Baroque Decor and my strange habit of paying Jenna with meat products.

Copy Cat.

My entire grade school career was spent diligently avoiding this label.  Shy of line "Budger", "Geek", "Cootie" carrier,  or the dreaded "Paste-Eater", being branded a "Copy Cat" was a social label that could seriously impair your playground social calendar.

Funny how thirty-some years change your perspective.  While I still think that "Paste-Eaters" are a completely different class of humans, I now proudly brand myself a "Copy Cat".  People ask me all the time how I come up with such vastly different cake designs from week to week.  I'm not truly the Evil Cake Genius I claim to be.  I'm simply a very accomplished Copy Cat.  Let's be honest.  No two couples are the same.  And unless they hire a wedding coordinator who lumps them into a formulaic cookie cutter wedding, their wedding won't be the same as any other wedding.  So, my job is easy.  I take the most compelling and visually interesting elements from their wedding, their relationship, their culture or family history (check out the Rubber Ducky post) and design a cake using "borrowed" elements. 

The benefits are obvious.  Our clients always get a unique design that is cohesive with their overall event, and even better, I never have to make the same wedding cake twice! 

Now, on to Kerstin and Erik. Their wedding would be classic and romantic.

An outdoor ceremony in Duluth, followed by a reception at the  Historic Greysolon Ballroom.

This Baroque beauty of a room inspired their wedding invitations, their color scheme, and, you guessed it, their cake.  From inset paneled walls, to gold Baroque garlands and molded chandelier medalions,  this setting was a cake decorators dream.

And Kersten and Erik let us run with it.  The only hitch...the Greysolon Ballroom is three hours away from Gateaux Inc.  So, shy of a 6 hour round trip drive, we weren't going to see the ballroom until we delivered the cake.  This is where I marvel at how I ever did my job before digital photography and the internet.  Yes, I'm that old, get a grip young'uns.  But fortunately, this old broad has adapted.  Kersten and Erik's coordinator, the fabulous Laura Mullen, provided us with photos of the space and color swatches, and I cyber-stalked the location to fill in any gaps. 

So, imagine a three hour drive, with a five tier cake.  In our multiple layers of long underwear, thermal shirts, mittens, and coats to keep the cakes icy cold, I couldn't help but wonder if we would meet the expectations that the Ballroom had laid out for us. 

When we arrived, we were greeted by park benches of Seniors lining the sidewalk outside the Greysolon, whose upper floor hotel rooms have been transformed into senior condos.  They watched, quietly murmuring, as two frozen figures emerged from a delivery vehicle, donned our hot-pink chef coats and began loading in box after box of precious mystery cargo.  When the elevator opened to the ballroom, I couldn't help but feel as though I was meeting an old friend.  It was just as I had hoped.  Elegant, but welcoming.  Classic and timeless.  And a spot-on match to its Cake Counterpart. 

Only two things left to do.  Stack the cake, and do a little exploring in Duluth.  Gotta' be a tourist when you can (plus, we needed a little time to defrost our limbs).  Our Senior Citizen audience got a second show that day.  When we returned to the car before our walking tour of Duluth's shoreline, we realized that it was a beautiful mid-eighty degree day.  So, we started shedding layers.  Much like clowns coming out of a tiny car, the layers of clothes kept coming off, only to reveal, more layers.  Once we were dressed like normal humans, again, we embarked on our adventure. 

A few weeks before the delivery, I heard a show on MPR about great food on the North Shore.  One caller mentioned a place called North Water Smoke House.  He sang its praises as a fabulous source for all things delicious and smokey.  And the Cake Lady was sold.  If you read our post about Two Harbors you know that I have a strange habit of paying Jenna her bonuses in Meat.  I think it began when we delivered a birthday cake to a night spot that was next door to Kramarczuk's Sausage Shop in Northeast Minneapolis.  Followed by our excursion to Lou's Fish house, Meat on Millacs (awesome jerky, by the way) and now North Water Smoke House.  This time, the mission...Bison Pastrami.  I've never had Bison before, but that's what they sell, and Charcuterie is their specialty.  So, we loaded up on the goods, and headed back to the car.  Not before planning what on earth we would do with several pounds of meat.  So, stop number two...find a bakery to buy a Marble Rye, three, a cheese shop, and by the time we arrived back in Minneapolis, we had all the makings for Reubens (well, not so much Reubens as Robins, grilled pastrami and swiss on Marble Rye, with Parmesan Peppercorn dressing).   So, off we split, to our separate residences to a Cake Decorator's Saturday Night.  Dinner in pajamas, on the couch, with the men who put up with our ridiculous schedules and neurotic obsession with all things cakey. 

Thanks to Laura Ivanova Photography for sharing their beautiful photos of our lovely Bride and Groom. 

