She can have her cake and she better eat it, too...

So whoever has been around me for the last month has known that I have been eating, sleeping and dreaming CAKES! My little sister, Lindsey, (whom I love to death and who will forevermore hail me as her favorite sister in the family) got married the day after Thanksgiving and she asked me if I would make her table centerpieces for her reception. Being the loving, kind, generous and charitable person that I am (wink), I most graciously said, "Of course Lindsey, I would do anything to make your wedding everything you dream it to be." OK, so I really don't talk that way, but I said sure, and that I would love to help out with whatever. So, she decided to have miniture wedding cakes for her centerpieces - which I had never made before, but had always wanted to try, so heck, why not?

About a month ago I decided that I needed to get started on them, so I went and got some styrofoam sheets (because the cakes were fake. Did you people really think that I would make 14 real cakes?) I tried to cut the forms for the cakes by hand, but it just wasn't working out. So I ended up buying a band saw on Craig's List to cut the styrofoam and spent the next four days cutting styrofoam cakes and covering them with fondant. Which by the way, I learned that you have to frost the styrofoam before covering it because otherwise the fondant won't stick. The band saw rocked, I was going to sell it after making the cakes, but I liked it so much that I'm going to keep it for future projects. So here I am, up to my armpits in styrofoam...

Yes, that is my kitchen, covered in an inch of styrofoam dust, that no matter how many times I vacuumed it up each night, the next morning another thin layer would have settled and was waiting to greet me...

So the cake making went on, cutting and covering. The kids loved helping, some times a little too much, but helping none the less...


Ana especially stayed by my side throughout the whole endeavor. We would watch the "Food Network Challenge", (where they make all of those fancy cakes) while we were doing it. At one point while I was practicing with the fondant, it completely broke and fell off the cake form. Ana scoffed in disgust, "Mom... we cannot put this cake on the judges table!" That was my queue that there was a little too much cake on the brain in our household...

But we managed to get them all covered and they turned out pretty darn good for not ever having done fondant cakes before, if I do say so myself. (heck, after four days of nothing but cakes, I think that I'm allowed to be atleast slightly proud of myself, don't you?)...

After we were done with the fake cake fiasco, Lindsey asked me if I would make the real "wedding cake" (OK, so she asked me a long time ago, but this is when I got around to doing it). So I started trying recipes, and more recipes. Let's just say that our neighbors and friends probably never want to eat cake again in their lives because they were the recipients of so many "experiments". Once again, my faithful sus chef, never left my side...

So we nailed down three very tasty cake recipes, packed up our fake cakes, and headed for Utah. (Seriously, Lindsey owes me for the rest of her life!) Once there, I spent the next three days decorating the centerpieces. That was the fun part! I loved making each one unique. And of course, I had my helpers. But there wasn't much for little hands to do at this phase, so they resorted to decorating each other. This time my nephew, Dallin, and sister-in-law, Becca, were in on the "help"...

This is what they looked like on the tables at the reception. Sorry for so many pics, but I couldn't just show ONE. This was my life for the last 4 weeks!...









This was the wedding cake. No fondant here, Lindsey likes frosting. She wanted three individual cakes - one chocolate, one carrot cake and she let me pick the third flavor. I spiced it up a bit with a marble cake that was made to look like zebra stripes - it pretty much rocked...

FYI, the decor for the reception was all antique/vintage; pearls, lace gloves, old dressers and lamps. It was so beautiful!
Thus ends my cake parade. Fun while it lasted... But I'm sure glad that it's over.