194/365 Stacked

Rather than today's picture of the day being the first in the series as is usually the case here, today it will be the last one.  You'll have to make it through this series of pictures, imagining some missing parts, to fully appreciate the ending.


Once upon a time there was a panicked bride.  On the Wednesday before the Saturday she was getting married, the source for her wedding cake informed her that she would not be able to make her cake. (Something about just having had a baby.)   With only three days until the wedding, what was the bride to do?

She remembered that she had a colleague with a young, trying to get experience, daughter who had recently graduated from culinary school and moved back to Texas.  She sought out her colleague who in turn phoned said daughter with the bride's dilemma.  In a moment of weakness (and poverty), the young baker said yes to making the cake.

Soon more pounds of butter, flour, and sugar than one normally consumes in a year appeared.  Eggs were cracking.

NOTE: The band-aids have to do with sharp edges on cake pans and plastic wrap boxes.

Soon , the last lonely egg joined the others from its dozen in a scrumptious cake batter.

Being that the bride's dream was a four tier cake that would feed two hundred people, there was A LOT of batter.  A lot of batter means a lot of baking.  Here we go with pan number one.

Fast forward . . . all four tiers, which were each two layers, are done and headed to the freezer.

During the baking process, the gum paste flowers were being made - each one by hand.

Once the layers were done and the first layer of flowers were busy drying (see yesterday's post), it was time to make the butter cream frosting to go between the layers and that would also be used to mask the tiers so that the fondant would stick.

The young baker decided that she would also make all of the fondant from scratch.

Tier three successfully covered.

Tier two successfully covered.

Tiers one and four were also successfully covered.  This cake process was nearly non-stop for three days.  Obviously I missed photographing many steps.

Then came the scary part.  The tiers of cake and all of its parts had to be moved to the reception venue unassembled.  Once there, the tiers were stacked, the fondant trim and finally the flowers would be added.  The transporting of this sugar monster nearly thirty miles was a little crazy making for all of us.  So many things could have gone wrong that would have been disastrous; the biggest thing that we knew we were fighting was the heat - it was  103 degrees.

All of the decorative flowers were packed in the empty egg cartons.  Surely if these masterpieces of cardboard can protect eggs in their travels, they will protect these delicate flowers.

There are zero pictures of the cake assembly process. We were all too busy praying.  Okay, I was praying; the young baker was frantically working to the mantra, "I will never do this again.  I will never do this again. I will never do this again." I tried to be the picture of calm.  That did not work to calm the young baker.  She said that the only reason that I was calm is because I had low standards and therefore did not stress out.  Yeah, whatever.

The young baker worked for an hour and half sticking dowels on the tiers of the cake so that they could be stacked.  She added the trim to each tier and then added the flowers, none of which broke in transit!  The florist came by and offered a few left over rose petals if they could be used to add a final touch.

The young baker added the final touches . . .

 . . .and the cake was done.  It was done in three days, by one young baker who had never made a four tier fondant covered wedding cake before (and may never again).

The young baker has come a long way. from this in 1993 . . .

 . . .to this in 2013.

"Stacked Tiers"

And they all ate happily ever after.  The end.

. . . except for the beer that happened at the Mexican restaurant on the way home.

193/365 Dry

"Drying Gum Paste Flowers"

Consider this a preview . . .stay tuned.

192/365 On the Street

"Past and Present Meet On The Street"

The juxtaposition of the old sign and new sign for this building one on top of the other made me chuckle.

191/365 Ordinary Moment

"Ordinary Anniversary"

Today is our anniversary.  When asked how long we have been married, our typical response is "forty-six years but only three to each other."  We had a short conversation about what we wanted to do to celebrate and came to the conclusion that we are pretty happy with our ordinary days and didn't really want or feel the need to do anything special.

I gave my last final exam of the summer term this morning.  Weber picked me up at school and we went and had a simple lunch at one of our favorite local cafes.  Afterwards, we came home home and I graded exams, averaged grades and figured out how to enter my grades using our new online system.  I think that I was successful!  I got all that done and we had time for a nap!

