So some of you may have seen/heard about our Wedding cake… um… situation that happend. The story has finally been told, yet the real reasons still remain a mystry… but I do have a feeling of what happened…
My families dearest sweet friend made our wedding cake, she emailed me with the full story this week. At the actual reception, she didn’t want to upset me and tell me about it… but I was in such happy bliss that it never even fazed me, and that’s the truth. The day was perfect, I married the love of my life… and like a sweet friend said, “It adds character to the whole wedding story”. Here is the story, as told by Janice:
Enough time has passed, I suppose it’s finally time to tell you exactly what happened that day (with the cake, I mean). I posted this story to my writing loop last week. (I’d been teaching a month-long course on mystery writing and left them with this story at the end of the month.) The story pretty much explains everything. I still feel really nauseous every time I think of it. I’m also thinking that I owe you a cake. So, when you’re ready to have a big celebration of some sort, let me know and there will be an UPRIGHT cake there for you (birthday for one of the kids/anniversary/etc.) Here’s the story:
Last week I baked a wedding cake for a friend’s wedding. I don’t bake professionally, but have been making wedding cakes off and on since my second daughter’s wedding. Anyway, I baked the cakes on Thursday. Iced them on Friday. Took them to the country club/reception site on Saturday morning. I’d braced every level with support rods, as always. Cardboard separators are used inbetween layers. I didn’t have one for the tiny top cake, but didn’t see that as an issue. It was really tiny, after all. I perched it atop the other three, wrapped black ribbon around each level (bride’s choice) and put the topper on top. (I should add–because this factors heavily into the story–that it wasn’t a real cake topper. It was the letter “g” made out of thin decorative metal. The bride had asked me to wedge it down into the top cake.) When I finished, I stepped back to look at the finished product. It was nice. Plain looking. (I usually do more elaborate cakes with flowers, etc.) Still, it was a nice, respectable cake.
I went to the wedding (which was lovely). On the drive back to the reception facility, I remembered that I’d forgotten to take pictures of the cake, so I grabbed my camera and had it in hand when I walked into the country club. This is where the story takes a turn (and talk about a mystery)! I looked at the table where the cake had been (stress HAD been) and the table was empty. Empty. NOTHING there. No cake. No cake stand (and we’re talking about an elaborate/expensive silver stand, about eight inches high). Nothing. I immediately went into what I call “the white zone.” That’s that place you go into when you’re in shock. You think you’re dreaming. You HOPE you’re dreaming. I went running to find someone. . ..anyone who worked at the facility. I finally found a waitress. When I asked about the cake, her face turned pale and she looked like she might cry. She informed me that the cake had fallen.
As I said, I’ve baked a LOT of cakes and have never had one fall before. The manager came running. She insisted no one had touched the cake or the table. (I’ll never know.) She took me into the kitchen so that I could see what was left of the cake. Now, remember. . .we’re talking about a cake big enough to feed 250 people here. When I got in there, the cake was in pieces and someone was slicing it, putting the slices on plates. They’d already sliced over 50 pieces by the time I got in there and stopped them. They’d planned to slice the whole cake, with the exception of one small middle cake, which they held back for the bride and groom to serve.
I did a quick, panicked assessment. Apparently this is what happened (though I’ll never know for sure). The letter “g” had split the top cake in half. Half of it had tumbled off. (I could see the half that was still remaining.) The three underneath cakes were slightly topsy-turvy. The people at the facility made an executive decision to dismantle the cake and start slicing. Ugh! I put a stop to that immediately and took inventory. TWO of the four cakes remained, albeit not pretty (think crooked and slightly smashed with frosting hanging down the sides). I ran to my car and grabbed a new bolt of black ribbon. Someone somewhere came up with a long strand of silk ivy. I put the two cakes on the stand (thank goodness for a tall stand), pressed in the ivy around the bottom to hide the major crookedness of the bigger cake, smeared on some left-over frosting on top of the top cake (thank goodness I’d had the foresight to bring extra, though it was a slightly different color, since it was buttercream and not cream cheese). Regardless, it went on the cake. Then I stuck the letter “g” on top. The whole thing was a short, fat, sloppy mess. Seriously. A mess. But it was a cake, by golly. And SOMETHING needed to go on that table.
