Wedding Cake: The End

Saturday was the day of the wedding, and I spent most of it putting the final touches on the cake and assembling and decorating it at the reception site. There are several good reasons to transport the tiers separately, not the least of which is the weight: the assembled cake weighed in at a beastly 58 pounds.

But, prior to stacking comes one of my favorite of the techniques I have learned- how to make the frosting smooth. Maybe you noticed that the spatula strokes were still visible on the frosted cakes from yesterday, but there is a solution. Once the frosting has dried just a bit, take pieces of parchment paper, hold them against the frosting, and just give the cake a gentle massage with your hands. Now, as heavy as these tiers are, it's not enough to neatly stack them on top of one another and hope for the best. There are actually little dowel rods that go in the cake layers and are cut to the height of just below the frosting, creating a support for the tier above. I used six rods in the large cake and four in the middle one. So, there I was in my sugar-dusted apron, sawing away at dowel rods on the downstairs workbench. (Not quite the image that usually accompanies the thought of cake baking.) To measure the height, stick in one rod and mark it with a pencil, then remove. Mark as many as you'll need to the same height, then pull out the saw. Besides providing support, this also helps the tiers look even, as the dowel rods are all the same height even if the cake top isn't. A little icing fills in the gaps once the layers are on, and no one will ever know.
Actually driving the cakes to the reception is one of the most stressful parts. I took my parents' Buick, trusting its larger trunk and smoother suspension and knowing that other drivers would expect that kind of vehicle to drive so slowly. Then, it was just a matter of stacking the tiers, filling in any gaps, and smoothing the sides. Using real ribbon and fresh flowers is easier than making them frosting, and I think it typically looks better.

There were two main challenges in the final stages- greedy fingers and grease stains. The bride's little brother was flitting about, wanting to be as close as possible the sugar high that the frosting offered him. Anxious to avert disaster, I resorted to bribery. He didn't cross the boundary of the edge of the table, and I gave him a spoonful of frosting before we went to the wedding. The other challenge solved itself. I noticed the splotches from the fat in the frosting only after I put on the green ribbon. I tried two layers, but you can see it didn't help. For the top one, I thought to cut a strip of wax paper to place under the ribbon, but I was sure the green ribbon was lost to blotchiness. But, by the time we returned to the reception site following the wedding, it has seeped so evenly that it looked spotless again.

One hour and 45 minutes before the wedding, the last flower was laid in place. And, voila:

Wedding Cake: The Labor

Most of the work of making a wedding cake isn't in the artistic presentation, but in repeatedly mixing batter, filling cake pans, and transferring giant slabs of cake without creating fault lines. Monotonous as it can be, there are a few tricks to making the final product turn out as you would like. Here are some pictures of the process:
Both the metal cone in the center and the strip of wet fabric around the pan help to ensure more even baking. The plywood on the left was covered in foil to make a tray for the cake. My uncle cut this one for me; he had also cut the one I used for my sister's wedding cake.
In order to get the full 2" height of the pan, the cake batter needs to fill 2/3 to 3/4 of the pan. All the cake that rises above the pan gets cut off to even with the edge of the pan.
That way, once the cake is flipped onto the rack, it lies perfectly flat, cooling and waiting to be cut in half lengthwise to make two 1" layers.

The filling for the chocolate cake is chocolate mousse. I've used this recipe several times, and I like the rich chocolate flavor and the consistency. It's pretty easy, particularly since I used the grater attachment on a food processor to "chop" the chocolate.
Chocolate Mousse
2 cups heavy cream
3 oz unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup sugar

Heat 1/2 cup cream in saucepan over medium heat, until just about to boil. Finely chop the chocolate and place in bowl. Pour hot cream over chocolate, stir once, cover, and set aside. Whip remaining cream and sugar in the other bowl until they form soft peaks. Stir the chocolate mixture until all is melted and well incorporated, then fold in the cream. Chill for at least two hours.The first time I made this recipe, I was worried that it would be no better than than the chocolate Redi-Whip, but as it chills, it thickens and even seems to get richer. The bowl on the left is a fresh batch, not yet chilled, and the bowl on the right is one that had chilled overnight. I've only used it thus far as a cake filling, but perhaps someday I'll serve it as a dessert in its own right, in little chocolate bowls or martini glasses, with raspberries and chocolate shavings as a garnish.
But, back to the cake. To fill the layers, pipe a barrier of frosting around the edge of the cake layer. This keeps the mousse (or raspberry, or pudding, or whatever filling you like) from squishing out when you stack the layers. Spread the mousse with a spatula or the back of the spoon. One recipe of the chocolate mousse filled each layer of this 12" square cake, so I needed three batches total.

