When it comes to sweets treats, I am forever ruined, a total snob who can easily identify a store bought baked good from fifty meters out. I grew up in a home lovingly referred to as "The House of Snacks." It is no wonder we don't all weigh 500 pounds. We were constantly surrounded by an endless parade of baked goods that effortlessly waltzed out of our oven and onto our kitchen counter. We gladly offered asylum to all the unfortunate refugees from snack-less homes within a 250 mile radius of our home. If your household was made up of health fanatics and heart patients, or simply unskilled in the art of homemade treats, you were welcome to stop in for a frosting fix at our place. If your own family possessed brilliant bakers, but for some reason your supply of sugary sweets had unexpectedly dwindled, you could find some solace chez moi.
If you were hosting a potluck feast and you wanted to ensure that dessert was divine, having my mom on the guest list made it a sure thing. And it wasn't just my mom who baked. My dad also dabbled in the culinary arts. In his circle of friends, my brother is known as The Dessert King. And my sister's sweet snackery has also been frequently requested by others. After sharing a sweet something at a party or event, people often ask me, "Oh my gosh, where did you ever find the time to learn how to bake?" I usually respond politely that I learned from my mother and grandmother, which is true but doesn't exactly answer the question. The truth is that when your nearest neighbors are a head of sixty cattle, a field of corn stalks, and a couple of goats, your options for entertainment are less than ideal. Long summer days of social isolation allowed me to hone my household handiwork, including baking. I'm also excellent at toilet scrubbing and shelf dusting, but for some reason, I don't get nearly as many compliments in those areas.
At some point, living out in the country led my mom to began dabbling in cake baking for fun and profit. Being thirty minutes from a grocery store was not always convenient for party planning, so if you needed a party cake, you could order one from my mom. You name it, at some point she has probably made a cake out of it. The sky was the limit, whatever you had in mind, she could effortlessly create out of fluffy frosting and chunks of cake. In fact, the only design she ever refused were molded Easter lambs. Unbeknownst to the average person, these luscious little lamby cakes had a fatal design flaw. They were made using a two-piece cake mold and the neck was actually too small to support his big, fat, wooly noggin. Upon unmolding the little guy or in the middle of icing him, the head would inevitably break off. Of course it could be reattached with a glue made of frosting but should it fall off again, the trauma would be too great to risk. Slicing a cute little lamby cake was bad enough, but completely beheading him at the annual family feast crossed a line. Sending the pint-sized guests screaming from the kiddie table was a major holiday party foul.
Long before the rise in popularity of numerous cake baking gurus on reality tv, we lived the drama first hand in our own little kitchen. My mom not only created cakes for every occasion from birthdays to bar mitzvahs, but she also specialized in the wedding cake. Of all the things on reality tv that are staged and scripted, I can assure you that any over-the-top drama related to cake transportation is probably 100% accurate. Thankfully, the heyday of my mom's cake baking enterprises were wrapping up long before reality television became a household word. My mom would probably not want to share with viewers that she did most of her cake decorating in her bathrobe and slippers. For freshness, her works of art were created either late the night before or early the morning of the event which lead to this seemingly odd wardrobe choice. Like an athlete with lucky socks, her special cake decorating uniform seemed to ensure sugary success.
Not only did my mom make wedding cakes, she made delicious wedding cakes which is a rarity. You will already know this if you have attended more than three weddings in your lifetime. You know that you are most likely going to get cake at the end of a wedding reception. I think it is this period of anticipation that makes it so much worse when the beautiful cake that you have been admiring all evening ends up tasting like sweetened sawdust that someone carefully enrobed in bunch of lard. Of course, this tragic fate never befell any couple whose cake was supplied by my mom. Along with tasting amazing, you could count on the fact that my mom's cake would also be extremely sturdy and stable. Not once did she experience any kind of cake slump or slide. I mean the only mishap experienced by her crack delivery team (a.k.a. my dad) was that his thumb once slipped and stuck into the side of a cake. This little snafu was no match for my mom, who always carried a little emergency frosting repair kit with her. A few seconds of TLC was all that was needed to patch up the little hole and no one was the wiser, not even the guy who got a little extra frosting with his slice of cake. There were, however, countless near misses when the delivery driver (a.k.a. my dad) had to slam on the brakes unexpectedly. For some reason, whenever your vehicle is bogged down with twenty-two lovely wedding cakes coated in forty pounds of frosting, you can guarantee that some little old lady is going to pull put out in front of you. She will then continue to make your life miserable for at least fourteen of the next fifteen miles required to get to your destination.
Eighty percent of the weddings that I have attended in my life were blessed with a beautiful, scrumptious cake that my mother made. At weddings where my mom was not responsible for providing the cake, she was frequently called upon for her expertise in cake triage. I have lost count of how many times we have lived this awkward little scenario. Our family would be seated at a table enjoying our appetizers when an urgent summons would be sent to our corner of the room along the following lines: Attention guests, a cake emergency has been reported in the building, it is leaning fifteen degrees to the right and sliding eastward at two inches per hour. We're afraid it won't make it until the cake cutting ceremony, can anyone help? Calmly and swiftly my mom would jump into action. She would call out the directions, I need four shot glasses, two chopsticks, a butter knife, and a bowl of water, stat. And with that she would set to work on the seemingly impossible feat of emergency cake repair, re-engineering the original frosted structure and saving the day.
I recently attended a wedding where the entire cake was crooked, precariously threatening to ooze off the table at any moment like some kind of sugar laden mudslide. If the situation deteriorated further, I knew I could get my mom on the horn to walk me through the steps necessary to repair this impending disaster. Instead, realizing that they were only minutes away from having to scoop smooshed slices of cake off the parquet dance floor, the bride and groom made a rather unorthodox move. Perhaps cutting the cake before actually walking down the aisle was somewhat avant-garde, but it was the only way to avoid certain doom.
