Candy making #2: Fruit jellies (p. 878) , Citrus fruit jellies (p. 878), Cream caramels (p. 864), and Bourbon balls (p. 879)

Of course, in my candy making extravaganza, I made several TJOC recipes. Why didn't I make only candy from TJOC instead of other cookbooks? I don't know, I just saw other recipes that looked terrific and I wanted to try them!

I rather randomly sent candy to friends and family, so I hope they comment on these two blogs about the candies. If you didn't get candy and wanted it, I apologize :) It was probably due to me thinking you didn't like candy or wouldn't be home around the holidays--let me know for next time! And I didn't send the whole compliment of candy to everyone because I didn't make that much .

Josh's good friend Jan mentioned that her kids liked gummies. While leafing through TJOC, I noticed a recipe for Fruit jellies (p. 878) and had a feeling that was as close as I was going to get to gummies. The recipe requires 3 cups of strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, or raspberries. I bought frozen strawberries and blackberries and set them out on the counter to thaw. I was under the impression that the bags would be sealed shut.

The next morning, blackberry juice was ALL over my counter. It looked like someone had been murdered and I've never been so grateful my counter wasn't white. It was a huge mess. I spent the first hour cleaning.

Eventually, I cooked down the blackberries until they "released their juice".



I then mashed the blackberry mixture through my new strainer (thank you uncle Derryl!):



It was at this point that I realized I was an idiot. A major idiot. I HATE straining. And the blackberries took FOREVER. Absolutely FOREVER. Plus I only got the minimum amount of puree that was needed for the jellies.


IMPORTANT TIP! TJOC mentions that you should use 4 envelopes of gelatin to get 3 tablespoons. My envelopes each included 1 tablespoon, so I only needed three envelopes. So look and be careful!

I decided to just mix the gelatin into the cup since that's what I measured the puree in to. It was a big error in judgement because the gelatin clumped WAY too much and had to be cut out of the final project. It was so hard that my kitchen shears almost couldn't cut it. In all future versions I used the medium sized bowl that the recipe called for.



While the gelatin was "softening" I started cooking my sugar/water mixture. It went from opaque:



To clear and bubbly:



The gelatin mixture was then added into sugar mixture and cooked:



Eventually it looked like this:



The next day, I popped the fruit jellies out of the pan, which wasn't easy because the jelly was very sticky:




I cut them with my kitchen shears and rolled them in sugar:



I also made a strawberry version of the jellies:



The strawberries were WWWAAAYYY easier to work with. No problem to strain and I got twice as much juice as I needed, so I made two batches. If I was going to make this again, I would use strawberries and blueberries, which are the easiest to juice.


After making three batches of fruit jellies, I decided to just plow ahead and make Citrus fruit jellies (p. 878), which are essentially just the fruit jellies above with citrus juice.

I mixed orange juice with lemon juice and gelatin.



Like above, I cooked the water/sugar mixture until the soft-ball stage and then added the orange juice:



I stirred until dissolved and then got it back up to the correct heat and poured it into the pan:



I finally cut the jellies and rolled them in sugar. I couldn't' find superfine sugar so I just used my normal sugar which is pretty fine to begin with.



The gummies are incredibly sugary. Inside and out. And I don't think they are going to travel well but I was unwilling to wrap all three thousand of them. So I apologize to people for the crushed candy!

I'm also rather sure the kids won't like them--I know when I was a kid, I usually wanted the store-bought version of food, not the homemade (except for Italian food, which was essentially all my family cooked). For example, I detested my grandmother's homemade macaroni and cheese because I wanted the radioactive orange Kraft version.

I'm not sure what motivated me to make Bourbon balls (p. 879). It certainly wasn't because I had bourbon on hand (because I didn't). I think it was because I was thinking of the rum ball cookies that I like and hoping they would be similar (they weren't). I went to the liquor store and stared at the dozens of choices. I really, really wanted to buy the cheapest one. Unfortunately, I knew that the flavor would really come through and I needed good bourbon. So I bought Maker's Mark (and I like the bottle!).



