So my friend Leigha hired me to do the baking for her wedding. We initially agreed upon this BEFORE discussing details (typical Kate) but I was just honored that she would trust me with such a thing! In the end she ordered 100+ sugar cookies, 150 cupcakes, and a small cake for she and her fiancé/hubby to cut into. For someone like me, this is quite an undertaking. I made a plan, ordered my supplies, and over the course of a few weeks, built up quite a supply of butter in my fridge. Every time I went to the store the check out lady looked at me like I was a weirdo; what could I possibly need all this butter for!?!?!
So we will start with the cookies. These cookies are not hard to do but they they take forever! In my opinion, these cookies are better a few days old, and that was good because I could make them a few days in advance. After making three batches of cookie dough, I spent about 4 hours after work one night rolling out dough while trying to keep it cold, getting it on a cookie sheet, and getting it in the oven. While they were baking, I did this all over again so I was ready withe the next batch right when the oven was available. I started working at 5:30 and finished just before 10:00.
Here they are stacked up after baking. There really is no such thing as too much counter space.
The next step on the cookies is to ice and sugar them. THIS is what really takes a ton of time. I came home from work the next night and work from 5:20 or so until 11:20. Allen just LOVES when I work on these cookies. Every. Single. Thing. in the kitchen is covered in powdered sugar and colored sanding sugar. Including Chopper and I. My fingers are stained pink, Chopper is high as a kite from licking powdered sugar off the floor in large quantities, and after all that, THEN I have to clean up the mess.
The finished product: each cookie was individually bagged and tied. That was the night after icing them. So all-in-all, I am guessing I had over 12 hours in the cookies alone.
The Friday before the wedding I took off work. SO glad I did too because for one brief second, I thought I might just do it after work one day. C-R-A-Z-Y. I got up and started baking at 9am. I finished up at 6:45. AND I mean, that was NO BREAKS. I didn't even eat except for a LaraBar. 1) Glad I took the day off. 2) The next house I have WILL have double ovens. IT WILL. 3) Since the only time I sat down the entire day was to drive to pick Alex up from school and make a pit stop for MORE butter, my feet literally caused pain when I walked. I was, well, whipped.
This is what my entire day that day looked like. Except five minutes after this photo, things didn't look so shiny and clean or organized.
So I spent the entire day on Friday baking. I failed to mention that Leigha told me at one point that the RSVP list had reached 150. Well, it just didn't seem right to do the exact same number of cupcakes as people attending so, I, well, I ended up making 216 cupcakes. I am nuts I know. Leigha had also requested a few different flavors. I agreed that was a good idea, but the problem there is that then people feel the need to get more than one cupcake. I felt like I should make more than 150 and I did. Turns out, I was right. I had several conversations that went just like this:
Guest: Oh you did so well. Your cupcakes are delicious. Good job!
Me: Oh! Thanks so much. Which flavor did you try?
Guest: What do you mean? I tried all three...
It was at this point I decided NOT to tell them how much sugar was in just one cupcake's icing. It is enough to kill an elephant. I mean it.
Here are the Strawberry Lemonade Cupcakes: a strawberry cupcakes filled with lemon curd. Iced with buttercream icing with chopped strawberries whipped in.
Here are the Wedding Cake Cupcakes: A white almond cupcakes filled with apricot jam, topped with almond buttercream icing.
And here are the Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with a simple buttercream icing.
The day I did the icing was the Sat morning of the wedding. I had NUMEROUS people (to my surprise) offer to help me on this day. I truly think people think that because the end result of baking can be so pretty, the entire process is pretty and fun. I feel like people glamorize it a bit. I have one friend that I am so close to, I KNEW she would help me where I needed it: washing up dishes so I could use them over and over again. SO I asked Sheila to come over at 8:30 on Sat morning (Yeah, she truly does love me). She arrived ready to help and didn't even complain when she washed my mixer bowls no less than 15 times. She did however give me puppy dog eyes and asked if she could put the sprinkles on the chocolate cupcakes. So sprinkle she did. And did you see them?!!? I mean, they'd be NOTHING without those sprinkles! ;) But honestly, if it weren't for Sheila washing those bowls, spatulas, and icing tips over and over again, this would have probably taken me a good 2 hours longer than it did. And she did get a glimpse of how truly unglamorous baking can be.
Here are all 216 of them lined up in their boxes on my kitchen table.
Last but not least, I needed to do the cake. I told Leigha that I would make her a 6" round for she and Kenji to cut into. She requested ombre: fading from dark pink to light pink. I had never done this before, but I concocted a plan. A very abstract plan. I am not even going to get into how the cakes came together but I will say this: for some reason I was very nervous about the cakes. I got the icing ready in a few bags in a few colors. I took a deep nervous breath just as Sheila started washing a bowl. By the time she finished, I had iced the cake. Ok, cakes. I had made a back up cake just in case I got nervous and mucked it all up. But I had an idea and once I got started on it, I was moving very quickly. Below are the two cakes. See the one closest to the camera? I ended up using that one for the wedding. It was not exactly ombre, but I was so surprised at how quickly I came to this result with no flaws on the cake, I decided not to press my luck. So it didn't exactly fade from dark to light pink, but we got there in a round about way. The one in the background was my "back up" cake that I didn't use. In fact, the next day I took it to my neighbors house because it happened to be her favorite flavor. Allen doesn't have a sweet tooth and I assure you I eat enough of this stuff!
Here are Leigha and Kenji cutting the cake. Awwww.
Here I am, eating cupcakes in my usual, elegant way.
So, quite a large project (for me anyway) under my belt. I learned that given enough time and forethought, I am a decent planner, I have a ton of people who support me and think I do ok at this gig, my neighbors rock, baking is in NO WAY glamorous, and two kitchenaid mixers and a double oven are necessary for me to commit to something like this again.
Thanks for checking in!
