Practice Practice Cake

Geez, it seems like with the week we’ve had, posting something about cakes or cookies or brownies just wouldn’t cut it. Except that the week we’ve had seems a lot more exciting on paper than it was in reality. For me at least. Perhaps I was just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, but the week’s natural disasters were rather anticlimactic.

Hard to believe a week ago that we had an earthquake. Tuesday afternoon as I stood in a meeting at work, the ground shook. And then the ground stopped shaking. And then we continued with our meeting.

Then last weekend, Hurricane Irene blew through. After all the hype and all of the warnings, I had all sorts of expectations for the weekend. Actually, mostly I was expecting to be sitting in the dark. But you know what? Our lights didn’t go out. They flickered once, but we never lost power. I know I am lucky, especially since many of my friends and co-workers just got their power back yesterday. On Friday, my plans for the weekend were:

1. Read books
2. Sleep
3. Read more books
4. Fall asleep reading books
5. Make art

What did I actually do?

Ate dinner with random food cobbled together from our pantry. It was pretty good.

1. Read some magazines.
2. Waited to lose power.
3. Looked at some pictures.
4. Waited to lose power.
5. Thought about watching a movie.
6. Waited to lose power.
7. Read some books.
8. Waited to lose power.
9. Started watching the movie.
10. Expected to then DEFINITELY lose power since we actually needed it.
11. Finished watching the movie. Kind of wished we had lost power so we didn’t have to watch the movie.
12. Went to bed.
13. Woke up expecting to have no power.
14. Had power.
15. Made toast.

And then I made a cake. I got asked to make my very first wedding cake in about a month. Since it’s my first wedding cake I really don’t want to screw it up. I decided to have a little tasting as well, so my friend could decide if the flavors she wanted were really what she wanted and I could have a chance to practice my icing skills. But I also wanted to give my friend a little confidence that I wasn’t going to make her a sucky cake so I made a practice practice cake before making the practice cake for her to taste.

I kind of ran out of icing at the end so I had to improvise a bit.

So, knowing I had to make a lot more icing, I started on the practice cake.

This is an idea of what the wedding cake is going to look like, except without the two different shades of icing and weird crease in the top layer. I learned a lot while making this cake and have given myself a lot more confidence for the real thing. I suppose it’s a good thing when you start worrying about driving the cake to the venue over how you’re going to make the cake.

Also, she liked the cake! Whew.