The Red Velvet Wedding (and the saga of the loser cupcakes)

The second wedding cake of the weekend was much bigger and was at a semi posh local hotel.  There were only 250 guests planned, but we made a total of 600 servings of cake for them.  The bride’s cake served 255 people, the groom’s cake another 100 or so and then they ordered 250 cupcakes on top of all that.  They packaged the cupcakes in delightful little boxes for the guests to take home with them.  What a lovely idea.  (Unless you are the poor schlep making 250 identical cupcakes!)

 

 

 

The Bride’s cake was a lovely red velvet cake, iced with butter cream and decorated in black colored chocolate swirls.  (Red velvet is a pain to ice, it keeps wanting to "bleed" crumbs into the icing!)  It was a striking look, the contrast of the colors was very pleasing.  I think it would have been a lovely presentation once they started cutting all that red cake!  I don’t like red velvet myself, I just feel like I’m doing something horrible to my body by eating that much food color (and it really takes a lot!) but there is no doubt that it is a pretty and delicious cake! 

 

 

 

 

I got all five tiers set in place and all the details finished and then looked around for the flowers for the top of the cake.  The florist had cut all the little orchids off the stem and my heart sank.  What a stupid move that was, but they clearly didn’t know any better.  So I started scouting the centerpieces on the tables to find stems of stuff that I could borrow for the top of the cake.  I snipped a few twigs here and there and combined with the orchid blossoms, it turned out very pretty.

 

 

  

The Groom’s cake was his frat emblem on a full sheet cake that was marble white/chocolate inside.  It turned out nicely I thought.

 

 

 

And then there were the cupcakes.  The Loser cupcakes.  At every turn we screwed up this order!

 

The first screw up happened when the elves took the order.  The client wanted an “L” on each cupcake, and the order said they needed to be made out of fondant.  BL told me to use a cookie cutter to make them and it wouldn’t be a big deal.  I took a look at that cookie cutter and I wondered to myself… it would look better for a child’s event than for a ritzy wedding, but I knew it was the only way to do 250 fondant “L’s” without wanting to jump from the nearest bridge.  (Doing a bunch of “L’s” out of Icing would have been quicker and easier but someone up-sold the client fondant – so that’s what I was stuck making.)  And with the amount of cake orders I had in addition to the weddings, I was about to pull out my hair anyway.  So I started in making these infernal “L’s.”  The bride’s mother happened by and BL picked up one of the “L’s” to go show her.  I was about half way through making them and I stopped BL by simply saying… “Don’t ask a question I don’t want the answer to!”  She looked a little surprised, looked at the fondant “L” in her hand and looked at me, realizing what I was saying.  She laughed, put down the “L” and went back to work laughing.  I made about 275 of those stupid things the first time around and had to come back and make more because they were fragile and I broke quite a few of them. 

 

 

 

 

Boss Lady is the baker and she just couldn’t keep up this week.  (For good reason – because the bread elf is gone and the brownie/cookie elf was on vacation.)  So I didn’t start seeing those cup cakes until it had already become crunch time.  They were red velvet cake in silver cupcake liners.  I had decorated the first batch and as I moved them some went flying off the board, like penguins into the ocean.  Those little silver liners are slippery!  I lost quite a few with that stupid human trick but it turned out that only one was beyond fixing.  So I used some non-slip stuff (the same stuff that they use under rugs to keep them from sliding around) and worked late into the night finishing up the first round of cupcakes.  But that was the beginning.

 

 

 

When one of the elves came in the next morning and looked at the cupcakes with all those little “L’s” on them… she dubbed them “the loser cupcakes” complete with full tilt New Yorker attitude and sign language.  The name stuck.  BL passed an edict that the client must NOT know that we named them thus, so the name really stuck. 

 

 

 

 

I was stressing because the rest of the cupcakes weren’t even baked and they are time consuming.  So she started the first batch but forgot to add in the rising agent and she didn’t figure it out until they were in the oven so the next batch of cupcakes didn’t rise.  They tasted a little strange and they were very short and dense.  She didn’t have much time to bake replacement cupcakes but she finally decided that she would at least try.  It turned out that we still had to use some of the red hocky puck cupcakes to finish out the 250, but at least they were finished.

 

 

 

The bride’s Mom and Dad came in to package up the cupcakes.  Each cupcake got the royal treatment in a red box with tissue paper and a ribbon with the bride and groom’s names on it.  Only the Bride’s Mom wasn’t crazy about my little cookie cutter “L’s.”  I didn’t blame her, I didn’t think much of them by that point myself.  But it was the morning of the wedding and there they were, all 250 of them.  BL scoured the order to see if anyone had written “cursive L” anywhere but there was nothing.  It was sad because making cursive “L’s” out of icing would have been so much easier for me.  The Bride’s dad just shook his head and told his wife “It is what it is” and everyone decided to be happy about it.  (He was a freakin genius!) 

 

They wanted to move the cart that I had put all the cupcakes on.  But then they realized that there was no way to get the cart through that part of the bakery, it would just be easier to move them tray by tray.  So the Bride’s mom picked up the one tray with the extras on it (that didn’t have the non-slip plastic on it) and I had to catch cupcakes like I was Michael Jordan.  Loser cupcakes just kept trying to jump. 

 

 

 

 

It is done and over.  I imagine that most of the cupcakes in their pretty boxes have been devoured.  It was a beautiful wedding and I’m certain that the new Mr. and Mrs. “L” are enjoying a lovely honeymoon somewhere marvelous.  On the other hand, I don’t want to see another red velvet cake for a very long time.  And 250 cupcakes?  Never again! 

 

And just for the record, it's the cupcakes that were losers, not the people.  The people were great.  And if you happen to know the lovely couple, remember that I was sworn to secrecy.  :)  (for all the good that did!)  LOL!