Double Chocolate Cake filled with Chocolate Fudge and covered in

Vanilla Buttercream and decorated with sugar Pointsettia flowers

Happy Sunday! Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We certainly did and I enjoyed having a whole week off. Having a full work schedule is surely something to be grateful for but a week off from work is certainly wonderful too!

This week brought a Christmas Party Cake for friends. They throw this amazing party each year and so I created this cake as a centerpiece for their event. Now, I've made it fairly clear that I'm not a buttercream fan, more of a fondant girl here, but this turned out so pretty I was thrilled to be able to present it at the party. Unfortunately 150 rough graded freeway miles had a different idea for me and my creation. Delivery is the worst part of this job in my opinion (others would say it's cleaning up from this job but I think delivery is horrid!LOL!). You spend hours upon hours working on what you hope is just this side of perfection only to take a huge risk that your edible work of art will end up in a pile of cake rubble. Fortunately, for me, cake rubble wasn't quite how far it went but about 75 miles into our trip I saw that the buttercream was literally sliding off the top tier of the cake in a nice neat line. Think of rolling down a window...only with icing slowing revealing the cake underneath! Having delivered cakes for a few years now I always carry a kit with me and knew that I could fix what needed to be fixed when I arrived. Once we did arrive I seperated the tiers, found out that only the bottom one was needed (the top tier was frosted and used as a treat in leftovers), removed the damaged front pointsettia and the damaged trim and gold decorations, reiced the whole cake, retrimmed with buttercream and new gold decorations and placed the pointsettia cake topper on top of the now single tier cake. I added a few new decorations on top and...

The final version of the cake.

Fortunately, in this case, the cake was for friends and it wasn't a set design but rather left up to me and that there was plenty of cake still for their guest list. Sometimes as a cake artist you have to think quickly on your feet because it IS cake and anything can happen. I do have a fancy cake delivery case which prevents toppling of a cake but nothing can prevent vibration damage. You just have to learn how to work around it when the damage happens and worse comes to worse??? Apologize and refund if the damage is total and you have nothing to deliver but cake rubble. Thank goodness I was able to put a beautiful finished cake on the table for this event, their guests none the wiser!

This upcoming week brings two smaller cakes. One is for a birthday and the other is a simple holiday cake. I'll share those next Sunday!

Cat