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!