So, that's the basic idea, and like I wrote above, the whole process is a repetition of these steps- all day long. And, in the end, you get three square cakes, filled and ready to frost. Notice the huge bowls of frosting on the right; it took all of that to frost those three cakes. Here's what they looked like naked: By midnight the night before the wedding, the three cakes were frosted, waiting to be smoothed, transported, stacked , and decorated. And yes, I stored them covered and in the refrigerator, not out on the kitchen table.

Wedding Cake: The Vision

Although I've never heard of anyone craving the taste of wedding cake, the visual presentation of one is typically part of the American wedding reception. You've probably consumed several, and I imagine that most looked better than they tasted. Over the next couple of days, I'll be working on baking and decorating one for the wedding of a friend of mine, so while I wait for things to simmer, set, whip or bake, I'll be posting about the process. Hopefully, the end result will please both the eye and the palate. Neither you nor I may find out about of the second, as I'm a vegan and you're only experiencing it electronically (with the possible exception of some New Hope-ers).

So first: the vision. The bride wants the cake to reflect that of her parents, so it is a three-tier square cake. However, her parents' had pillars and an overabundance of frosting; she's decided to go with a "less-is-more" look, and rightly so, in my opinion. The plan is for a bottom tier 16" square, yellow cake with raspberry filling. The middle will be 12" square, chocolate cake with chocolate mousse filling, and the top will be 8" square, same flavors as the bottom. It will be frosted in an ivory-colored frosting, flavored something butter-almond-vanilla-esque. Each layer will have a ribbon, pink or green, around it, and I'll festoon it with fresh flowers coordinating with those of the bridal party's once I get there.

Now: planning. I had never made a raspberry filling, so it seemed wise to make a test-run batch well in advance. But, what does one do with raspberry filling and no cake? So, I made a vegan lemon cake for my birthday, and the raspberry filling was fully approved by those who tried it. If you're surprised at the idea of a vegan cake, you might be interested to know that it is actually a post-Depression era recipe designed to save money. It was a disaster the first several times I attempted to make it, but the problem was my own illiteracy: baking powder and baking soda are not freely interchangeable. But, once done correctly, the final product was tasty and fluffy, and no actual cows or chickens were harmed in the making. The lemon was a great complement to the raspberry filling, and I iced it with vanilla frosting and garnished with fresh raspberries and lemon zest. Sorry, no pictures, but if needed, I can provide references from carnivores who went back for seconds.

Vegan Lemon Cake Recipe
Ingredients:
1 large lemon (juice and rind)
1 1⁄2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
6 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 tsp. vinegar (Yep, vinegar, but I promise you, you won’t taste it.)
1 tsp. vanilla
Water

Preheat oven to 350°.
Put flour, sugar and baking soda into a mixing bowl. Mix them together fairly well.
Then grate all your lemon rind into a measuring cup. (I find this is lots easier using a large liquid measure. I just lay the grater over the liquid measure and the rind falls in.)
Then, take your already sorely abused lemon, cut it in half and squeeze the juice from both halves into your measuring cup.
Next add water to your rind and lemon juice until you have filled one cup.
Pour your lemon juice mixture into your bowl of dry ingredients.
Add oil.
Add vanilla.
Add vinegar.
Mix well.
Mixture will foam.
Pour into an ungreased 8 inch cake pan. Bake 25 minutes, or until cake bounces back a bit when you touch its center.


