The Wedding Cake, the Icing Sugar and the Chelsea Blue Side-Effect

Last week, Jen posted about being my Assistant Baker as we spent a night(s) baking and decorating our sister’s wedding cake and cupcakes. Well, not to ruin the ending of the story, but it all ultimately turned out to be a smashing success!

What you don’t know is that while we were preparing the two-tiered wedding cake and the 36 delicious wedding cupcakes, we had a few adventures along the way.

First was The Curious Case of the Icing Sugar Shortage.
Now, as some of you may know, cupcakes with a piped frosting take a lot of icing. And by a lot of icing I mean a lot of icing
(more on the physical effects of large amounts of Chelsea Blue icing
later). In any event, I had prepared for the decorating event by buying
2 kilograms of icing sugar for making homemade buttercream icing (my
homemade buttercream rocks, btw). And then I went out and bought a third pound, just in case.

I think you can see where this one is going. After the cupcakes had
gobbled up all three batches of buttercream and there were still four
left to frost, and still more blue flowers to pipe on the cake, we were
sorta stuck. It was nearly 10:00 p.m. and we were doing this job in my
suite at Blue Mountain Resort. Where to get more icing sugar (I still
had loads of butter!)?

Enter miracle-workers Jen and our new sister-in-law (sorta!) Lorelli:
they bravely trekked off into the night (I should likely mention here
that we had each consumed four martinis – or equivalent – at little
sister’s stagette earlier in the evening). I was stunned – stunned!
when they returned with a one kilogram bag of icing sugar. Eureka! We
were rescued! All thanks to the kindness of fellow human beings. All I
can say is thank God there’s a well-stocked Beaver Tails outlet in Blue
Mountain Village!

Which was followed by The Mysteriously Disappearing Blue Icing Colour Gel
Next morning (Wedding Day, incidentally) when I went to colour the fresh icing Chelsea Blue there was a minor major problem: I had forgotten to bring the blue icing colour gel.

So I sent hubby out (on his third errand of the day) to collect it back at the house. He made the drive there, and then phoned in a panic: he was rifling through all my cake decorating tools and he could find lavender, black, green, pink…basically a whole rainbow of icing colours but not blue.

“Oh, uh, wait…could it be here after all?” I replied sheepishly, remembering the little bag of stuff I had left in the hall closet?

Sure ’nuff.

But in the end, the cake was beautiful (and delish!) and the cupcakes were a smash hit, too. The cupcakes were half white, half devil’s food with cherry filling, and the cake was too: the bottom layer was devil’s food with cherry filling and the top was white cake with buttercream filling. All topped with rolled fondant and then piped with chelsea blue flowers with white dots, to complement the white flowers with blue dots on the cupcakes.

Oh, and the wedding? It was beautiful, too.