A Tale of Two Cakes

March 2013

Ever have one of those days? 

I made a cake for a friend of mine who was hosting a 25th anniversary event. She had no specific design in mind so I took that to mean: experiment. (Bad idea #1). 
I have seen all of these ruffle cakes floating around and thought, I'll try that! I envisioned a ruffled bottom tier and a smooth top tier with a monogrammed plaque rimmed in silver glitter. I used an 050 tip to pipe the buttercream ruffle and I was so pleased the cake turned out as imagined.

I packed it up and sent it off via my husband for delivery. About 30 minutes later, my poor hub called me with a tightness in his voice that I immediately recognized as....STRESS. "What happened?" I asked. "Stuff was falling off!" He was stressing for sure. I felt so badly for him! I told him to take some pictures and send them to me.

My customer had pressed the falling ruffles back onto the cake at this point, but I knew I couldn't let her keep it that way. So I packed up some supplies and drove over to her house to fix it. Poor girl, I got there and took that cake apart right there in her kitchen! I didn't want her to worry about anything falling off anymore that night so I decided to scrape all of the icing off the bottom tier and reapply with a different technique.

After removing all of the icing, I was left with a really. ugly. scary. mess. The thought of photographing it crossed my mind, but I decided it was too ugly to document. 

Putting one foot in front of the other, I was able to finish up this cake in about an hour and I am happy with the result. I think my customer was too. Hub says he likes the second version better, but he's not going to deliver any more cakes!

Final product...IN MY CUSTOMER'S KITCHEN!! :0

All in all, I survived my first major catastrophe, lost a hot delivery guy, and learned a valuable lesson: don't "experiment" on my customers! I'm still not exactly sure what went wrong with this project; at this point I believe it had to do with the buttercream. I will be working on those ruffles soon though because they are too cute to not have in my repertoire!

Thank you, Anna for everything! xoxo
~Summer