A First Time for Everything – A Non-Karmic Event

When your wife is a professional baker, you get used to some nice by-products. There are usually left-over cakes from that week’s tastings. She often has left over fillings from wedding cakes that make a great desert on their own. And if we come up with a delicious desert concoction, she can just invent the recipe and we can eat it whenever we want. But you also get used to some other things: baking late into the night on busy weeks, losing all of your fridge space to that weekend’s cakes, and having to lift 50+ pound multi-tiered wedding cakes and transporting them across town, up a hill, down a flight of stairs, and across a busy dance floor.

It’s that last point that people usually fixate on when they find out what Steph does. People are fascinated with transporting these things and all of the potential catastrophes they see in their heads as soon as they envision moving a mountain of flour and sugar. I usually respond with a fervent “uhh, I don't know, uhh, we just don’t drop ‘em.” Until this weekend, we’d never experienced one of these catastrophes.

Three weddings this weekend. We’re to attend the third one as guests in Hood River. Because of that Steph set off early in the day to deliver the first two wedding cakes. It didn’t take long. Because of the day’s logistics Steph was transporting these cakes by herself; normally she has a spotter sitting with the cakes if they are multi-tiered. Ten minutes after leaving the house, Steph was driving in heavy traffic behind someone who didn’t know where they were going. They merged into the right turn lane, and then quickly merged back in front of Steph and had to slam on their brakes to stop for the traffic light. That is all it took. A quick stab to the brakes by Steph to avoid the collision and the three tiered wedding cake flipped over. FLIPPED OVER. Up-side down. Well, part of it was on it’s side, but that detail just didn’t matter at this point. It happened. A first. The driver of the lane-changing car drove off knowing nothing of the destruction they had caused.

A near-hysterical Steph called me first. A 10 second phone call: “The cake tipped over, I don’t know what to do. I’m turning around. Meet me back at the house.” Click. Before I could start asking questions she had hung up and was onto her next call. She called Sara G. You should always call Sara G when your cake tips over. I don’t think there is a better person to call.

Looking back, it felt like two minutes later the three of us were back at the house. Steph and Sara were in Crisis Mode. Crisis Mode is a fantastical state where piles of trash can be transformed into pastry confections. It makes me wonder if we could assign these two to work on the Mortgage Crisis or the current Georgia Conflict. They’d have to be in Crisis Mode before they started, but within an hour an economical and peaceful solution would be delivered to the world and everyone would want a slice.

I won’t go into the techniques of reviving a fallen cake. Steph’ll have to speak to that. Needless to say, 3 hours later they delivered a three tiered wedding cake. As far as sainthood goes, this makes only two miracles for our Patron Saint of Pastry Timelines, Sara Greenleaf. So, despite the heroics, she’s not quite there yet. St. Greenleafs Day will be celebrated in the first week of September, though, be sure of that.

I would have taken pictures of the poor cake after it flipped, but Steph would have ripped my head off if I’d tried at that moment. Steph was disinclined to memorialize the cake after delivery, so we also don’t have one of the finished product. At this point all we had to do was to get to the next wedding.

Sara and Steph posing with this weekend’s cakes before any transportation took place (a happier, simpler time):