Raspberry Filling Recipe
Serves/Yields: 3 1/2 cups
Prep. Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes

2 12 ounce packages of frozen raspberries (not packed in syrup)
1 1/3 cups water
1 1/2-2 cups granulated sugar (or to taste. 2 cups will be pretty sweet)
2 T of lemon juice (optional)
5-6 T of cornstarch dissolved in 1/2 cup of water

In a saucepan combine the raspberries, water, sugar, and lemon juice. Bring to boil and simmer for 15-20 minutes or until the raspberries have broken down. Remove the mixture from the heat and strain with a fine mesh sieve. (I found that using the back of a ladle to rub the mixture through the sieve helped encourage more fruit to come through. I also like it with some seeds, so I didn't try too hard for a thorough job). Return the strained mixture to the heat. Dissolve the cornstarch in 1/2 cup of water. Whisk the slurry into the raspberry mixture. Bring the mixture back to a boil and simmer for 5 more minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and cool completely. It will take awhile to set up. It will thicken like a jelly. May stir it for easier spreading on cake.

NB: At no point should you leave the raspberry mixture simmering while you go upstairs to try to set up a photo scanner so you can have a picture of the bride's parents' wedding cake in your blog post. Your attempts to scan will fail, and your raspberry filling will boil out all over the stovetop in a syrupy, sugary mess.

More on Women and Jesus (and then a surprising source of creative writing)

Some of my favorite writing on women is found in two essays by Dorothy Sayers, "Are Women Human?" and "The Human-Not-Quite-Human." Essentially, she points out that women are often treated as class separate from the human race, perhaps exalted, maybe disparaged, but as something essentially other than human. Obviously, her point is that this perspective, whether explicitly or implicitly thought and taught, is harmful to both women and to men. Truth is, "a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual." Her writing is clear, witty, thoughtful, and oh-so-delightfully British. If you haven't, you should read these essays. The second contains one of my favorite paragraphs:

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man-- there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!": who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

____________________________________________________

And, as another example of a well-written paragraph, proof from a matchbook cover that even directions can be written with a flair for the witty and creative:

Instructions: Firmly grasp individual match, keeping fingers away from the igniting tip. After liberating said match from its confinement, assure that your matchbook cover is closed. Briskly strike the tip across the provided strikeplate on the backside of your matchbook to facilitate ignition of said match. Repeat when necessary. Flame good.

Gender and Conflict

The views of gender are often distorted, resulting in injustice and harm to both men and women in the Church. It is not surprising to see, but it should cause sadness and appropriate anger in response. I tend to think of the silencing of women as something that would be apparent in a church's doctrinal statements or teaching from the pulpit, or at least obvious in the slurs and attitudes of the leaders, but recently, both my reading and experience have united to show me that these distortions are often far more insidious than I like to think.

Specifically, how does a man respond when he is confronted about sin by a woman? I can think of any number of male friends of mine who would be able to hear biblical confrontation or questions from me with grace and humility. I hope I could receive it from them likewise.

What is it that frees us to receive correction, or even criticism? The article "The Cross and Criticism" by Dr. Alfred J. Poirer of Peacemakers includes this paragraph as explanation:

In light of God's judgment and justification of the sinner in the cross of Christ, we can begin to discover how to deal with any and all criticism. By agreeing with God's criticism of me in Christ's cross, I can face any criticism man [includes all humanity] may lay against me. In other words, no one can criticize me more than the cross has. And the most devastating criticism turns out to be the finest mercy. If you thus know yourself as having been crucified with Christ, then you can respond to any criticism, even mistaken or hostile criticism, without bitterness, defensiveness, or blameshifting. Such responses typically exacerbate and intensify conflict, and lead to the rupture of relationships. You can learn to hear criticism as constructive and not condemnatory because God has justified you.

Surely, the gender of the one either gently rebuking or angrily criticizing does nothing to undo the justification of God that should allow all of us to hear correction in humility. And yet, I am learning that many men in the church are unable to hear women who observe sin in them.

A few paragraphs from Lost Women of the Bible by Carolyn Custis James speak to this issue. She is writing about Tamar, whose story has been "lost" in the ways that it has often been misinterpreted:

In church, we talk about the importance of a "quiet and gentle spirit" (I Peter 3:4) as though the Bible has nothing else to say about women, doesn't also require these qualities in godly men, and doesn't equally prize a woman's strength. Tamar sets us straight. She wasn't called righteous for her gentle and quiet spirit. She was righteous by being strong and assertive. She was a godly leader. She confronted Judah, the future leader of Jacob's family, for turning his back on God's covenant, and her courageous actions led him back to God. She was committed to build the house of Jacob and used her strength, her wit, and her courage to do what was right in God's eyes. Judah rightly called her righteous.

