Dani's Discovery Tours via Photos #2: Building a Cake Tower

While the first photo tour in the short series that I'm doing on my blog was about a church camping event, this second entry is more the description of a hands-on project I did in recent weeks.

My niece Holly got married to her Trevor on a beautiful Saturday in late July. The outdoor wedding, held at the home of the bride, was a very touching and meaningful event. (You can read about it here in my sister-in-law Rose's delightful account on her blog.) 

Holly asked me to make her wedding cake, which I was honored to do. Not only did I wish to help her out with wedding preparations in this way; I also somehow felt that it was one thing I could do in memory of Bonnie, Holly's first mom. 

Making and decorating a cake large enough to feed 270 wedding guests was both exciting and daunting. I thank God for my success; it was a prayed-over cake! And I could not have done it without the help of others - my mom-in-law, Holly's grandma and other relatives on the Stoll side, my family, my supportive friends - and google. 

Here, as I will show you in a series of photos, is how I went about it: 

Clustered on the kitchen counter are the ingredients for the white layers - a vanilla 

cake recipe that called for the eggs, butter, sour cream and milk to be at room temperature.

Can you tell that I baked the white layers on a very humid day? Look at those sweaty eggs!

Since each batch of vanilla cake batter called for six eggs, separated, 

I came up with my own version of an egg separator. 

I also improvised a baking strip - to help the cake rise in a more 

level manner - at the advice of my SIL Sharon via Mom Martin. 

This meant that I wrapped water-sodden paper towel sections 

inside long pieces of aluminum foil to make a band.

This is what the baking strip looked like wrapped around the outside 

of the 16-inch cake pan. I think the band really did help to keep the 

cake from forming a too high and mighty dome in the center. 

The bottom layer of the cake was 16 inches in diameter. This was certainly 

the largest cake layer I have ever baked. It seemed massive! I baked 

two cakes of this size to make up the bottom tier of the five-tier cake. 

Oops! I hope to learn from the mistakes I made while doing the wedding cake. 

The first lesson I learned was not to bake two layers at one time, at least not in my 

non-convection oven. The cake layer on the bottom shelf took forever long to get 

"done" and it rose crazily because of the layer baking above it. And that said top 

layer above it rose right up into the top oven element...oh, dear! I used the layers 

in the cake anyway - just shaved off the oops part. (My apologies to anyone 

who had a piece of cake that hinted of oven element flavor at the wedding!)

That's a LOT of cake! Mom Martin baked four of the cake layers for 

two of the white tiers of the cake, while I baked two white layers and 

four chocolate layers. I was immensely grateful for her help! We 

baked these cakes ahead, wrapped them in plastic wrap and foil, and 

stuck them in the freezer. Here are the ten cake layers thawing 

overnight, in preparation for decorating the next day.

I sketched a brief illustration for my reference, both for a little coaching session with 

Holly's Grandma S, (she's a retired professional cake decorator, whose advice was 

much appreciated) and for carrying out my own cake assembly plans. 

Grandma Stoll gladly lent us her cake board that was perfect for the base 

of the cake. I couldn't find the white cake foil she recommended, so I 

improvised and covered the wooden board first with white wedding 

gift wrap, and then with a layer of clear cellophane basket wrap. 

You can see the "pleats" on the edge, but I think it turned out just fine.

For applying the icing between the layers of the tiers, I piped a thick "cord" of icing 

on the outer edge that formed a sort of dike to hold in the spoonfuls of icing to be 

smoothed out with my angled icing spreader.

Transferring the top layers from their boards to the bottom layers of cake 

was one of the trickiest parts of cake assembly. Four lifters or pie servers 

as tools along with my hands and the hands of a bystander (which was 

likely to be Kerra) doing careful maneuvering brought accomplishment.

I applied the crumb coats to the chocolate layers first, 

to get the "crummiest" job over with first.

I have a large decorating tip that allows for getting a lot of icing on the 

cake in a short time. After applying swaths of icing on the sides of the cake, 

I used a straight-edged smoothing tool (thanks, Holly!) to even things out.

Following the smoothing technique, I used a sort of toothed tool to put a 

ribbed edging on the cake sides. A turntable is a handy utensil for cake 

decorating. Ideally, you hold the edging tool against the side of the 

iced cake and spin the whole cake to get the proper edging effect.

With so many layers of made-from-scratch cake in the wedding cake tower, it had 

considerable weight. To keep the tiers from collapsing in on each other, I separated them 

with several cardboard circles that I purchased at Walmart. I also used wooden dowel 

pieces that I pushed down into the cake layers. The cardboard cake circles rested 

on these dowels instead of pushing down on the cake proper.

I did most of the cake decorating and assembly the day before the wedding. 

I put the two bottom tiers together and transported them to a cooler next to 

the wedding tent at Mom and Dad Martin's place just a mile or two up 

the road from us. The three top tiers I housed overnight in my own fridge.

In the morning on the day of the wedding, I went to the wedding reception 

tent and assembled the whole cake in its place on the cake table.

