“You have until midnight,” Anastasia said.
“You'll need every minute of it,” Gracie said with a laugh. “I'm typically working up to the eleventh hour decorating the cake, making sure it’s perfect for the bride's big day.”
I loved weddings. When I got married—if I got married—I wanted a Christmas wedding, with a huge white dress and a fur cape. I would take pictures in the snow. We'd have the whole venue decked out for Christmas. Hell, I might even have a live reindeer. But that was a big if. I couldn’t even manage to keep my baking company afloat for three months. Did I really think I could handle a serious relationship?
What about Owen?
What about Owen?
I couldn't shake what his mother and Sloane had said, that he was only with me for fun. Maybe he didn't actually care about me. Maybe I was just the fun, sexy girl he brought to his bed, not the one he married.
But he was smiling softly at me before he left the studio for the day.
“Ready for your dream wedding cake?” he asked me.
“To be perfectly honest, it's probably going to be the nightmare wedding cake. The last time I made a wedding cake, it took me three days. Now I don't even have a full twenty-four hours.”
Owen chuckled. “I have faith in you.”
“I'm glad one of us does,” I said.
He leaned over to kiss me. “I'll see you tonight.”
After Owen left, I tried to focus. I desperately needed to win. I couldn’t just show up with some three-tiered dumpy cake and call it a day. I needed height, drama, and a touch of something special.
I knew I was going to have every layer be a different flavor. On the bottom, it was going to be red velvet cake, because I wanted something red for a Christmas wedding. The red velvet layer would be the biggest. I was going to shape it like an abstracted snowflake. The next layer was going to be offset a few inches. It was going to be two layers of a citrusy cake with orange buttercream frosting. Layer three was going to be another round cake, and it was going to be chocolate with a fudgy frosting. The fourth layer would be tall, ten inches, and cut in a pentagon to add some visual interest so it wasn't just a stack of circles. For that tier, I was going to bake a seven-layer yellow cake with chocolate, raspberry, and butter crème between the layers. Layer five was going to be a smaller circular butterscotch-rum cake. For the final sixth layer: strawberry cake with layers of stewed fruit.
For the cake topper, I was going to blow sugar into a snowman groom and snowwoman bride. The decorations on the cake should evoke winter. I was going to have a few sugar-gum flowers but make them look frozen, as if they were covered in frost. I didn't want a lot of flowers. Sometimes wedding cakes with too many sugar flowers looked diseased. I just wanted a few tasteful bunches here and there. The rest of the cake would have intricate icing designs to evoke a frozen winterscape.
I had my sketch and my game plan. I checked the clock.
“Let's do this.”
I preheated the ovens then started several mixers going simultaneously. When I had worked in restaurant kitchens, I’d regularly cooked four of five dishes at once.
I made the bottom red velvet cake first, the cocoa powder frothing and turning red when I poured in the buttermilk and vinegar. I needed two mixers since the bottom tier of the cake was so big. The batter went into the largest pans, and I put them in the oven. Then I made the next three layers. The red velvet cake finished cooking while I was mixing up the final tiers. I took it out to cool then put the next pans of cake batter in to bake.
The actual making-of-the-cake part wasn’t difficult; I could make cakes all day. It was the assembly and decoration that would be tricky. As the cakes came out of the oven, I carefully turned them over onto cooling racks. Once they were partially cool, I wrapped them in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge. While they chilled further, I started on the decorations.
The sugar snowman and -woman were going to take some time, so I heated up the sugar first. The cake toppers were going to be blown like glass. I couldn't just use the same sugar I would for candy; I had to add corn syrup and cream of tartar to make it thick enough to blow. I wanted the whole cake to feel minimalist and wintery. I kept the snow couple white and crystalline.
I was a little worried; the sugar was hot. I was wearing gloves, but still, last time, my dress had caught fire.
After the sugar had reached the correct temperature, I poured it out on a silicone sheet and rolled it into several balls. Then I stuck in a metal tube and started blowing. It was a delicate process. I shattered the first two before I got the hang of it. Using a blowtorch, I lightly melted the spheres and formed the snow couple. Then I colored the rest of the sugar, some orange for the noses, some black for the buttons, and some blue for a scarf. I was going to use blue and silver frosting as accents on the larger wedding cake. The accents weren't as difficult because I could just roll those out of fondant.
“Hard part is done,” I said happily, running my hands under cold water. Amber passed by me, lugging a huge hand cart of ingredients. I watched her carefully to make sure she didn't throw anything into my icing.
“Please do not get too close to those,” I warned Zane, who was shooting close-ups of the snow people. He flashed me a thumbs-up.
I made the frostings next, huge tubs of them. Once I had the cakes frosted, I was going to cover each in fondant as a protective coating and a clean, smooth base for the decorations. I rolled out the huge white sheets of fondant and set them aside. Then I took my cakes out of the fridge. They were nice and cold, and I easily trimmed them down to be flat and shaped like my templates.
Satisfied, I frosted and stacked the bottom red velvet layer, sticking in the dowels that provided the structural integrity, and then carefully laid the sheet of fondant over the top of the cake, smoothing it out so all the edges were crisp.
Then I assembled the next layer and the next. When I was done, I had a pristine white tower of cakes. I had to put on the final layer, then it would be ready to decorate. It was so tall that I needed a stepstool. I was carefully placing the final layer on when Amber rammed the hand cart into my table.
I shrieked as the cake tipped. I tried to catch it and stumbled off the stool, my hands raised. Somehow I didn't fall flat on my face. It truly was a Christmas miracle, especially since I felt something heavy and cake-like resting on my outstretched hands.
“I can't open my eyes,” I said to Fiona. “How does it look?”