Being that today is our anniversary and we couldn't think of anything out of the ordinary to do, I laughed when I saw that the prompt for today was to photograph an ordinary moment.  I didn't have a sense of what I wanted to photograph.  I had ordered a couple of new Lego mini figures the other day; they arrived this afternoon.  The creative wheels started turning and I decided to have a little fun with them.

Most of the figures in today's picture came from the Lego wedding cake topper.  Who knew such a thing existed?  (It is a good thing that I wasn't so addicted to mini figures when we got married :-)  I had to mix a few pieces from other mini figures to get these scene just right.  The bride came with three different hair color choices.  The blonde worked OK.  The original groom's head had to much dark hair.  So, I swapped his head with the grandpa's head in the Series 10 mini figures.  He looks like Weber, don't you think?  

The set also came with champagne glasses.  We don't drink champagne very often; coffee, however is another story!  The grandpa figure has a coffee cup as does the librarian so I borrowed them.  Since we had decided to spend our day more or less quietly at home, the "shhh" on the librarian's mug made me laugh.

Then there is the dog . . . .the dog belongs to the trendsetter figure but looks so much like Harley we had to include her here.  Harley is happiest right smack in the middle of us.  It doesn't matter if we are sitting on the couch, at the desk in the office, or in bed.  Her preferred spot is in the middle.  

The color in the background is flowers that Weber had waiting for me when I got home from school.

Thankfully, most of my days involve a little fun and photography.  This seemed like a reasonable way to document our third anniversary and a few slices of the ordinary moments that create our wonderful life together.

And Lego is a whole lot more fun than leather, which is what Weber discovered is the designated gift for one's third anniversary.

190/365 Shadow

"Let It Bee"

189/365 One Flower

"Crepe Myrtle"

I probably shouldn't say this, but I am getting tired of taking and looking at pictures of flowers.  Don't get my wrong, I think flowers are beautiful, but there comes a point where I just want to enjoy the real thing rather than photograph them.  The only reason that I attempted today's prompt rather than going off on my own tangent was that it encouraged us to photograph a single flower from a different or unique perspective.   Perhaps this is because we are all getting tired of taking pictures of flowers and need something to maintain the interest.

We don't have any annual flowers planted.  I had good intentions, but I just never got there.  I don't know where my time has gone, but it definitely has not been spent gardening!  The only flowering anything that we have in the yard right now is the crepe myrtle out front.  It became the subject.

Though it was miserably hot and the air seemed perfectly still when we were out running errands this afternoon, by the time I decided to work on today's photo, there was just enough breeze to make shooting up at the branches a challenge with regard to focus.

I do like the above photo.  Most often it is the bright pink petals of the crepe myrtle that draws my attention.  The yellow in the middle is a nice contrast to all of the pink.  In the photo below, though it includes a whole flower, I was also drawn to the yellow in this one.  To me, it looks like the outline of a heart.  (I also see animals and people in rocks and clouds.)

"More Crepe Myrtle"

This morning at school, one of my students was lamenting her upcoming twenty second birthday, mourning over the fact that she is getting "so old."  Another older student (one who is older than I am) and I gave her the encouraging news that despite what the media and the cosmetics industry tell us, aging is not so bad.  In fact, life gets better, at least it has for me so far.  Yes, there are aches and pains, I don't move as fast and you do start to experience more losses, but those things are going to happen whether you embrace the aging process or not.  Growing older is well worth the trade off for being back at the stage where I was trying to figure out who I am, what I want and how I am going to get and become those things.  

Of all the things that I have learned in my fifty-plus years, the most important is that beauty resides on the inside and not the outside and that it cannot be contained in any one definition.

"Heather and Hume"

188/365 Seven

"Order Number 7"

Offspring No. 1 is the least helpful of my family members when it comes to being the subject of one of my pictures of the day.  Today she had no choice.  We went out for dinner and our order number was seven.  Because she is not in many of my photos, she got the honor of holding our table tracker in front of the camera.  You can tell from the expression on her face that she was thrilled by this.  I also only got one attempt at the photo and it was with my phone.  

This is a lousy photo both compositionally and technically but it tells many stories of our lives.  And, the photos are about the memories so rather than go for a more artistic take on the number 7, I am sticking with a real moment in our lives on 7/7/13.