Dropping a strong woman like Tamar from the lineup of biblical female role models confuses women into thinking it's okay to turn a blind eye instead of speaking up when sin is in the family or the church. It also causes a lot of godly women to feel that their strength is all wrong. To be sure, strength, like any other gift, can be misused by a man or a women. But righteous strength like Tamar's is an asset to the church. When we discard the strength of women, we disable a powerful weapon against the Enemy and remove a vital safeguard for men. God calls the ezer to be strong.

The goal of all rebuke and correction is to restore the brother or sister who is caught in sin. It should be done gently, by both men and women. To pursue that restoration is love, to allow injustice and sin is to harm the one who is caught in it. It is not gentle, quiet, or peace-loving to ignore sin; it is wrong. God condemns this kind of false peace in Jeremiah 6:14, "They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'peace, peace' where there is no peace." Tamar's confrontation of Judah was for his good:

Judah gave Tamar the highest marks for her conduct and accepted her righteous rebuke. Her actions didn't emasculate or feminize him, as we are warned will happen if a woman takes the initiative. She didn't rob Judah of his manhood. to the contrary, he became a better man because of his encounter with her. One wonders what would have become of Judah is Tamar had held her peace and remained passive. The strength of a woman is a powerful weapon for rescue, healing, and peace when women like Tamar are "strong in the Lord."

Recently Read/Heard

From a story by a student, about a character who had been in a car accident,
"He hit his head during the crash and has a severe concoction."

Another student, writing as Roger from the Langston Hughes story "Thank You, Ma'am,"
"She shook me so hard the bad went out of me."

From Glen Hansard, describing the emotional tumult of the heart disconnected from the head,
"It's like a lion driving a speeding train across ice."

From a bumper sticker,
"I wasn't made in your image of God."

Despite having these snippets, I'm on the prowl for reading recommendations. I did finish the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and there's a blog post somewhere on that, but it'll have to wait. In the meantime, have you any palatable reading to suggest?

Courses of Study

If you had to choose four of the following five to study, which would you choose and why: Literature, History, Politics and Society, Philosophy and Religion, or Natural Science and Math? If a historian, would you leave that one off, since you are already familiar, or would you pursue it, looking for new insights and stories? If more versed in the humanities, would you abandon Natural Science and Math, or would you look forward to a chance to be more well-rounded?

Such is the question that St. John’s College requires an answer to in order to properly register a student. My answer? Procrastinate decision making as long as possible and just take it a semester at a time. This fall, the segments available are Literature or Natural Science and Math. That choice made, I’ll be reading Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Chaucer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Joyce and Eliot, among others. It turns out that I did have to chart out my four semesters in advance, but also that the history segment is not part of the original curriculum, so it is the most recommended to drop. So, my embarrassingly scant knowledge of world history will remain unscathed.

The goal at St. John’s is to: “help students to formulate and respond to fundamental questions about themselves and their world by reading and discussing with others the great books of the Western tradition.”

“All classes are small and based on discussion of classic texts, but differ in significant ways. The heart of the curriculum is the seminar in which 17-21 students engage in a discussion initiated by a tutor's question about the assigned reading. In the tutorial, a slightly smaller group of students (12-16) focus more intensively on smaller assignments, either mathematical proofs, short literary texts, or dense arguments of philosophy or political theory. The preceptorial, with an even smaller number of students (6-12), engages in the study of a single book or topic and requires that students write a substantial paper.”

You can read more here if you are interested.

After months of delay on my part, I am officially accepted and registered. Although the financial aid deadline had passed when I applied, they are providing grants for just over half of tuition because I teach, which I plan to continue part-time while working on this master's in liberal arts. Classes meet on Monday and Thursday evenings, and my commute will be an hour and a half each way. I am looking forward to reading, thinking and discussing these books and ideas.

In the meantime, my summer holds less scintillating education opportunities necessary for my certification: "Methods of Teaching Reading in the Content Areas, Part II." Class will meet for two weeks in July, four days a week, 8:00 am to 2:30. Joy.