Journeyman Years

jour·ney·man

 (jur′nē-mən)

A journeyman is an individual who has completed an apprenticeship and is fully educated in a trade or craft but not yet a master.  Sometimes, a journeyman is required to accomplish a several-year working trip, which may be called the journeyman years.

Andrew and Brendan are getting married!

And this Evil Cake Genius can't think of a more fitting setting for their chic, metropolitan affair, than New Year's Eve in Downtown Minneapolis.

New Year's Eve weddings are wonderful in many ways.  Your guests are more apt dress to the nines for the holiday.  Nobody is leaving before midnight, and it's as if the whole world is celebrating with you.  There are, however, some pitfalls to a New Year's Eve Wedding.  Things can get pretty cheesy and themey pretty fast.  Thankfully, Andrew and Brendan and their wedding planners- Style Architects, had this firmly in mind when hashing out the details of the evening.

When they came to meet with me to discuss the Wedding Cake and Invitations, there was a beautiful design to the event.  Great color scheme, clean, modern look, with a little bit of glam (after all, it is New Year's Eve).  But there was nothing that screamed of Auld Lang Syne or the beginning of a new year.

That all changed with the cake.  No, we didn't pollute their plans with a six foot tall Champagne Bottle cake with a ticking clock, edible clock springs, confetti, and pyrotechnics at midnight.  But we did talk about the significance of time.

Andrew and Brendan had been together for 11 years.  That's a long time...and in those years, they had experienced a Journey.  They started out as two single guys (life-apprentices, if you will).  And what followed were 11 Journeymen Years.  In those years, they grew together.  They experienced loss, love, the birth of their two daughters, the evolution of their careers, a cross-country move, and the transformation into a family.  Each year brought something new, something joyous, something heartbreaking, something comforting, something scary, something easy something difficult, but always something that they would face together.  So what better time to share this Journey with their closest family and friends than on the dawn of a new year.

So we sketched a cake.  A modern, clean structure with a timeline running down the center.  The guys would get me a paragraph about each year's significant events.  And we'd create a sweet story.  We'd borrow fonts and formatting from their invitations, which we had already designed.

We topped it with a sugar monogram in the style of their invitations, and a title of sugar letters to draw their guests in.  They even added their daughter's monograms, and let them choose the style and color of their letters...after all, it was their journey too.

There was a temporary wall between the ceremony and reception area at the venue (the beautiful Guthrie Theater) so we not only got to see our guys just before they walked down the aisle, but we got to eavesdrop on the ceremony.  A rare treat for the Evil Cake Genius.  As we stacked layer upon layer of cake, we could here readings, music, and the exchange of vows.  We added the last details, and listened to the guests erupt in applause as the couple walked back down the aisle...and into the next of many journeys, together.

Decorator's Notes:

Andrew and Brendan's cake was paneled in fondant for a crisp look.  The cakes were frosted in buttercream, then topped with fondant.  The side pieces of fondant were rolled out a day in advance and allowed to dry.  Then, they were cut to size, and attached to the cake using buttercream.

The lettering was all done using a custom Mesh Stencil.  Rather than hand-painting one letter at a time, which is slow and imprecise, we laid out stencils to allow us to do all of the wording on each panel in one swipe of Royal Icing.  Thank God for Evil Cake Genius!  Want to see one of the mesh stencils in action, click HERE to see a monarch butterfly stenciled in no time!  Evil Cake Genius does custom Mesh Stencils too, so go ahead and contact them. Here's the web site link

We used mesh stencils to create the pattern on the monogram as well as the Zebra Print on the girls' initials.  Super precise, super fast!