Work is Work… Even if it involves cake…
Who ever said “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” was wrong. Not completely wrong, but a degree of wrong. The truth is when you choose to do something you love as a way to make money in life you’re undoubtedly going to have to do things that you don’t enjoy.
For me it’s dishes, coloring fondant and putting a smooth finish on a cake. Now, I obviously love baking and I love trying new things but the dishes that accumulate are ridiculous. Think of how many dishes you have at the end of prepping dinner for the Thanksgiving and then add all the dishes you’ll have at the end of the actual meal now divide that by number of Tupperware containers you’ll use to store your left overs and you’ve got approximately the number of dishes it takes for me to get a cake out. (Who puts math in a blog!) Okay maybe not that many but it feels like it, every time.
Coloring fondant isn’t difficult but it’s low on my list of likes. It’s just time consuming and sometimes if it’s cold the fondant (that I buy in a 25 lbs. bucket) is really hard so it takes longer to warm up, than you have to get the color in there and of course you really need to work it into the fondant so you don’t end up with streaks (unless that’s what you’re going for… which is never the case).
And finally my Achilles heel. Putting a smooth finish on a cake… To me it makes a cake. To have a smooth finish be perfect is almost impossible (for me). Buttercream is so delicate when you apply it to a cake, so when you go for a smooth finish you have to make sure the buttercream is whipped so it’s smooth. You don’t want it to be too cold because your buttercream will start to pull and leave little marks throughout the cake. And if it’s too warm it’ll melt (pretty self-explanatory…) Than you have those moments where you’re doing the final coat and you go to smooth over the top (which you want to do in as few strokes as possible) but you end up with a tiny lip on the edge so then you have to go over it again. And then it’s a little lower than the rest of the cake so you try to work the other areas down. And then somewhere in that process you’ve made so many little marks that you have to just start over again because, what is this amateur hour? Who’s going to want a cake with tons of divots in it? And exactly how much frosting have I used? Didn’t this used to be a 6” cake why is it overflowing on an 8” board did I use ALL the buttercream? And so it goes almost every time I do a cake.
And that’s it, those three little things drive me absolutely nuts. I usually forget about them by the time I deliver the cake and get to see the look on people’s faces when they see the finished product. I definitely forget about them when I take an order for a cake. But there always there, looming in the background…
Date Added: 12.30.14