I sifted powdered sugar and cocoa together using my new sifter:



And I mixed bourbon and corn syrup in another bowl. The recipe says you could use bourbon OR rum, but if you used rum, would they really be bourbon balls?



I mixed the cocoa mixture and the bourbon mixture:



I then smashed some Nilla wafers with a mallet and mixed them with chopped pecans and then I mixed the cocoa mixture with it:



And shaped them into balls:



They didn't shape into balls easily and really wanted to fall apart. I kept adding bourbon, so they were pretty stout. And hard as tiny rocks--although rather good. I'm really interested to know what other people think about them.

I had made chocolate cream caramels (and I did it again this time, although I'm not going to detail it because I did it again). I hadn't made Cream caramels (p. 864). The recipe was pretty similar. I mixed sugar, corn syrup, butter, and heavy cream in a pot and then heated it up until the firm-ball stage. Stirring constantly. It took forever.




Boiling caramel is scary! Use a deep pot so it doesn't boil over:



At the very end, another cup of cream was poured in and the mixture was brought back up to temperature. I poured it into a lined disposable pan. I learned from experience that lining the pans was not necessary (that tip came from Brittles, Barks, and Bonbons and was absolutely true).



And wrapped them up cute!



I was afraid they didn't turn out because they felt so hard but they tasted perfect.



Notes on candy making:
There are two types of people that shouldn't make candy.
1. People who hate to measure. Measuring ingredients and watching the temperature is incredibly important.
2. People who are impatient and think "well, I'll just turn up the temperature" or "it surely doesn't need to be stirred all the time" shouldn't make candy.

Disposable pans are terrific. Candy just pops right out!

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Candy post #1--non-TJOC recipes and a PSA for dog owners

So, several years ago I decided to make cookies for a bunch of my friends. I made dozens and dozens of cookies and sent them all over the country. I was so insane about this that I made cookies and sent them out days before having a rib removed and moving to Colorado at the end of 2006.

But I hate baking in Colorado because of the altitude, so I didn't send any cookies out in 2007 or 2008.

This year I started getting passive-aggressive comments from my friends about the lack of cookies, which were both hilarious and annoying. I didn't want to do the cookies again but I realized that I had a new love that I could make instead...candy!

Candy is actually better in Colorado than the midwest because of the low humidity. I thought they would take approximately the same amount of time as the cookies. That was incredibly wrong. They took me at least ten times as much time.

I made many types of candy, half from TJOC and half from other cookbooks. I went to Barnes and Noble and perused their candy-making section. It was four books. Only four books. I bought two of them. I actually bought fifty percent of their candy section. Not even half the titles--half of the books!

The first book I bought was The Field Guide to Candy. I was excited about this book! It was cute and colorful and had information on approximately every candy ever made! I decide to make several candies out of it! I started by making gumdrops.

This is what I ended up with:



That is not a gumdrop, even if you cut it. And it didn't even taste good. I threw it away. I figured it was my fault and made peppermints. An even bigger disaster that almost ruined my saucepan (I didn't even take a picture). DON'T BUY THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU JUST WANT TO LOOK AT THE PICTURES! I had been really excited about making cherry cordials for my father--I had the cherries soaking in kirsch and everything--and I decided not to try because I was not optimistic that they would turn out.

I had much, much better luck with Brittles, Barks, and Bonbons by Charity Ferreira. I made three recipes from it. I'm not going to do a step-by-step because these aren't TJOC recipes :)

Butter mints! I didn't know these little mints were called butter mints but I always take a handful when I see them out at a resturant. They were easy to make and delicious. They also don't require any cooking so they would be a good starter candy.



Peppermint bark is something that I've never been a huge fan of, but it's really easy to make. Believe it or not, I couldn't find candy canes at the grocery store. I certainly couldn't believe it. It always seems like there are hundreds of candy canes everywhere and I get dozens of them for holidays--and I don't even like them! It took a special candy cane pilgrimage to Walgreens (which has a wide selection of candy canes).