In the end, although it sounds a bit cliché, it's not the cake that truly matters on the big day. I always use my own wedding as an example. My mom was traveling ten hours to be at the event, so having her create one of her signature cakes was out of the question. If she had attempted to make it in advance, she and my dad would have surely arrived with frosting smeared on the backs of their seats, the backs of their heads, and probably the inside of the windshield as well. This makes for really tricky lane changes when you have a giant glop of frosting completely blocking your vision. Not wishing to put them in an unexplainable incident with local law enforcement over an icing induced accident, I considered option B. This would have had my mother trying to whip up a cake in the confines of a mini kitchen in an extended stay hotel room. Equally problematic. Although my mom would have been totally willing to do either of these things for my wedding day, neither choice was ideal, so in a brief flash of bridal sanity, I opted to go with a local bakery.
We tasted and tested and discussed for hours before finally coming to an agreement on the final design. Two days before the wedding, the caterer called in a panic. The cake lady had been frantically trying to get a hold of me for some reason. I called the bakery back immediately and she demanded to know why I hadn't returned any of her calls. Uhm, because I had not received any messages from her, otherwise she would have heard from me. Never mind that despite providing her with three different contact numbers, we were mysteriously incommunicado. I needed to find out what the urgent problem was with the cake. As it turns out, she simply needed to know if we were still interested in her cake services. Despite paying her in advance, there was some confusion on her part as to whether or not we still wanted the cake we had purchased. I thought the fact that we had already paid for the requested wedding cake should have cleared that right up, an obvious oversight on my part. She hadn't heard from us and thought we had buyer's remorse, abandoning her cake in favor of a better deal somewhere else. She explained that this sort of problem comes up a lot in the cake making world. Strangely enough, I was unaware of this phenomenon. At no point had anyone ever left my mom stranded with an enormous 200 slice wedding cake for a better bargain with another baker. I started to panic. My mom could work a lot of cake miracles, but pulling a wedding cake out of thin air twenty-four hours before an event was not part of her repertoire.
On the big day, I was relieved to find that the requested cake had in fact been delivered. Unfortunately, it was nothing like the one we had discussed. You would think that this might reduce the bride to nothing more than a sobbing, soggy pile of taffeta and tulle, but amazingly it did not. I would only dwell on this disaster for a whopping twenty seconds before realizing it just didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. I had just married the love of my life. I had patiently waited twelve years for this day and I wasn't about to let some crummy wedding cake ruin my moment. That's what I learned on my wedding day. I always try to share this nugget of knowledge with boggled brides-to-be, but no one ever listens. When it comes down to it, nothing that you have been worrying about, working on, and losing sleep over for an entire year leading up to your wedding day matters. Not a messed up cake. Not the fact that your priest accidentally said half the mass in Latin. Not the fact that the harpist your mother-in-law hired tried to shake down the best man for more money. Crazy harp lady misplaced the check that was mailed to her weeks in advance. Not the fact that you and your spouse found yourself dancing to a country love song when you repeatedly specified no country music, unless requested by a guest. Oddly, that particular honky-tonk gem was a special dedication that came from the DJ himself. However, in the end not one of these things mattered, least of all the cake.
Despite it's unexpectedly austere exterior, the wedding cake was actually quite good. Too bad none of our guests got to taste it. It was sliced and boxed and misplaced somewhere in the bowels of the kitchen. In hindsight, I think it might have been part of the kitchen staff's evil plan to spirit away my cake for their own personal enjoyment. Eventually, their plot was foiled but it was much too late. At the end of the night, the cake was miraculously rediscovered and rushed out to the ballroom to find that only a handful of stragglers remained to enjoy it. I hope they ate it right away as the frosting didn't keep well overnight. Frosting that had been wonderfully fluffy and delicious the day before morphed into a stiff, congealed, gelatinous blob the next morning. Not very yummy leftovers. If people were hoping to enjoy a sweet little snack on their journey home the next day, they were sorely disappointed. I bet they took one bite and nearly chucked it out the window. From the Poconos to the Ohio border, Interstate 80 was probably littered with little white blobs of frosting spittle.
Luckily, our little anniversary cake was safe as it had been sent directly to the deep freeze. We carefully transported it back home without any damage, but we should have known that it was doomed from the start. Two weeks after returning from our honeymoon, a hurricane blew through our neighborhood, knocking out the power for three days. This is how my husband and I found ourselves sitting in the dark in the middle of our living room, eating the top of our wedding cake. Unfortunately, it was only the one month mark instead of the one year mark. Thanks to years of my mom's careful baking tutelage, I would be able to whip up a sweet little replacement the following summer in order to celebrate our first anniversary. The key part of this statement being "I would be able to". My ability to create a culinary masterpiece was not showcased when that particular day arrived due to the overwhelming exhaustion we were experiencing as owners of a three month old. I thought it was better not to turn on the oven in my delirious state induced by the fact that I had enjoyed only three winks of sleep in the previous ninety days. Between breastfeeding, burping, and bathing a barf covered baby, I am certain that my husband and I would have really enjoyed a homemade cake creation. Too bad I lacked the energy to walk across the room towards the oven, let alone use it. Instead, in the interest of time and safety, our anniversary celebration was sponsored by Hostess. We jammed an old birthday candle into the middle of a Ho Ho and called it a day. We might have even finished it before passing out face first in our plate, but who can remember?
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment