Unintended Hand Painted Cake

As the Whiting's can attest (they were the lucky, and adorably appreciative, recipients of my most recent Wedding Cake extras) I had a rather large chocolaty cake to work on last week. I went ahead and made three of the cakes the week before and safely preserved them in the freezer. The other two cakes I let Wildflour Bakery make. I refuse to make the large cakes anymore as it's far more stress than it's worth. Have you ever dropped one layer of your 14 inch cake and watch hours of work crumble to the floor? It's horrible.

The bride picked a 'clover' green colored cake with intricate little "C" and "S" swirls in chocolate for the design. So I created five cakes (2 cakes were merely extra serving slices and not to be incorporated into the final cake production. However, I'd had enough left over CLOVER fondant to cover those too.)

As I practiced my hand at doing the swirls on one of the extra cakes, I could not make a bag and cake tip do the right job!!! I tried thick chocolate frosting, I tried thinned chocolate frosting. I could not make the swirls look right!!! They squiggled, or they lopped off, or they weren't thick enough...anyway, I COULD NOT make it work!!! What to do? The wedding is tomorrow! I have spent HOURS baking, leveling, filling, stacking, frosting and fondanting cake!!! I can't let this 'design' problem thwart me now!! So, I thinned down the frosting to a nice sloppy consistency. I pulled out a new paintbrush from my craft supplies. And I PAINTED the design on. For THREE HOURS. Was it perfect? I'm going to say no, it wasn't perfect. But was it the best I could come up with? Yes. And because the paint, er, frosting was so wet, it was a really good thing I painted until 11:30 at night. Because even by morning the design was still a little sticky. I did sort of like the look of the brush strokes myself. It was a fairly unique thing, I think.

I never did hear from the bride whether she like it or not. I saw the bride for literally seconds. And I hope the florist, as he said he would, added the flowers in a pleasing way to the cake. He was not as prompt to the set up time as I was to the reception area.

Those are my frustrations: not seeing the actual finished product, and not being sure the bride approved of my hand painted technique.

The joys are that I was paid enough for the cake to have my Christmas shopping money...which is almost spent and even wrapped!!