I know what your thinking but it's true; I am sick of cheese. Yes sick of cheese and sick of baguette's. I'm sick of cheesy baguette's and croque monsieur's (actually, I never liked them... way to wet and French like for my tastes).
But despite all that, I'd still rather be there then here at work...
I suppose I should tell you why we were in France in the first place shouldn't I? Well, Nikala's brother Aaron and his fiance Katie were getting married, fortunately they had got the professionals in to sort it all out...
... I'm lying of course.
A few months ago, when Aaron and Katie got back from holiday and we all saw the glittering ring on her finger, Nikala jumped up and offered her help (as any discerning sister would I'm sure). Oh yes, Nikala offered to design and make the tiara, the veil and decorate the wedding cake; none of which she had done before. Still, she is a fantastic designer and we all had faith in her. of course that started to wane on the night before we were due to leave at 4am to go to France for the wedding when Nikala decided that the veil wasn't right and a new one must be made then and there despite the fact that the bride to be was already delighted with the first one. Thank goodness the tiara had been a triumph! (still a little worried about the cake at this point but I didn't want to rock the boat).
We arrived in France, the veil was loved (the new one too), the tiara was looking fabulous and everyone said Nikala should go into business making them (an idea I fully support by the way!), then we were introduced to the cake. Nikala and Aaron's dad had made this cake which was stunning to say the least. Clive (Nikala's dad) is well known for his fruit cakes, enormous quantities of alcohol are usually soaked into it well in advance, but this was a surprise...
The cake was made up of three layers. The bottom layer alone took twenty seven hours to cook and weighed about 35lbs! and there were another two layers to go on top of it.... how on earth were we going to make this look like the tiny picture Katie had given us of the Mexican looking cake she wanted?
Right, lets at least get the white icing bit on.
Day before the wedding. We make the white fondant icing (yes I know all the types of icing now). We could have bought icing with us but we had been told all the ingredients were there. no problemo, the icing is made... tastes a bit odd though..weird. Aha! the liquid glucose is honey flavoured, that wont do at all! OK so in the UK for some odd reason (something to do with cough medicine apparently) you can only buy this stuff in chemists; of course being France nothing was open... it was a bank holiday and lunchtime to boot. Right we would have to go first thing in the morning, the wedding wasn't until 4pm anyway, we would be fine. Of course we still had 58 daisies to cut out of marzipan, we weren't panicking at all... oh no... not one bit... gulp.
Oh joy! What amazing luck! the daisy cutter was in fact a big pile of feculent maggot crap and didn't work! BumArse (that became the expletive of the week)! What were we going to do? there was nothing for it, I had to cut them out by hand. I knew when Nikala offered to decorate the cake that I would end up losing hair over it.
Wedding day. No icing on cake. Marzipan daisies drying on plates all over the kitchen. Alarm at 06:30.
OK we were up, we were off to get liquid glucose. We were spurned at every chemist around and sent to the supermarkets, whom also had no liquid glucose. BumArse. OK panicking we drive back to the house, four hours wasted looking for that stuff! One of Clive's friends had arrived to say hello, what a godsend! It only turns out he was a master baker 20 years ago! He whipped up some royal icing and iced all 3 layers in about 45 minutes flat... phew! Now all we had to do was paint he marzipan flowers and stick them on the sides of the cake. Easy.
Except as soon as you touched the flowers they turned to dust.
Well the petals all broke off and then we were in bits too... Nikala was pulling random ludicrous ideas out of thin air that were totally unfeasible but sounding like much better options than the one we had, but none of them were what the bride and groom wanted. There was only one option, I had to painstakingly build each flower petal by petal on the cake... and you know what? it looked pretty damn good by the end... from a distance... BumArse.
1 comment:
Well said.
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