As I said, I don't like peppermint bark, so I have no idea how it tastes. But a coworker who loves the stuff said it was tasty. And it sure was pretty!

Rocky Road!



Personally, I love rocky road. And s'mores. I like chocolatey combos. This rocky road was just chocolate, marshmallows, and pecans and it was aaammmmaaazzzing. The book taught me a great trick--don't worry about tempering the chocolate, just melt the chocolate so slowly that it never falls out of temper.

I also made macadamia nut brittle. Incredibly good if you like macadamia nuts, although rather expensive to make.




PSA--I call my dog a little roomba because she is constantly eating everything that falls on the floor. I dropped macadamia nuts and didn't think anything of it. About ten hours later, I went upstairs to go to bed and called Duchess. She didn't follow me. I kept calling her and looked down the stairs and she was staggering up. I went to get her and her back legs weren't working--they were paralyzed. I immediately figured that she had probably eaten something she shouldn't have and I googled and found out that MACADAMIA NUTS ARE TOXIC FOR DOGS. I called the ER and they said that it should pass in 24 hours, just watch her. She was better in 24 hours but it was terrifying--it actually paralyzed her back legs but the poor dog still was wagging her tail :(


Finally, out of my 1964 TJOC, I made Maple caramels:



First off, the recipe was written in (apparently) 60's lingo. I was supposed to cook the candy over a "quick heat" and then cook the ingredients "slowly". Very vague. It took about an hour to get up to temperature. When I popped them out and cut them, they were extremely fragile and granular--I was sure they were wrong. I gave one to my father (who, unfortunately for him, is on the Atkin's diet and couldn't eat any of the candy) and he told me they were perfect--it was an old-fashioned candy and that was exactly what they were supposed to taste like. I found them extremely addictive--they only had four ingredients--maple syrup (spelled sirup, strangely, and the real stuff--very expensive at Whole Foods), brown sugar, cream, and butter.

The table got incredibly full--and this wasn't even all the candy!



Hooray for candy-making!

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Thanksgiving 09 Post 1: Cocktail meatballs (p. 82), Salami rolls (p.83), and Crudites (p. 78)

Thanksgiving 2009! A couple items before I start the Thanksgiving blogs:
1. The pictures are TERRIBLE, I know it, I apologize. I forgot the charger for my camera and my mom's is not good for food pictures. They are all dark and/or blurry. I'm really sorry!
2. It was our biggest Thanksgiving we've ever thrown! There were 6 of us, which was exciting!)
3. Mom was complaining last year that she was just a flunkie and didn't actually get to make anything. Since I've made so many TJOC Thanksgiving style recipes already, mom was able to throw in some of her favorites. So she's graduated from flunkie to sous chef, which she seems happy about.

Like the last couple years, I decided to make some appetizers for lunch on Thanksgiving so that I could knock some of the appetizers and hors d'oeuvres recipes off the list. This has became an anticipated tradtion.

I made three appetizers, starting with Cocktail meatballs (p. 82). This recipe has intrigued me for a while due to the sauce which includes brown sugar, jellied cranberry sauce, lemon juice, and an entire bottle of chili sauce.



The meatballs were made out of ground beef, cornflakes (strange!), catsup, soy sauce, onions, parsley, garlic, black pepper, and eggs. Josh and Jordan took over the balling of the meatballs--they were tiny (it makes 70!).



The sauce was then poured on the meatballs and they were cooked.



Watch them carefully! The sugary sauce started to burn on one of the trays, although no meatballs were harmed. They were really tasty! As strange as the sauce sounds, it really worked, and they were tender and flavorful. They would be particularly good in a little slow cooker at a potluck (I never go to potlucks--do people bring stuff in slow cookers to them? It seems like they would).

I also made Salami rolls (p.83). The recipe is really simple--take cream cheese, add sun-dried tomato halves, some chopped scallions, and a little pepper, and grind it in the food processor. The problem was that it became a ball of cream cheese and wouldn't mix! So I had a smoking food processor, clumps of cream cheese, and annoyingly whole tomato halves and scallions. This problem was never fully solved, I just quit worrying about it and smeared the cream cheese, chunks and all, onto the salami slices.