Next, I put the icing borders on the cake. Thankfully, this covered up the gaps 

and the edges of the cardboard circles one could see between the tiers.

And, there it was, the tower standing (decently) straight and tall and 

looking surprisingly beautiful in spite of all its imperfections. I was very 

relieved and grateful at this point, besides being eager to see what 

Holly's cousin Bridgette would arrange on it to complete the creation.

She did such a fabulous job. I thought the dear little apples - supplied 

by orchard trees just outside the tent - added the perfect touch.

The bride and groom showed us how it was done. After they had the first 

taste, the wedding guests got their turn to partake of the wedding cake. 

From the reports I heard, the cake was a success in deliciousness.

I was pleased to "build" the cake for this sweet couple, and 

I will be far more pleased to watch them build their 

relationship with God and each other in marriage.

Dani's Discovery Tours via Photos #1: First Oasis Church Camping

(Photo Credit: Ricky Martin)

I'm interrupting my regular program of blogging to post a series called "Dani's Discovery Tours". I will design these posts to take you on a quick trip through some of my recent experiences (ha - if you call within the last month, "recent") via photos.

This first post in the series provides a glimpse into the first annual Church Camping event for our new church, Oasis, which was held on a very warm weekend in July.

That's an impressive heap 'o eggs and shells! Food is always a major part of the church camping experience. In the past, Grace Church's camping menus didn't vary a whole lot from year to year after we got into a pattern. This year the food committee wanted to try a few different meal ideas, such as a diner style breakfast on Saturday morning and a chicken bbq for Sunday lunch. Usual or unique, all the food was scrumptious!

Games and group activities are another involving and interesting part of the camping weekend. Even though it was very hot outdoors, people really got into playing Rock, Paper, Scissors in teams. Another group activity was a newspaper headlines/pictures challenge. Sometimes smaller groups of people played board games in the air-conditioned Stonehouse.

And, of course, the water balloon toss is an annual tradition that we could not miss. This activity starts out quite structured with rules about when to toss the balloon to your partner and how to take a step back every time you throw it and such, but as things progress, the water balloon toss becomes a free-for-all full-out dash and blast accompanied by lots of noise and water.

I already referred to the Stonehouse part of the campground at Hidden Acres, to which we could retreat for air-conditioning when we needed to cool off. It was also a wonderful shelter to escape to when a rain-and-wind storm blew in rather suddenly on Saturday evening. We moved our campfire sing and share time indoors, too. During the informal devotional time, one of  men revived an abandoned tradition by teaching us the music and motions to the children's song, "With Jesus in my Boat, I Can Smile at the Storm". 

For me, the church service on Sunday morning is always a special and meaningful time during the camping weekend. The outdoor pavilion we were in this year had such good acoustics and we had some very lively congregational singing. I just loved it! On Camping Sunday our pastor typically has a practical message about the church; this time he spoke about the pilgrimage of Oasis thus far.

Since we are a young church, (I realize Oasis hasn't been going very long yet, but here I mean we have lots of littles) much of church camping involved children in one way or another. 

By Sunday afternoon, the little people showed us just how much energy they had put into the weekend when their exhaustion-induced meltdowns began cropping up. Even in that, the children gave us an object lesson of sorts. Like one of my friends said, when we adults have our "issues", often we need someone in our church family to acknowledge that we're tired, to encourage us to be the mature and responsible people we are - even if we don't feel that way at the moment, and to gently steer us toward Home.

Her Gifted Hands

To all of my sisters at church (and elsewhere) who feel that you aren’t talented enough, or productive enough, or something enough, I wrote these lines of poetry with you in mind:

With her

long and slender

  graceful

    smooth and pale

      immaculate

        manicured

hands

that have

gripped a pen

wielded a paintbrush

danced over piano keys

typed on a computer keyboard

handled a Sunday School book

cradled a choir binder,

designed a craft

arranged a bouquet…

With her

sturdy

calloused

stained

creased

weathered

work-worn

reddened

hands

that have

milked cows

podded peas and snapped beans

shaped bread dough into loaves

scrubbed a toilet

pulled thistles

repaired appliances

wrestled ornery creatures

varnished woodwork…

My sister

has been to me

the creative hands

of Jesus.

This Post’s Quotable:

One mom’s way of describing her adventure-loving, risk-taking son: “He keeps my prayers fresh.”

This Post’s Childhood Memory:

When we lived in Northwoods Beach, one of our fascinating neighbors was a German lady whom we called Mrs. Sperling. I remember going to her house for tea. She peered at us children through her coke-bottle glasses while she spoke to my mom in a strong, heavily-German-accented voice. I got the impression that, had she been a school teacher, she would’ve been of the very strictest sort. Once, she described a special German dish to Mom, and she kept referring to letting the milk get “sick” in the making of it. Later Mom explained to me that Mrs. Sperling meant allowing the milk to get thick, instead of sick. I figured that if one added curdled milk to a food, it would certainly be “sick”, as well as thick!