This is the cake at the beginning. I was thrilled and happy. I have been planning this cake for months. It was a four teird strawberry cake with a chocolate strawberry filing. It was covered in a cream cheese frosting and then fondant. The below picture is all the ingredients that was need for the cake. I thought it would be fun to show you all!

This is my sister in law Paige. She is wonderful, she volunteered to help me the whole day to do the cake. I had baked them at home and transported eight cakes five hours north. At this point in the day everything was going great! The cakes were coming together great. It wasn't until we started to stack the cakes that all heck broke loose!

This is me, putting it together the first time. It didn't' take long for us to realise that the bottom layer was not holding up to the weight of the cake. I had never run into this. I have always done everything you are suppose to do. I put the dowels in the cake, and had each layer had a wooden board. So we took the cake apart and added more wooden dowels in the cake to give it strength. We put it back to together. Again we had bulging and puckering and sagging. It was horrible. I was about to have a panic attack. We were then given the idea to take the cake apart, again, and cut out parts of the bottom cake and add cups in to hold it up. So we gave it a try. What else could we do?

This is me trying to put on a brave face. I was praying the whole time this would work. I had no clue what else to do. I didn't know how I was going to face Cherise if this didn't work out. How could I let me little sister in law down???? Okay, Paige held me together, I couldn't have done it without her. We put the cups in the bottom layer, recovered in fondant and put it back together. It seemed to work. For a while. This is the cake when I left to get ready for the reception.


At the time it looked great. Like it would work. I was still sick to my stomach. When I reached the reception about an hour and a half later I was shaking. The cake wasn't holding! I was ready to vomit. Now layer two and three were sagging! We had only an hour till the reception started so we tilted the cake stand to help it not fall over and then had to put a plastic lid folded a couple of time under one layer to hold that end up. What the heck was wrong with this cake? I felt so horrible! Cherise was wonderful and said it didn't matter, she thought it looked beautiful. Those words meant a lot to me. I still felt bad. I wanted it to be perfect. The next picture is a view of the room. You can see the cake looking a little lopsided. Oh I am embarrassed to post this, but I think it will be therapeutic to get it off my chest.


The reception decor was beautiful! To make a very long (and painful) story short, it held together alright for the night. We made the couple cut the cake pretty soon and they started to cut it up. I enjoyed hiding in the kitchen and slicing the horrible cake to death. While in the kitchen, holding back tears, a darling old lady came up to me, she said, that she had been making cakes longer than I had been a live. She said that some cakes just don't make it, but that she had never not been able to make one work. She then told me that I did a great job making it work. I wanted to curl up in her arms while she rocked me. IT was the best comfort I could have heard. I will always hate that cake. I will feel bad for a really long time, but I will get over it. It worked, Cherise is married and happy. That is the best part. One good point, people really liked how it tasted! Point for taste!

Oh and the apron I was wearing?
I made it. I wore it the whole time I mixed, baked, decorated, and resurrected the cake. I gave it to Cherise as a present. I think I will make an apron for every major cake I make and then give it to the person I make the cake for. That is if I ever make a cake again!