I talked some poor waitress into carrying it out. (I refused.) The bride’s family was told. They took it in stride. The bride was told. (She took it in stride.) When it came time to cut the cake, the bride never even flinched. (I figured her face would show her displeasure as she cut the cake, but she never let on. She made it look like that was the most beautiful cake on planet earth.) Afterwards, she told me maybe five or six times, “Don’t worry about it!” Here’s the best part of the story. That cake (white cake with strawberry filling and cream cheese frosting) was the best cake I’ve ever baked. Seriously I’ve never seen SO many people rant and rave over the taste of a cake. And the pieces that had been refrigerated were ten time better than the rest.
I will never know why that cake fell. I can speculate (and have). But, it’s a mystery. Likely, one that will never be solved. Many times that day I heard the Lord say, “I’m watching how you handle this.” I actually used the words, “When life gives you lemons. . .make wedding cake!” The same is often true of our stories. We can work, work, work to put them together. Spend quality time. Then something happens and part of it takes a little tumble. Someone somewhere decides to dismantle it, slicing it into pieces. And yet. . .there is a God who wants to make wedding cake out of lemons (or something like that). You get the picture. 
I just wanted to leave you with a Janice A. Thompson story as we ended this course. As my critique partner Martha Rogers said (upon hearing about this), “Only you. . . .”
Oh, and one more thing. My next (and final) cozy mystery for Barbour is titled “Catering to Disaster.” It’s about a sabotaged wedding reception where all of the guests end up with food poisoning. Guess what I’m adding to the story…
Janice Thompson
“Love, Laughter and Happily Ever Afters!”
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Now it’s your turn to speculate, assume, guess, what do you think happened? Have you gotten married and had some kind of crazy thing happened? Let’s hear your story too!
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I remember it very clearly… I had rehearsed and rehearsed and drove miles upon miles to meet with the person I would be performing with… I wanted to make sure that my performing partner & I would not mess up at all.
A local country singer & I were to perform the entertainment at a breast cancer benefit. We were to open up the ceremonies with the star spangled banner – I would play my guitar, and she would sing.
“The” guitar was my 12 string acoustic/electric. You plug it in and voila, its electric. Unplugged, its just a plain old acoustic.
She didn’t have a big knowledge base of guitars and how they’re to be handled. Her ONE guitar was an acoustic, and she didn’t get the concept of being able to plug in an acoustic guitar… she’d never even seen a jack to plug in a guitar to an amp.
Minutes…. mere MINUTES before our performance, I turned around – not 10 feet away – to talk to Mom. I turn around and the country singer apparently thought she would help set up my guitar…….
She unscrewed the jack out of the guitar… and the pickup [the electronic device you plug the cord into] fell into the guitar. There was no way to screw it back on because its a 12 string guitar… so there’s NO space to stick your hand into the hole without removing the strings. And the little screw she took off fell somewhere in a crack on the floor was gone forever.
[I'm hoping that makes sense to you...]
2 minutes later we were to perform, and I ended up having to have someone hold a microphone up to the guitar as I played it acoustically…. but it was so quiet that her singing overpowered my guitar, and the guy that was holding the mic kept moving away and didn’t put it close enough for the sound to really be as loud as it needed to be….. Then our halftime performance ended up just being her singing to a karaoke tape she magically had, and me sitting in the audience watching what I had practiced weeks for.
I always found it suspicious that she had a backup plan just in case something happened to my guitar…. I still think to this day that she knew exactly what she was doing and wanted to steal the show….. but who knows.
very interesting! I think you could be right
every day of my life is improvised…i dont know what i would do if it weren’t…