This weekend was our church’s 10th anniversary celebration, or rather CELEBRAT10N. My friend Kristin who has made cakes with me before suggested we offer to make the cake for the party. We were given the colors of the party, which were red, blue and yellow, and the count for the event which was about 150. Other than that, we pretty much had creative freedom.
We came up with the idea of making the cake look like a sky with pennant banners hanging outside with lots of balloons escaping. We cut out letters spelling the word CELEBRAT10N – notice the use of a one and a zero instead of the letters io at the end there… Very cute idea that was not ours.
After about 28 hours of work split between three people, Kristin, my incredibly generous mom, and myself, we finished the cake.
DH and I moved the cake to the car on Friday night, and we went to bed. I was totally pooped and looked forward to sleeping in on Saturday morning. But I woke-up at about 6:00 am feeling unsettled about the cake. I thought it was irrational and that I was just being paranoid. So I tried to put it out of my mind. But by 6:30, I decided to just go check on the cake to make sure… so that I could rest.
Well, I wasn’t being irrational after all. The cake had in fact, fallen over in the back of our car. I was too upset to take a picture of the carnage. But we brought all the tiers back onto the house and evaluated the damage. I determined that the top two tiers could be salvaged, but the bottom two needed to be redone from the beginning. I got the first layer of the 12 inch tier in the oven and then texted Kristin to let her know. And then called my mom to let her know, too. On the phone, I broke down (again).
We came up with a game plan. Within an hour, I had the second layer of the 12 inch cake out of the oven. We had a plan for the new 10 inch cake. Kristin came over, DH had gone to the store to buy ingredients for more frosting and more fondant.
We had the ball rolling. By 11:00 am, we had new 12 and 10 inch cakes and everything we needed to rebuild the cake.
Luckily, everything went smoothly. We ended up having a pretty good time, as a matter of fact! AND, to top it off, we felt like the new cake even looked better.
We were able to take it to the church and be done with it by about 4:00 in the afternoon. We even had time for a nap!
The party was a blast, the cake was a hit, and, most important, it tasted great! Plus, I learned a LOT about cake structure and how to avoid this in the future!
[…] A few weekends ago I received an early morning text message from a friend. It was an urgent emergency. We had been preparing a cake for our church’s 10th birthday celebration and it had tipped over in the night and needed to be redone. This wasn’t just any old cake. It was 4 tiers and was enough cake to feed 150-200 people. You can take a peak at the creation here. […]