June Wedding

My first cousin is getting married in June and his fiancee asked me to make the wedding cake. After talking to her about it the first time I started collecting pictures and she starting looking too.  The actual cake is going to be things she liked off of several different cakes so there is no picture of it.   I saved all the pictures she liked and wrote myself a bunch of little notes but I still like to have a picture of sorts to get it all straight in my head.

 I'm no artist unless I have a piping bag in my hand.  I can't seem to make the idea of perspective translate onto paper and while I can make flowers out of gumpaste that are realistic I can't draw them. My cousin finds this funny for some reason. :) Anyway, I still have to try for myself so dont' say I didn't warn you, alright?

The cake is white, square, stacked a little offset with stargazer lilies, teal ribbon, a little greenery, dark chocolate "branch" piping and white allover scroll piping.   Now didn't you get all that from this picture? ;)

Chocolate covered strawberries

Most of you are looking at this and drooling  :)  Personally I don't understand the appeal.  Don't get me wrong..berries and chocolate are always a hit with my tastebuds.  Maybe it's the food snob in me but I want berries and chocolate mousse or berries and chocolate fondue or fudge stuffed strawberries or berries over chocolate ice cream or.....  well, you get it by now. 

We do these mostly for weddings at work so some weekends we spend a good deal of time on them.

Easter Brunch

I have obviously survived another holiday.  We are going to change up the schedule for mothers day so that maybe I won't have to work 37 hours in 3 days to pull it off.  We are only able to cross utilize some of our desserts still we try to keep the menus sorta similar to cut prep times. 

Main Dining Room Desserts
Creme Brulee
Black & White Cake
Carrot Cake
Coconut Mousse
Strawberry Panna Cotta (which I made in a dome mold and had to listen to "boob" jokes all day long)

Unfortunately things happened out of my control and we were a little slow getting the plates done for the dining room, in the chaos I forgot to take pictures.  Bad Becca!

Buffet
Luckily this was my domain and I finished prepping it nearly an hour early.   Plenty of time to fiddle, arrange and take pictures

Carrot cake and chocolate cake petit fours and orange cheesecake

Lemon cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes, coconut cream tarts

Strawberry Panna Cotta with fresh stawberries and orange rosemary cookies

Hand Decorated Cookies

The entire buffet

I think the hand decorated cookies are a thing of the past unfortunately.  I was told that it's a waste of time, but somehow making cupcakes isn't.  I am totally anti-cupcake.  They are little dried out pieces of cake, no filling and always too much frosting.  BLECH!!!!  Plus it takes me longer to make 80 little bitty cupcakes than it does to make rounds that would serve the same amount of people and TASTE BETTER.  phew, think I'm done now.

Oh BTW, I got the last laugh with the pink "boobs"  by 5 o'clock I was so sick of hearing about it the I put 2 of them on a plate, stuck a single blueberry on top of each and hand delivered it to the F&B director.  He was speechless for nearly a minute.  BWHAAAAAHAHAHAHA

Christmas in March

Our Kitchen Aid Mixer turned Fatal earlier this month. The maintenance department was able to fix it the first time it broke so we called them when it went wonky. They got it running again but warned us that the next time it died they really couldn't do anything for it. This is the 2nd mixer that has died on us in the 28 months I've been at this job so we went looking for something slightly more industrial. Meanwhile we limped along for a couple weeks with the help of a meat mallet but eventually gave up.


We have been without a small mixer for the past 3 weeks. We have a 30 qt  mixer in the bakeshop that will whip as little as 1 cup of cream or egg whites  plus a 12 qt & a 20 qt in the far kitchen. (By far I mean it takes 25 steps to get there) And yet one of the bakers is whipping cream by hand everyday then complaining that her wrist is hurting. DUH!! If there is a long way or a hard way or way to turn a 5 minute project into 3 hours she'll find it. I keep telling her to "work smarter not harder" but I think that the point is lost on her.  I have even outright ordered her to use the other mixers but apparently it's too much work to mise en place, put it on a sheet pan and carry it across the kitchen?!?


Anyhow... back to the mixer. We ordered an 8 qt Univex countertop model, it's industrial and the planetary head is attached to the gear thingy rather than just kinda stuck up there without any hardware to hold it in place. (I understand the difference but not sure exactly how to explain it) Plus it's still made in the USA. I've seen a picture in the catalog but still wasn't prepared for the actual size of this thing. It's a beast compared to the KA models, but it's OUR beast!

This morning I realized that we had set it up with the window open and the window won't close with it sitting there :/ It's one HEAVY sucker. Oh well, guess the window stays open til the outside temps are hitting the mid 90's.

FYI: what you can see in this photo is our entire prep area in the bakeshop. We are currently scheming to change that but still in planning mode.

Next Wedding Cake

So my baby brother is getting married for the 2nd time on May 1st. I was showing a co-worker pictures of wedding cakes I had done and she said "I thought you had 4 siblings married?" I made cakes for the other 3 when they got married but hadn't gotten into this insanity for the first wedding.

This is the cake that the bride picked.

I'm super excited for this one. I love the way fondant looks when you cover the entire cake with it. Not so fond of the pink but once it's finished I actually won't have to look at it again.

The wedding is on the only Saturday of the year that I am ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY required to work so I will be making the cake the day before and heading back to the heat for work the day of the wedding. Oooh, that reminds me; gotta talk to my mom about how we are going to pull this one off.

Strange wedding cake

A friend of a friend's wedding cake.

One of the line cooks at work agreed to make a friend's wedding cake. This isn't as odd as it sounds since he likes to do cakes, plus I think it ended up being their wedding present from him.

Anyhow, after doing a test run that turned out less than perfect he asked for help finishing the cake. He had the 2nd cake in the oven when I went over around 11 and we finished the cake at 2 am. This is my first ever attempt at rope borders and I don't think it turned out half bad.

Baby cake

I made this "baby" tiered cake for a 50th Anniversary Dinner.

The guests of honor brought in their cake stand that she wanted us to use. Very pretty cake stand but also only 10 1/2" across. So the tiers ended up being 5", 7" & 9", the entire cake might have weighed 20 pounds.

The party was only 7 people, but the Mrs. wanted a 3 tier cake so the base is styrofoam. She wanted drapery that covered most of the tiers which in retrospect I never should have agreed to. The fondant drapery is some of the heaviest I have ever put on a cake and it is actually held in place with toothpicks since it kept sliding.

But it did serve to remind me that I LOVE making wedding cakes. It is challenging and stressful and so rewarding. I have 2 lined up for this summer and I can't wait.