Duluth! and China.

Just how cold can an SUV with the Air conditioning on full blast get in three and a half hours? Really, no...Really cold.

When we met with Shefali and her parents to design her wedding cake, we knew we were in for a drive. The wedding would be held in Duluth. We've done long distance deliveries in the past (our record is 5 1/2 hours away) and we carry cakes onto airplanes for magazine shoots quite often (but those are dummy cakes). So, traveling with a real wedding cake...for a real wedding, is still a stressful (and downright arctic) experience.

Shefali's wedding cake would imitate the rich palette of her decor (bright oranges, yellows, pinks, etc.) and with an armful of Sari's, her mom Anita brought us enough pattern inspiration for three cakes. So we designed a beauty.

Then...serendipity, in the form of a trip to China, intervened. As many of you know, the evil cake genius is an avid traveller. Even more, an avid amateur photographer. So when I returned from a lovely trip to China this April, I noticed that I had accidentally cleared all of my SD cards for the trip, without backing them up properly. I really could have sworn I'd done this, but to my embarrassment, the photos of those Sari's were nowhere to be found. So, I emailed Anita, who promptly emailed me photos of Shefali's wedding Sari.

They didn't have her Sari when I first met with them, so this was all new material to me. She was about to send photos of the original sari's when I mailed her brand new sketches, using the bride's actual wedding dress as inspiration. My favorite detail being the repeating motif of embroidered Peacocks!

Needless to say, Anita didn't need to send us the original photos again. And even though I found them on my computer several weeks later, I knew that their two month hiatus was one of those instances in which the universe has a better cake plan than me.