I know the picture is dark, you may have to use your imagination.

They were then rolled up and cut in half. They were good although I would rather have them with less cream cheese. I would make these again but change the cream cheese to include garlic and chives or something. So I suppose I wouldn't actually make these again but, instead, a similar roll-up.

I then chopped up some celery and cauliflower for Crudites (p. 78) with blue cheese dressing. The blue cheese dressing is so delicious that it makes people who say they hate blue cheese change their mind :)



You can see all three finished dishes in this picture :)


Thanksgiving means that all three dogs get to spend some time together, too, and bond with the rest of us (the third dog is hiding in this picture). Mostly, they just sleep.



I hope all of my American blog readers had a great Thanksgiving! There will be more Thanksgiving blog posts :)

Shout-out to all the wedding vendors

I managed to write this entire blog once already, then stupid FireFox crashed and lost half of it. Frustrating! I hate writing blogs twice. To all of you who just read my blog for the food, I apologize. I promise this is the very last post about the wedding!

All the wedding posts:
Engagement
Dress is found!
Bridesmaid Dresses
The first pictures
The wedding disasters
Professional pictures

I just thought I needed to do shout outs to all my vendors, since so many of them were so awesome.

The DJ
Kate and Rachel with Toast and Jam were our DJs. They were amazing. They played everything we wanted--even the strange stuff like Flight of the Conchords--at the exact right time and did an amazing job at knowing what the crowd wanted. There was TONS of dancing. And no cheesiness AT ALL. No chicken dance, no macarana, none of that. I've had several people tell me that our wedding had the best music they've ever seen at a DJ'ed wedding and Rachel and Kate are 100% responsible for that.

The photographer:
James Daley did our photography. He was terrific (as you can see). He didn't get flustered by any of my strange ideas (a carnival? Really?) and was totally willing to go for every shot. He must have taken 5000 pictures. He worked with us for 13 (THIRTEEN!) hours and never seemed tired. Plus, the man was everywhere at once while never being invasive. I don't know how he managed to get a billion pictures of the ceremony and never get in the way, but he did. I can't recommend him enough. He was easy to work with and the pictures are beautiful--what more could you want?

(Information about the limo will be inserted when Josh gets it to me Monday)
The reception site:
The reception was at White Eagle Golf Club. Lillian, the wedding coordinator there, was terrific to work with. The food was absolutely amazing--we selected pork and salmon as our choices and they were delicious. In fact, people keep mentioning the food to me--usually wedding food is fairly forgettable but WEGC's was terrific. The room was absolutely stunning and the ground were beautiful.

The flowers:
I randomly stumbled upon The Flower Basket. I saw an ad for them at the wedding dress shop and liked the name, so we went there. Our flower arrangements were terrific. Plus they let you see them the day before, which is great. I couldn't have been happier with our flowers and they were very reasonably priced. I knew they were the florist for me when I told Carol that I wanted roses for my bridesmaid bouquets and she said "oh, no, that would be way too expensive" and recommended a (superior) option. An honest vendor who will tell you that? Worth her weight in gold.



The wedding gown:
Wolsfelt's Victorian Bridal is one of the strangest names I've ever heard for a bridal shop. But if you live (or are going to be) in the Chicago-land area, I couldn't recommend them enough. They have an enormous range of wedding dresses including local talent (of which my gown was) in a large price range. On top of that, they have every bridesmaids dress known to man (only a slight exaggeration) at a cheaper price than any of the other shops I went to (the bridesmaid dress fiasco was totally Dessy's fault and not Wolsfelt's fault).

The tuxes:
Like everyone else, we went to Men's Warehouse for the tuxes. They are easy to work with, the tuxes are attractive, and they include EVERYTHING (shoes, cufflinks, socks, etc.). It is by far the easiest choice when you have a far-flung wedding party. And they carry a morning coat tux if you are obsessed with that like Josh was.

