Tuesday, February 3, 2009

What I've been doing lately

It's been awhile since I've posted, but it's not because nothing has been happening. Rather, there have been Superbowl parties and everyday work and weddings. Well, one wedding. But we went all the way to Oregon for it.

Two weekends ago, my sister got married in the Portland area. Brian and I both flew back to attend the wedding - and that's about all we did there, except for going out to dinner with Brian's family Friday night.

I arrived late Thursday night and spent the night at my sister's house. Friday morning, I got up, and she was making rice krispie treats. She wanted a rice krispie treat cake, and apparently the person who was supposed to make it for her backed out. So, since I had come a day early to help out with whatever needed to be done, I offered to take over. Of course, I didn't think ahead to the fact that I was offering to make their wedding cake. When she pulled out five Hershey bars and the cake topper, it slowly dawned on me. But at least they knew what they wanted: a rice krispie cake that sorta looked like a snow covered mountain. No prob!

I figured I'd better begin with the easy part. I spent the morning mixing marshmallows and cereal and pressing it into cake pans. That's not as easy as it sounds! When you start setting pans of rice krispie treats on top of each other, different proportions of ingredients and pressing pressures are obvious. Pretty soon, though, we had a good selection to choose from.

On to the chocolate topping. Now, anyone who has tried dipping strawberries in chocolate knows the perils of pure chocolate. I've tried enough times to know it rarely turns out the way you want it to. Never having successfully tempered chocolate myself (the process of melting and then rehardening chocolate) made me a little nervous about experimenting on my sister's wedding cake! I broke one bar in half, and experimented with each half. One came out looking horrible but having great structure. The other looked shiny and flowy but never set up. Call me a wimp, but I decided to go with fool proof "chocolate flavored" almond bark. And you thought I was such a purist!

Thankfully, Brian arrived Friday night to help with the overall design of the cake. Saturday morning (ceremony at 2 pm), he recommended square, round, square layers to make the whole thing look cohesive and spooned the melted "chocolate" while I encouraged dripping.





And in the end, it actually turned out looking pretty good!



Oh, and the couple looked pretty good too!

3 comments:

meg said...

wow, i'm totally impressed, you guys can make me rice crispy shaped anything anytime.

Aly sun said...

Amazing. I can honestly say that I've never seen anything like it. Well done! It looks awesome. And congrats to you sister!

Sarah said...

I first saw the picture of the cake that Angie put on FB, I totally thought it was professionally done it looked so good. No idea that you made it. The wedding looked like fun. But glad you're back home again, it feels weird when you're so far away.