All cake decorators have mishaps, moments of panic, and full on cake disasters from time to time. This week it was my turn. Bethany's mom asked me to make a birthday cake for her 18th birthday (that's one of those special birthdays in case you were wondering). Bethany is the oldest in her family of 8 children and in addition to turning 18, Bethany is graduating from high school next month. Her mom wanted something special for her. Her mom said that Bethany loves to read and collects snow globes and wanted the cake to reflect her interests. Aside from telling me her favorite colors (red and black) and that Bethany doesn't like glitter, I was given free reign over the design. If you're ever ordering a cake from a decorator- give them free reign. Trust me. We end up doing way more work than what we quoted you for and having a lot of fun with the design. We did talk about doing one of those gelatin bubbles that you see on Pinterest- but all of my research showed that those bubbles end up cloudy and if you don't mix in food coloring it looks like a dirty bubble. You can use pricey gelatin sheets (if you can find them) but even then they just don't look as good as glass. I opted to use a glass fishbowl from the craft store and inserted one of Bethany's senior photos into the snow globe. I made fondant books and wrote in the names of her three favorite books; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Giver, and The Scarlet Letter as well as a few of my favorites; Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Unwind... think of it as a book list passed from one bookworm to another. I placed the "snow globe" on top and topped it with a fondant book. I photographed it, very pleased with myself and headed to work for the day.
I didn't account for the fact that we'd just had horrible flooding rains here in Houston and the humidity level was 87%. That was my fault. When I came home the poor cake looked awful. The books were bubbled falling off and the fondant was "weeping." Weeping fondant is fondant that is bleeding. Fondant sort of acts like a sponge and absorbs moisture from the icing under it and from the air around it. The book titles were just running off the spines. It was horrible. My cake was weeping and I wanted to, too. I set to work repairing the damage and was able to flatten out the books, but I couldn't get the titles back on. The fondant was just too wet. It wasn't perfect, but when we left the house it looked decent. Anytime I deliver a cake, even if we're only meeting at a location and the client is taking it the rest of the way I open the box and show them the cake- this is also my last chance to make sure that everything looks as good as it did when I left the house. This cake did not look as good as did when I left the house. The humidity was killing me!
Bethany was so sweet about it and said that she liked it. I felt horrible. In the course of our conversations I learned that the family was postponing their celebration until two days later and I knew that even in the fridge that cake wasn't going to last two days. I tried to be optimistic, but within a few minutes of leaving I knew that I was going to remake the cake for their Friday celebration. My original plan was to not even tell them I was doing it (out of fear that they would tell me not to and that it was OK), but when Bethany's mom sent me a picture of Bethany smiling with her cake and I saw how much worse it looked in that short period of time since I'd left it, I told her that I was going to remake it. Of course she told me I didn't have to, but I told her that this cake had started off way too pretty to look the way it did. I told them to go ahead and eat the ugly one and that they would have a new one for the party two days later.
The second cake was a success. The humidity level had gone down, and I babied that cake so much. I also made a change to the inner structure of the cake (the way that I had the snow globe mounted) and it was perfect. This time when Bethany's mom sent me a picture of her smiling with her cake I didn't cringe and tear up. So although this cake story was a bit of a horror story, it had a happy ending and I learned a valuable lesson about Houston weather, humidity, and weeping fondant.
The End