The rehearsal dinner:
Our rehearsal dinner was at Luigi's House, which is owned by Portillos. We rented a private room, which was private and spacious. The meal was family style and came with two appetizers, two salads, two entrees, two pastas, two sides, and two desserts for only $30 a person--that's an amazing amount of food, especially for the price. It was great food too and universally enjoyed by everybody.

Etsy vendors:

A TON of the wedding stuff was handmade from Etsy crafters. I feel they should be given their due also :)

Save-the-dates:
The save the dates were the very first thing I got off Etsy. The design was from an Etsy vendor (who has gone MIA since) and the printing was done by Viridian1. Viridian was extremely easy to work with and did a terrific job both typesetting the postcard side and on the graphics side. They were really professional looking and heavy duty.




Invitation printing:
I don't have a picture of our invitations but they were made by Ajalon. I kept putting off selecting the printer so they were rush ordered. Ajalon printed the invitations to the ceremony, reception, and rehearsal dinner, RSVP postcards, info card, envelopes, placecards, and table numbers. I only have a picture of a table number but they were all done in the cherry blossom style shown. The printing was excellent and on heavy paper and the shipping was fast.



Ring bearer pillow:
RomancingJuliet did a terrific job on the ring bearer pillow and was amazingly easy to work with. I actually forgot about this until the very last minute, so it was a wonderful thing to find someone so talented who was willing to do a rush order. The pillow was beautiful.



Champagne flutes:
The champagne flutes came from LaserBird. She also made some gorgeous moleskin notebooks which were part of the gift package that I gave my bridesmaids. The flutes are personalized with Chinese birds and our names but she will essentially engrave anything you want on them.



Stickers:
The stickers on the take-out boxes came from MAUPromos. They were really easy to work with and the stickers looked exactly like they looked on the website. Plus they were FAST. It's a really great way to customize something the cheaper way.




Crane cake topper:
The cake topper came from Localcolorist. Localcolorist has a wide selection of origami cranes in prints and various colors. Josh and I picked one each and they were great. I wish I still had them! They disappeared, I wish I still had them :(



Garter:
The garters came from LemonadeStandShop. It's not her normal thing but she did a great job. They were easily recognizable as steaks--and fancy steaks at that :) I loved them!



Thank you parasol:
The thank-you parasol was made by Megalinn03 and was terrific. I have packed it away for future events or if friends want to borrow it.




Other vendors:

Cranes:
I thought that origami cranes would be cute scattered around but I knew I didn't want to make them. That's where AvantGarde789 came in. She was willing to put together a custom color combination (pink, light pink, and brown) and even threw in two giant cranes! I saw a bunch of people take them as favors. They were perfect. I let the wedding party decide where to put them and they had one at every placesetting, on the candy buffet, everywhere. Honestly, there were even a couple in the bathrooms



Card house:
My aunt Charlotte made a terrific box for my grandmother's 50th wedding anniversary. I hoped she would make me a box for my cards. Instead, she made this high end upholstered, shingled little house! It was beautiful, luxurious, and perfect. She owns Devon Shops in New York City, which specializes in hand-crafted French and English furniture.

Professional wedding pictures PICTURE HEAVY

I promise this to be the final blog about the wedding (other than the vendor thank you, which is going up today too). I wasn't going to post any more pictures, but believe or not, I've been asked to do add the final ones :) This is a random conglomeration of my favorites. I tried to limit the amount of pictures of people other than Josh and myself because I don't know what other people's views on having their pictures splashed on the internet are (and not because they didn't take gorgeous pictures).

(If you can't see the whole picture, click on it, I've had some trouble with pictures today)

My mom helping me get ready--she looked beautiful and her dress was a gorgeous Calvin Klein. Pinning that veil is much more difficult than it seems.



This picture was taken the minute I realized I wasn't going to be late to my own wedding:



Pure relief.

If you are wondering why I would have been possibly late, read the last blog post.

Dad was happy to see me too! We should have been able to spend 45 minutes in a tiny room reflecting about the wedding but instead it was thirty seconds and down the aisle we went!