Get me to the Reception on time

I'm late.  I'm always late...a "latepants" if you will.  Can't help it.  Any minute that I arrive early  to something is a minute that I could have been working on one of the ten-thousand other things I have on my to do list.  So, I'm either exactly on time, or late...mostly late. Except for cake deliveries.  In seventeen years of delivering cakes, I can think of two times that I ran late.  One was an unexpected traffic jam that snuck up on me, resulting in a hurried set up that caused the caterer to prolong the cocktail hour by ten minutes, the other was due to a tornado warning, in which, my husband, the Captain, had fortunately already arrived with the cake, and called me off from driving into the storm. Of course, my only question..."is the cake alright?" and my brilliant husband's response "It's on a kitchen cart in the basement of the hotel with me and the hotel staff and guests."  Apparently, it was the only inanimate object moved to safety...gotta love the Captain.

The trick to keeping Latepants from being late, is in the padding.  We arrive at each venue two hours before the guests arrive.  That gives me an hour and a half to set up the cake and take photos, and another half hour of cushion time in case the guest's arrive early, or we hit traffic, etc.

The only exception to this rule is at the Minnesota History Center.  We love it there.  Top notch staff, great food, friendly people.  The only hitch...it's a museum, therefore, open to the public until five o'clock each day.  So, when Jenna hired us for her wedding, and informed me that the guests would be arriving at 6:00, we had to throw our meticulously padded timing out the window.  Can we set up a cake in an hour.  Sure.  If we have to.

Jenna had a fabulous vintage aesthetic to her wedding.  Her sense of color is fabulous (one of my worst design traits) and her knack for personalization, amazing.  She should be a wedding planner... actually, she opened her own business this year...wedding planning.  She's great, if you need the number, give me a call!  We had a great design session, combining her and her fiance's love of travel, with their vintage look and color scheme and her vision that the cake should look like a stack of hat boxes.  I've always wanted to do a hatbox cake, and the beautiful vintage hatboxes that she found online as inspiration, made designing this little sweetie a sheer delight.  We added a band to match the waistline detail of her dress on the top tier, and the beautiful damask pattern from her hand-made table runners to another, and put lyrics from a song that she wrote for the wedding ceremony on the bottom.  Multi talented, much?  Finally, we found art from vintage post cards, and made frosting-backed travel stickers and postcards for the cakes to tell the couple's story in geography.

The day of the wedding came, we planned to arrive at the History Center at 4:30 (even though we couldn't get in until 5:00, we're persistent that way) and Jenna and I began our Caravan to the reception at 4:00, leaving 30 minutes to get from Plymouth to St. Paul.  A trip I've made more times than I can count.  Little did I know, that MNDOT had postponed the much publicized closing of I-94 from a week earlier due to rain...and didn't share this information with, well, it seems, ANYONE. 

When we got to 94, we were redirected to 94 west, and taking one look at the line of traffic trying to get back into Minneapolis on 94 east, I decided to drive through the city.  The Captain and I both went to the U of MN, and lived in Minneapolis for several years...so I called him so he could direct me to the next entrance onto 94.  Easy, we drove through downtown (which by the way, everyone else decided to do) and attempted to get onto 94 at the Metrodome, nope, that entrance was closed, Seven Corners, closed, the detour took people onto 35W North, but I'm smarter than the detour, right? Wrong.  Poor Jenna got the tour through Dinkytown, onto University Avenue, which, just out of coincidence, was not only shut down to one lane, but was covered with Fraternity and Sorority members having some kind of festival...

The idea was to get down to 280 and cut back over to 94, but with the lane closure on University, I was travelling an average of 4 miles per hour, and starting to FREAK OUT.  Finally, I remembered the entrance onto 94 that I used to take when I lived on Erie Street.  The Captain advised against the risk, but I was getting nowhere on University Avenue.  So, I made a last minute decision, and cut right, leaving Jenna to try to maneuver over.  I hung up with the Captain, and called Jenna to direct her to where I hoped we could make it onto the Highway.  And, by the grace of the cake gods, it was open.  The skies opened, and I think I heard the faint sounding of horns, as I made it onto I - 94 via the Huron entrance.  Which I had all to myself.  Nothing makes you recall every scene from every Post-Apocalyptic, and/or Zombie movie more than having Interstate 94 in Minneapolis, all to yourself.  Not a single car or construction vehicle, not a soul, besides me and my cake, from the U of MN Minneapolis campus all the way to Cretin/Vandalia.  A stretch of road that measures approximately 3 miles, and felt like 30 miles waiting for Mad Max and Tina Turner to come carry me off to Thunderdome. 

But, again, I digress.  Turns out, I arrived at the History center at 5:40, with Jenna a mere 2 minutes behind me.  We sprinted inside, found a flatbed, and set a new land-speed record for stacking a four tier wedding cake and putting all of the finishing touches on it in fifteen minutes.  I even had time to snap a few pictures of it before the guest's arrived.


Not my ideal day, but as these photos of the Bride and Groom show, no one was the wiser.  Until now...