Giving it all away - yay!

Finally, I've sent out the extra money raised that's going towards building Well #2 with Well Wishers!!! Meanwhile, I hope Well #1 is being taken care of by Charity:Water since the campaign closed at the end of September. Also, the donations page and final sum donated to both organisations has been updated. 

According to my excel spreadsheet, the actual amount raised from the three month campaign was AU$6,679.90 + US$1,722 (plus $340 people have given me for ingredients and labour!). Unfortunately, $107.28 went towards covering bank transaction fees and approximately $150 was lost in the sh!tty exchange rates at the time :( and that's why I've decided to put the extra money raised with Well Wishers. I've given it all away now, off my chest, moving on!!!

So, I managed to pull through the last challenge of making my first wedding cake and using fondant....

It was a fun process although daunting as I was basically just making things up as I go and having lack of time to do anything (working during the day!) I was lucky nothing went drastically wrong the night before the big day.

Here's a spoiler process photo compilation taken throughout the night... zzzzzz

I'm waiting for the professional shots from the wedding to do a proper post of the cake/wedding.

I don't remember much of the actual wedding, just have a few photos to prove I was there as I was basically a sleepy zombie having done an all nighter. I realised I'm seriously getting too old to go 30 hours without sleep, my body is still recovering from that.

Thank you Jesse and Annie for letting me be a part of your special day!

Pro Procrastinator

there's my ugly feet chillaxing :)

So it's been another few weeks gone by... and there was suppose to be wedding cake samples made and mock-ups of the real thing for the bride and groom (and for myself), except I have been doing what normal people do on the weekends - catching up on housework, catching up with friends, going to the beach, to the park and making sure I get 8 hours sleep each night.

First sunny day in months!

Anyway, I do feel quite bad that I took forever to get my ass back into the kitchen. But it's not like I haven't been thinking about the wedding cake. It's been on my mind. I've been searching for a suitable cake stand, ordered numerous books on the topic, purchased a heap load of equipment (for my own pleasure), going through tonnes of images for inspiration, visiting craft stores and even hardware stores to source stuff.

The stress is coming back. The wedding is right around the corner. The bride and groom decided to trust me with their cake, I apologised for not having anything to show but I promise to show up with a wedding cake on the day! lol......

I tested the chocolate fudge cake recipe and baked the red velvet cake for the first time (I finally know what it tastes like!)... except they were both extremely sweet, and after talking to the baking supplies shop lady, I realised being in Australia has its disadvantages. We are pretty much limited to using ganache as filling for the cake unlike in the UK or US where people are more worried that their cake might freeze. Here, everything is melting, on a daily basis.... so my tester cake, the one that I filled with cream cheese frosting/buttercream and covered in fondant didn't really work out. I was also surprised by how intense powdered food colouring is (I had grape purple from 1/2 tsp of that stuff! so had to really dilute it back down )...

I seem to blabbering, does anyone even care?! (I'm only updating coz I saw I'm still getting a few stray visitors in the past two weeks)........

first attempt at fondant icing... all a bit wonky and mushy

I didn't take photos of stuff with my sticky hands, just these mediocre fondant iced midget tester pieces which was applied under humid/hot conditions (damn summer) so everything was just difficult to handle..... luckily I did try it out with the cream cheese filling, now I know not to use it as the cake will be out in the sun... ganache is going to have to do it on its own. I also found out what fondant is like....

Hopefully... all goes well (jesse/annie if you're reading this DON'T WORRY! it won't look like this on the day!), I'm going to have to dramatically decrease the sugar ratio of these cake recipes for the asian crowd, although they did say it doesn't matter how it taste but it needs to look good...... don't think I'll be sleeping much the night before the wedding....

Going to test out white chocolate fondant and flower pastes in the nights to come... :))))