The Pipe Queens at the 420 house

So, last month I made a cake for a silent auction, and as I was icing it in the wee hours of the morning, I was flooded with memories from my former life as a wedding cake baker back at USU. The great thing about any wedding services is that people lose their minds and all control of their money when their kids announce an engagement. I sometimes felt a little guilty at how much we were charging. It was a bit of a racket, I think. But it paid the bills and I'm grateful to have done it.

Anyway, all the fun stuff about being at Utah State had nothing to do with school. Should've taken that as I sign, I guess, that I was pursuing the wrong profession, but live and learn, eh. Some cake stories.

The first wedding cake Jamie and I did was quite literally prayed together. I was still living in Orem, Jamie was in Logan, and she had talked a friend of hers into letting us do her wedding cake for cost. She chose a lovely four-tiered fondant cake with a ribbon around each tier that she saw in Martha Stewart Weddings. Of course, she didn't know that we'd never done a wedding cake before, let alone a fondant cake. I drove to Logan the day before the wedding to knock this cake out. Future bakers of America--if you value your sanity, don't ever plan to bake, cool, ice and decorate a four-tiered wedding cake in 24 hours. Really bad idea. But how would we know? We started baking, but you really can't fill and ice the cakes until they are entirely cool or you end up with a greasy, sticky mess, so it was eleven that night before we started icing and decorating. Fondant is not hard, once you know a few little tricks to get smooth icing underneath it, and keep it from wrinkling and drying out. Fondant is incredibly frustrating if you are uninitiated (plus, it tastes like paste. Go with big swirls of chocolate ganache--not white, but infinitely more delectable) and we were definitely uninitiated. At 11:30 that night we had one butt ugly top tier, and 3 larger, more difficult tiers to go. We were in trouble.

This is why Jamie (and the Big Guy, too, really) is, has been, and always will be on my favorite people list. At 11:30, we locked the front door so no one would interrupt us, got down on our knees, and pleaded with the Lord to guide our hands and help us get a beautiful cake to this girl's wedding in twelve hours. We got up off our knees, and I swear, not even five minutes later Jamie's sister walks through the door. She'd done fondant before, and in less than a half hour she had filled us in on what we need to know about fondant. We busted that baby out, it was gorgeous, and we did not sleep a wink until it was delivered and set up at the reception center at 11 the next day. Jamie tried to force me to take a nap before I got back on I-15 to drive home, but every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was that beautiful cake, leaning like the tower of Pisa. I finally gave up, and groggily drove home.

That's definitely one of the hazards of the wedding cake biz--the possibility of an engineering breakdown that will result in collapse. Never happened to me with a finished cake, but I did send a filled (not yet iced or decorated, thank heavens) cake flying across the kitchen once. It actually was quite beautiful as it flew through the air, like it was in slow motion, and landed in a crumby heap on the linoleum. Too bad we didn't have a dog. Luckily, I had learned to bake and freeze well before the wedding, so time was not an issue. It did seem to be quite a waste though. A fourteen inch tier is a lot of cake.

Another hazard is the bride. They look so lovely and radiant on the wedding day, but don't let it fool you. Even under the calmest demeanor lurks a control freaky crazy woman with sometimes questionable taste. I did a goopy, heavily piped and swagged iced cake once, and the bride and her family promptly draped it with fake blue flowers and plastic grapes, the colors of which I have never seen in nature. That was fun. Or the hours of chocolate swirls drawn freehand with a parchment cone-beautiful, but agonizingly detailed. And here's a little tip for future brides and mothers-of-the-bride--I can't always match merengue flowers to a Pantone color chip, no matter how much you want the deepest possible red. Egg whites have a mind of their own.

My favorite moment, though, was when my friend Dustin walked in one day when we were decorating a cake, and hollered "Hey, it's the pipe queens!" Our address was 420 N, and our house had become known as the 420 house. I really think that folks could have gotten the wrong idea about us if certain people on campus started hearing about the pipe queens at the 420 house. One mood-altering addictive substance at a time, please!

I miss the days of three keys

I'm the world's worst blogger. I'm sure of it. I never blog. Oh well.

So, part of the reason I never blog is because I rarely have all that much time to actually sit down and eat a meal or sleep a good 7 or 8 hours. When did life get this crazy, and how do you all do it with families and kids to take care of and all the other divine complications? This week, this whole summer, really, I've felt like it just never stops--work, church, family. My life has become an endless round of things I need to get done, responsibilities to take care of, bills to pay, programs to host, phone calls to make, fliers to deliver...and on and on and on. I don't remember how to spell fun (phun?), let alone how to have it. It's been a bit discouraging, and I've been feeling it around the edges of my brain for a long time, but this week two seemingly meaningless moments brought it into focus.


The first was last Friday, sitting at Movies 8 with my darling little niece Mary. Once a month I have a day with one of my nieces. I take whichever girl has her turn that month, and we go to the movies, or go swimming, or to the park or whatever they want to do, eat junk food, and hang out just the two of us. Then we take ice cream cones home for everyone, and I'm sure Gina hates me for hyping them up on sugar and then giving them back, but oh well, that's my job. Anyway, Mary wanted to see Wall-e, but it wasn't playing anywhere, so we had to settle for Kung-Fu Panda. There I am with this delightful creature in my lap, who is dripping rootbeer from a cup almost bigger than her, and oohing, and aahing, and oh-no-ing at all the scary parts, and I love how she loves it, how it is just pure fun and escape for her. And I started wondering when I stopped feeling that. And then I started wondering how I get back to feeling that. I realized that since about January, I've been to the movies maybe four times, twice to see Kung-Fu Panda. I like Jack Black, but not that much. I've been hiking once this summer, and camping not at all. And I fear my life will keep me from going to a single football game this fall. Not great tragedies, I know, but how do you balance living with what makes you feel alive?


The second moment sort of symbolizes why I can't remember how to have fun, I think. I was at the Smith's on Monday night at about 10:30 (I can't decide if grocery stores being open all the time is a blessing or a curse) buying food for RS Enrichment meeting this week. I was feeling entirely overwhelmed staring down an endless and awful schedule of sleeplessness and craziness this week. It felt like standing at the foot of Everest without a sherpa. I handed my keys over to the checker to scan my fresh values card, who chirped as he handed them back "Wow, you've got a ton of keys. I have, like, three." I encouraged him to cherish these days of three keys, that someday he might really miss the weightlessness of it. And I started to wonder if any of those keys on my ring, or the worries attached to them, could somehow be retired.

I don't know what this means. There is a part of me that scolds myself for being selfish, for wanting to feel entirely weightless, hopeful and alive again. There's part of me that says if I were more devoted, more compassionate, less selfish and egocentric, I wouldn't have this problem. I would have joy in spite of all this. There's another part of me that just wants someone to go hiking and camping and footballing with, or someone to go with me to see Tony Lucca and Ray Lamontagne. Everything, even the chaos, is more fun when there's some kindred soul to do it with, and my kindred souls are all sort of far right now in one way or another. And part of me thinks if I could just fall asleep and stay asleep on a consistent basis, everything would look rosier. I don't know, but I'm holding on, praying my guts out that Lori is right--that it will get better.

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one. We're all feeling a little uncertain and anxious, I think. Most of you just seem to be handling far better than I. But if you do feel discouraged and miss having fun, God bless you. I still believe in the deepest part of my soul that He wants us to be happy, wants me to be happy. And He'll take our hands if we let Him lead.