My favorite ceremony picture:



I look so devout! If you know me in real life, you realize how hilarious this picture is :)

Another good ceremony shot--the church was amazing.



Our families:



Now that's a good looking family, right?

Same with the wedding party:



After the wedding, like most weddings, we went to the carnival.

(What? You didn't go to a carnival?)

We even got our picture taken with the mayor of Naperville!





I played the traditional wedding game of balloon darts (and won!):



Jordan fulfilled the typical best man requirement to find the bride some cotton candy:



Josh and I shared some cotton candy similar to Lady and the Tramp:




All of us:



We were quite a spectacle at the carnival. Considering my dress is pretty similar to a Disney princess dress, I was very popular with children, some of whom followed us like the pied piper. We were congratulated by hundreds of people, which I loved. I wish I could have ridden some of the rides but there was no way I was fitting on anything in that dress. Believe it or not, I kept the dress clean enough that the dry cleaner thought I had changed out of it into a second dress after the ceremony (even though it got dragged through a carnival, gardens, survived eating lunch sitting on the ground, and was worn from 10 am to 2 am the next day).

We also took some more traditional pictures :)

This is one of my very favorite wedding pictures. All the groomspeople are looking up because a squirrel is throwing nuts at them.



The wedding party again (Erica looks like she has two escorts!):



The wedding party was greatly amused watching me trip my way down to this pond and back:



Hoops are NOT easy to walk up inclines with. Or, really, to do anything else with. No wonder ladies had to have a squadron of servants back in the day, they literally couldn't even go to the bathroom on their own.

On Thursday before the wedding, my cousin David told me that he had caught 4 garters out of the last 4 weddings he had been to and that he WOULD catch mine. This lead to the only garter-toss I've ever seen where people actually tried to catch it (trying to ruin David's record). He caught it anyway! He then told a story about one of the weddings, where he put the garter in his mouth for the picture and the bride got mad. We told him to go for it! Makes a better picture that way :) So Rachel did it too (and she IS the next to get married!).



I adored my shoes. They were high, they hurt by the end of the night, and they were TOTALLY WORTH IT!



We had a candy buffet at the wedding. I really wanted to stick with the pink/brown theme, which was easy enough, a lot of candy is pink or brown.



We had a wide selection but the peanut butter malted milk balls were very very popular. I was a fan of the Peep aerie that was built. It was amazingly popular and is one of the things that people bring up about our wedding most often but was actually kind of expensive, so don't do it if you are looking for a cheap way to do wedding favors :)

We went to Cancun for the wedding and it was amazing--the all-inclusive route is definitely the way to go. This is my favorite picture:



My mom keeps buying me plants, hoping that we will stumble upon one that I don't manage to immediately kill. Mother-in-law Tongues are the only plant that I've manged to keep (mostly) alive (I lack a green thumb). Whenever I see them, I immediately think of mom.

There they are! Tell me what you think. Comments are always great, esp. when they are about my beauty :)

***Vendor info*** Perfect if you want to know who my photographer was :)

The two wedding disasters including the CAKE

I've promised this post for a while. It's the second to last post in our wedding photos series :)

We only had two major disasters on the wedding day. The first one involved the bridesmaids dresses. There was no room at the church for me to get ready, so all the ladies (me, the moms, and the bridesmaids) were getting ready at the hotel. It was made very, very clear that the wedding was NOT going to happen late--if we were there more than ten minutes late, the wedding was off (oh, Catholic churches!). The goal was to get to the church by 11:15 for the noon wedding. So, obviously, they got me ready first. We were already late getting back from the hairdressers (who greatly mismanaged their time), so by the time I was dressed it was 11.

Rachel starts putting on her dress and *bam* the zipper breaks. My aunt, a talented seamstress, starts sewing her into the dress with a sewing kit that Emily (miraculously) carries everywhere. Emily puts on her dress, no problem (although it was at least two sizes too big). Erica starts putting on her dress--and the zipper breaks. These dresses were NOT too tight--they obviously had faulty zippers. There wasn't enough thread for two dresses to be sewn shut so Rachel's fiance drove (he says it's the fastest he's ever driven) to Joannes for more thread. At 1145 we were just getting in to the car. We were about four miles from the church and there was a carnival in town.

