My best work

About this time last year (or was it two years ago? They all seem to run together these days!) I did a wedding cake for a dear friend. I had never made a cake for anyone before so I think it was sheer confidence that prompted me to offer to make her cake. I watched Ace of Cakes enough and I knew I could figure it out. She sent me pictures of a couple ideas she had for cakes and they all looked so easy, so I told her I could do it!

For anyone who hasn't tried to do a professional-looking cake, I recommend you try it. It really is NOT as hard as it looks!

I baked the cakes a couple days before the wedding and froze them. I heard that you can freeze them and then brush the crumbs off while it is still very cold and that is supposed to help the frosting to remain crumb-free. Well, that didn't work well for me. But that is why you see a brush in the picture below. You'll also notice that one of the cakes had a big piece that broke off, but that's nothing that frosting can't hold together! Frosting makes a great glue! :)



The bride didn't want to use fondant since no one really likes the taste, so I told her we could do buttercream. I searched the internet and found the "paper-towel method" for smoothing buttercream to look like fondant, so that's what I did. I definitely recommend this method! It seems like everyone prefers buttercream and you really can get it to look smooth. The cake below was a bit frozen, so the buttercream was too hard to smooth properly. But I knew it would be mostly covered up, so it worked.



This layer wasn't frozen, so the buttercream smoothed a little better.



One key ingredient that really helps is a mom that is willing to help you when it's past midnight and you're about to break down in tears from sheer exhaustion. Moms are good for stuff like that. :)



Here it is in the assembling stages. I started to worry that it wouldn't look nice at this point. But... as you'll see, frosting covers a multitude of sins.



Here are the layers after all the dots and embellishment was added. Looks like it might actually be presentable!



Here I am at 3 a.m. with the almost-finished product. Time for sleep! The flowers would be added the next day right before the ceremony.



It was really hot that day, and I was obviously inexperienced about what to do when it's really hot, so I spent the whole morning freaking out about the buttercream melting and sliding into a large heap of frosting on the cake table. Thankfully that didn't happen, but I did have to do some re-smoothing at the church!



Finished product! It was a success! Everyone loved it and I can't tell you how many people asked me for my cake recipe. Can you say Betty Crocker? ;)

My voice (along with the rest of my body and mind) is tired!

Several weeks ago, a member at church approached me about an opportunity to audition for a new Acappella Praise & Harmony album. He is intimately involved with this project and I couldn't help but be excited at the thought of getting to record under the direction of Keith Lancaster! That name probably doesn't mean much to a lot of people, but I grew up listening to Acappella and AVB. I remember the group way back when it was just Keith and Rodney Britt (pretty much the best bass that has ever walked the earth... I'm just sayin'). The first concert I ever attended was an Acappella concert. In my eyes, this man is a LEGEND!

My Papa and I ended up asking Matthew, my brother, and Audrey M. (another girl from church) to fill out our quartet. We recorded and I am pretty proud of our finished product! If I knew how to post audio here, I would do it. In the meantime, you can check out www.xanga.com/sbbh and click on the audio tab. It is the most recent entry.

We sent in our audition earlier this week and we should get a "yes" or "no" within a couple weeks. It was hard to schedule my recording time around all my midterms, though! I think I did okay on my tests, but what a stressful week. On top of the aforementioned obligations, I sang in a wedding on Saturday, which of course included a rehearsal on Friday evening. To say I had a busy week is quite an understatement!

My cousin, Andy, and I were asked to sing "When God Made You" and "Lucky" in the wedding. I've known both of those songs for a while now and learned my part weeks ago. You can imagine my chagrin when we started the rehearsal and Andy didn't know the songs very well yet.

Yikes!

We played it off for the rehearsal. After we practiced the ceremony, we watched a video that someone had made for the bride and groom. I have known the groom as long as I can remember and have gotten acquainted with the bride over the past couple years. They are such sweet people and seeing the love they had for each other and the love that all those in attendance had for them - well, it just gave me the warmest feeling. The video showed pictures of each of them growing up, and at one point the groom's very pregnant sister came on the screen and her voice came over the loudspeaker. She told them that she wanted to be there so badly, but that the doctors wouldn't let her come and that she loved them so much. I am not doing it justice, but there was not a dry eye in the church. It was so bittersweet. Her words were precious, but we all wished she could have been there.

Andy went home and practiced, so during the ceremony it went off without a hitch - except for the recessional where I got so caught up in watching the beautiful bride and groom that I missed my entrance! Thankfully no one was paying attention to the singers at that point. :)

The reception was beautiful, but cold. Cold is preferable to raining for an outdoor event, though, so we were all thankful!

Hopefully I'll have pictures to post soon. I borrowed Matthew's awesome camera during the reception and for the first time, took some great pictures. Pioneer Woman has introduced me to the world of photography from behind the lens. I had a great time playing with the aperture and manual focus! I thought I did a pretty good job for my first time! I'll let you be the judge of that when I finally get them on here, though.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!