Update with Cake

Last week we were pretty busy with cake. First of all, Rachel organized a birthday party for her friend Adriane from church and we (mostly Rachel) made a marble “bundt” cake for the occasion. Well, it really was made in an angel food cake pan because I don’t own a bundt pan, but it turned out well. Rachel had the idea to make the candles and Andriane and about 12 others were happy with her efforts.

Rachel helped me tons this week to bake and freeze cake after cake after cake to make full 275 servings for a wedding yesterday. It was an exercise in organization to get all the parts ready at the right time, right size, in some kind of container, and safely deliver them to the venue to be assembled and completed. Late in the game we learned that the venue, located in west Arlington, had no kitchen, so we brought a hot plate and saucepan to prepare the ganache and had to fetch water from the bathrooms to keep our hands clean. But we finished in plenty of time and I was happy with the result.  I hope the bride and groom liked them.

I learned about cake plateaus with this cake order.  That is what they call those big silver things on which the cakes are presented.  I don’t own anything like this, but now I know about them.  🙂

Then it was home to clean the kitchen for the 40th time this week and put away all the cake stuff which took a full 2 hours.  Oh, I also threw together some cake leftovers for the church potluck today, a chocolate cake and a pile of chocolate covered strawberries.  Speaking of chocolate, we had a dreadful time getting the ganache to work for some reason.  I’ve made ganache many times, but this time I ended up with 4 (!) ruined bags of chocolate chips before I got it to work.  If you want to learn more about seized up chocolate, here’s a link.  Though it was a busy week, I didn’t really feel stressed until the 3rd bag of chocolate chips went bad.  Then I started to panic.  We ended up stopping by Walmart on our way to the venue to buy more.  At which time the mother of the bride called me and wondered why we weren’t there yet!  AAArrggh!