Wedding cakes and excuses

 When you're making a wedding cake the bride can get you out of anything. 

How to make a wedding cake

 This post could also be called how to become an alcoholic.

January: Agree to make wedding cake. Look for sugar skull moulds.

February: Buy sugar skull moulds. I meant to start work on it straight away but didn't. Don't worry, there's  plenty of time.

March: Crap - only a month till the wedding. Panic. Realise that this is all about preparation as I must work the week before the wedding. Beg, borrow and steal tins from mother-in-law. Make lots of lists and calculations.Realise that there is very little I can do till the week before the wedding. Again panic. Drink lots of alcohol. Look at wedding wrecks on cake wrecks. Drink more alcohol.

Make Sugar Skulls: Make sugar skulls from moulds. Leave to dry for a week. Join together with royal icing. (recipe to follow over coming days).

2 Weeks before: Individually line, mix, bake, cool, wrap and freeze each tier of wedding cake (takes whole day). 

Week before

Saturday: Cake shop open till 2pm. - buy a HUGE box of fondant. Call mother realising you don't want to carry 7kg of fondant home for 20 minutes. Realise you haven't gotten the cakes out of the freezer. Defrost cakes. Play Sims. Make Ganache. Leave to set. Obsessively look at Cake decorating forums. Practice Educause conference presentation.

Sunday: Make buttercream. Split cakes, fill with buttercream, cover with ganache. Clear out fridge. Leave to set in fridge. 

Monday: Present first ever conference paper at Educause.

Tuesday night: Colour fondant green, wrap for later. Start decorating sugar skulls. This involves making royal icing from scratch.

Wednesday night: work late - hope to dear god that everything won't be ruined because you haven't covered the cakes with fondant icing.

Thursday night: Come home, cover cakes in fondant. This is not as easy as it sounds. Spray cakes with vodka. Drink vodka.

Friday: Have day off. Realise that you have left covering the cake board in fondant far too late. Buy wrapping paper to cover board. Make fondant decorations & attach with royal icing - this sounds easy but surprisingly took all day. Finish decorating skulls. Be amazed at the amount of royal icing required for everything. Hubby helps assemble bottom two layers of cake. Pipe ganache borders. Hubby makes travelling box. Get to bed by 1:30

Wedding Day: Get up with hubby at 5:30. He switches cars around and moves cake to back of car as you realised the night before that you can't lift the cake on your own. Feel lucky you realised this before he left home. *phew* Go back to bed as he goes to work. Pack up everything needed for the cake, get dressed. Cake safely makes it to the wedding, you put on the top tier and the bride doesn't submit your cake to cake wrecks. *phew*

Also - I realise that top tier isn't centred. It bothers me every time.

I totally made a wedding cake!

If you check the date you'll see I totally blogged for work yesterday, even if I forgot to put it here.

How to hack EndNote (Part 4) - Submitting your journal article

Suddenly I feel like that's all over with - until my colleague Patrick told me I should do a how to Hack Endnote for your thesis and explained to me this problem of combining all your individual chapter's bibliographies into one. The only catch is I haven't done it before ... ever. So there may need to be some practising.

All this talk of wedding dresses! Did you know I made a wedding cake for MissSophieMac's Mexican Elopement Fiesta? I totally did! I also presented my first conference paper the Monday at Educause in the same week. Since I have so many days to fill in - I thought I'd blog some of the steps involved.

Here's a preview of it below.

Ohhh I, want to steal your heart ... and eat your brains

The lonely Island

So awesome! (Note some swearing... actually a lot of swearing. Just in case that bothers you)

Double click on yes...

Still being a dork - I'm sorry.

Part 3: How to hack EndNote: After all that effort, nothing has changed in MS word!

Also, Eddie Izzard is AWESOME.



Although - who has to do what with a fax now?

EndNote and cupcakes

I feel like such a library dork my first two posts for #blogjune are about EndNote. *sigh* Actually there will be another two in the series. I also blog at Research@UTS:Library, but have completely fallen behind with RAILS and Educause. So thought I would kill two birds with one stone.

The 4 part series will chronicle my epic adventure in referencing a journal article. I mean, who has ever heard of numbered referencing style before? The irony of this is after I spent a week learning how to do this, we didn't even make it to peer review for that journal as they publish articles that are more researchery and not so conceptual. So after yelling at my computer and sending numerous emails to my colleagues there was NO WAY I was going to let this slide by and not get something out of the experience. Hence:

1st June: How to hack EndNote: writing a journal article (part 1)
2nd June: How to hack EndNote: writing a journal article (part 2)

Also - I must learn how to do the cupcake swirls in the video below. I have the big tip, coupler and large piping bag from Wilton. It's a crime not to have used them yet.