We made it and the procession started ONE MINUTE later. Nobody even knew there was anything wrong :) I was hoping that was the only issue, everybody always says that something goes wrong on your wedding day.

Turns out, two things were going to go wrong on my wedding day.

We decided to go with a new vendor for our wedding cake. I really loved her ideas and she seemed to be really professional and focused. Her samples (full 8 inch cakes that she brought to my aunt and uncle's house) were delicious and unique (chocolate orange cake with marmalade filling, for example). Josh was dead set on a groom's cake and wanted it shaped like a piston, Cake Lady (CL) seemed excited about the idea and knew exactly what a piston was! Score!

He wanted a cake that looked like this:



and CL said it would be absolutely no problem, she even described how she was going to engineer the cake and seemed really excited. She was going to work the Mopar logo in and everything.

The main cake was to look like cherry blossoms were climbing the sides, like this cake, but three layers:





We get to the reception. The cake was supposed to be there at 5 pm. We get there at 530 to help set up. No cake. CL apparently calls the venue to say there has been an "issue" with the groom's cake and they are late but will be there very soon. Cocktail hour starts at 630. No cake. Another hour comes and goes. No cake.

Josh and I are starting to get agitated. Half the point of a wedding cake is for people to see it--if we wanted a cake that nobody would see, we would have just got a sheet cake from the grocery store. I decided that if we kept worrying, we would start looking bad in the pictures, so we delegated the worrying to my father, who started circling the cake stand.

I never knew a woman could move so fast. She got in around 745, dropped the cake off, and TOOK OFF. My dad didn't even manage to catch her, she was gone like a flash. Never a good sign.

It's also not a good sign when people keep coming up to you and telling you, the bride, not to look at the cake.

Not that many people saw it, it came about ten minutes before we all sat for dinner and they took it away. Those who did asked about the groom's cake. "What is it?" was the common question, with some sort of guess.

The main cake was okay. Actually, if it had came on it's own and on time, I probably would have been happy with it:



The flowers are pretty, they look pretty much like we wanted, and the cake is as smooth as most people can make buttercream. (I have no idea what happened to the cake topper, it disappeared into the ether).

It was the groom's cake that was the disaster.



Honestly, if given three guesses--or even ten guesses--would "piston" ever be one of them? And don't you love the scrawled "Jessica and Josh"? Never mind that it was literally 100% different than the cake she described. And it didn't even taste good! It actually made the wedding cake uglier by proxy.

See?



Josh was barely restraining his rage during the cake cutting, which was the first time we saw the cake. No exaggeration, we spent no more than 30 seconds with these cakes.





The only thing that got us through it was Rachel whispering "at least you can submit it to Cake Wrecks".

As wedding disasters go, it was a pretty mild one, sure. And it was one of the items I cared the least about. And I of course got a refund, although she didn't offer it first. She's lucky she decided to not fight us, Josh was totally ready to take her on Judge Judy.


**Vendor info (only for the good vendors!)***

Baked rice pudding (p. 820)

I have mentioned many, many times that I really hate making TJOC recipes that I already make terrific versions of. I make an amazing rice pudding. Honestly, it's like heaven in a bowl (I make a variety of extremely delicious old-fashioned desserts including blueberry buckles, bread puddings, and rice puddings). And my recipe is totally different from TJOC's Baked rice pudding (p. 820). I wasn't optimistic about TJOC's version...

It was a simple recipe. I combined milk, eggs, brown sugar, butter, vanilla, and salt in a bowl until well mixed.



I then added two cups of rice and some raisins and added them to a buttered casserole dish.



And baked it:



How was it? Pretty good. Not amazing. And certainly not as good as the version I already make, which is closer to Indian kheer than British pudding. I actually think this version was really bland--it needed more butter, cream instead of milk, and more sugar in my expert opinion :) And make sure to keep it in the refrigerator, otherwise it will mold...not that I would know anything about that...

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