'll admit that I did re-cover the 8" and 6" tiers because I couldn't get them smooth enough the first time) and cutting dowels and stacking them (that was the exciting part!) and airbrushing the leaves and intricately placing them all over the cake at 2 in the morning the day before the wedding as the groom's mother rushed around getting everything perfect (and it was all perfect)... everything came together. It was beautiful. It was bliss. It was zen.

And when I got the cake to the reception and it was all set up on the cake table with the cake topper and the bride and the groom saw it and everyone said it was beautiful and delicious... I remembered, over and over again, why cake decorating is not just my job, but my passion.

Now if only I could remember to make business cards...