Cake update

So. Take 1 huge beautiful cake, add 1 broken Jeep, 1 semi-operating Cabrio, and 95-degree weather. You get a huge disaster and 1 broken heart.

After spending so much time and energy on THE cake (below), I was definitely nervous about transporting it. However, Sam has a Jeep, so I figured I would put the cake in a box, slide it into the trunk, keep the car well air-conditioned on the ride, and cross my fingers. All went as planned until we got about 20 miles from my house and Sam's car started shuddering and smelling like burned rubber. So, we turned around, went back to my house, and decided we should take my car.

There were a couple of problems with this idea. One is that a VW Cabrio is not really designed for cake transport. The trunk is very tiny. And does not have a wide enough opening to allow for the delicate and gentle transfer of a cake. The main problem, though, is that my air conditioner was broken, and I did not get it fixed last week, since I figured we were taking Sam's car to the beach...

So, step 1 was to get the cake INTO the trunk. But because I had to tilt the cake and because it weighed approximately 823109823 pounds, I nicked the icing on the side while getting it in. HUGE gash. Ok, no big deal... yet. I ran inside, grabbed a spatula and my extra icing, and did some quick repair.

Step 2 was figuring out how to keep the cake from melting. Unfortunately, there was really nothing we could do about this situation. So, we decided to drive quickly and cross our fingers.

Step 3 was figuring out how to keep ourselves from melting. Really, the only thing we could do there was drive with the top down. And at this point, we were already an hour and a half late (Sam also had to work that morning!), so we decided to just boogie.

Driving, driving, driving, and the whole time I'm freaking out about what is going on in my trunk. But there's nothing I can do about it, so I try to relax.

We get to Elizabeth City, open the trunk, and the cake is a disaster. A complete and utter mess. One of the roses in the back corner had jumped ship and slid all the way down the side of the bottom tier, pulling down the icing and tinting it pink. On the top tier, the whole back corner of icing was sliding off into a puddle of melt. It was just a complete mess. So what am I going to do? I contemplate throwing the entire cake away. Just trashing it. I was so embarrassed (though, thank goodness I was doing this as a FAVOR and not getting paid). But I pulled myself together (kind of) and slapped some extra icing on the corners, just so the cake itself wasn't showing through. All the piping obviously was destroyed, but at least the cake was hidden and at least I had taken pictures before the melt.

No one even noticed. No one even looked at the cake really. !?

But everyone said it tasted amazing, and most people thought it had come from a bakery.

Here are a few things I've learned:

1. If possible, I will freeze the cake before transport. However, I don't know if any cake would fit in my freezer, so that may not work so well.
2. I will not only bring extra icing and a spatula in the future, but I will also bring decorating bags and tips. I had no idea the whole sides would melt off. I really (stupidly) thought I would just be fixing up nicks from putting the cake in the trunk and taking it out.
3. I will bring extra roses. There are SEVEN extra roses in my fridge right now that I could have had with me in case of emergency.
4. When I bring the extra icing and roses, I will put them in a cooler with ice packs. I stupidly had the tupperware of icing sitting in the trunk with the cake, so it was really soft when I had to put it on the cake.
   

All in all... it was a rough weekend. But I'm just glad I took pictures before we left!! And I'm glad everyone enjoyed it, because that's really all that matters.