Aged to Perfection

My friend Stephanie's dad just turned 60. Stephanie asked me to make his cake. I was honored.

I didn't realize what mess this was going to be. The cake put up a good fight and I almost gave up but I think I conquered it after 12 hours+. On Tuesday I made some royal icing/color flow for the wine bottle. I found a pattern and created a wine label like Trader Joe's Two Buck Chuck (Her dad's name is Chuck so I thought it would be cute). This was not such a good idea. It is really hard to write words in color flow. But I thought I could save it. I baked the first layer Wednesday night and almost burned it because I fell asleep. I baked the second layer Thursday before my class. I came home after class around 9:30 pm and started the decorating. I iced the first layer just fine. Then I tried to set the second layer over the first. This is very hard to do brilliant idea to do the wording the same way. I found a font I liked and printed the text from my computer. I traced it with piping gel and added it to the cake. Well guess what! When you turn it over the mirrored image is backwards. Doh! I ended up free handing the lettering. I added the grapes and vines at the end and finally went to bed. I tossed and turned and woke up several times that night from cake nightmares. I kept dreaming that the cake cracked again. When I woke up in the morning the first thing I did was run down stairs and check on the cake. Sure enough it was still in one piece. Whew! I gave it to Stephanie Friday morning. I hope she and h with a 9x13 size cake. The top layer cracked in 3 pieces. I used a ton of icing to get it to stick back together. You couldn't tell the difference. Then I did the basket weave around all the sides in white icing and added a rope border around the bottom and top. Then there was a landslide. A huge chuck of cake from the top layer fell off. This was when I got angry and started crying. I almost gave up. I walked away from the cake for about 1/2 an hour to think about what I should do. I came back and put the cake in it's place. I added even more icing to doctor it up. Then I prayer that it wouldn't fall again. I recreated the basket weave and rope borders. It was time to add the color flow wine bottle but it still wasn't dry enough. The wine bottle cracked too. Grrr! So I just traced the wine bottle with piping gel and added the piping gel pattern to the cake. This was one of the few things that worked well. I'm really bad with writing with icing so I had aer dad like it!