The Three Spinsters {part the first}

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Wedding Cake Continued....finally!

Well, here I am finally! I had a few set backs after my last post, one was a wedding, the other a camp and lastly an accident. More on those things later. I thought I should pick up where I left off. So it's time for...........................(drum roll please!)...................CAKE!!

That is a lot of cake. :)
We wrapped each layer in plastic wrap and foil before we stuck them in the freezer so that they wouldn't taste like a freezer. Ick.

Here is one of the sheet cakes being leveled and split into layers. VERY important when making any cake that is stacked on itself. We weren't TOO type A about it. ;)

Then we painted on the moistening syrup to make the cake more....moist. We used vanilla flavored. Mm! Then we did a layer of frosting and a layer of strawberry jam in the white cakes and a fudgy chocolate filling in the chocolate cake. Each tier was 4 layers. So, three layers of filling. My mouth is watering....

This is the frosting for the crumb coat. It is the same frosting (cream cheese) but we didn't want to get crumbs in the rest of the frosting. We thought that might defeat the object of the crumb coat! A crumb coat is a very good idea. As you might have guessed, it keeps the crumbs from showing through the frosting. After we applied the crumb coat we stuck the layers in the refrigerator to await the final frost.

Mmm....Quinn approves of the crumb coat! :)

The guys looking for hand-outs i.e. crumbs and drips. :) Actually, there were a LOT of crumbs and pieces of cake left over from the leveling so we froze them and made a few trifles later. SO good. :)

Erro had fun "helping" Aunt Robyn to make more frosting.

It was a bit of a daunting task frosting all those cakes!

Look how huge this layer is!

And here is the final product. It looks so small in this picture! This is after we set it up (scary, scary!!) and put the final coat of frosting on. Actually, the setting up went so smoothly. We were so happy. That was the thing we were most nervous about. We used heavy cardboard under each tier and inserted dowels into each tier to keep it from crushing itself. You wouldn't believe how heavy each tier was after adding all the filling and frosting. Especially the 16-inch round and the sheet cakes. Whew! We didn't even try to move the fully assembled cake. I don't even want to know how many pounds it was.

This is Robyn and Mom adding the flowers and ribbon for the finishing touch. They added a lot more flowers after I took this picture but I didn't get a chance to take another so you'll just have to imagine how beautiful it was.

The Bottom Line?
We had a wild but good time making it and it was so delicious. And so very worth it. We made this cake for a fraction of the cost and we had tons left over. Two sheet cakes to be exact! (How do you say.......miscalculation?) But, it was really nice to have a lot of cake left over to share and eat and eat and eat and eat........

xoxo,
Genevieve

Thursday, October 2, 2008

As You Like It

Great movie, great actors, great costumes. =] One of my favorites!

~Marguerite =]

Thursday, September 11, 2008

silliness, simplicity and celery

One lazy summer day, my nephew came over.
While trying to come up with an idea for something to do, he said, "Let's make celery cars!" I, being the uninformed person that I am, did not know what in the world celery cars were. So he taught me how to make them. We had a wonderful time making them! (and eating them of course.) =]

What you need:
celery, cream cheese, grapes (or other small berries), crackers or pretzels or whatever you happen to have that goes good with celery and cream cheese, toothpicks, knife and cutting board

1. cut the washed celery into lengths
2. use toothpicks (broken in half) to "pin" on grapes (or berries) for wheels
3. fill celery with cream cheese for interior of car (and to cover ends of toothpicks)
(If you want, you can turn the celery over so the round side is on top for a different look.)
4. add all of the edible details you wish
5. take out toothpicks before eating
Have fun!

Or you can make boats!

~Marguerite

Monday, August 25, 2008

Feeling Domestic...

...Ahhh.... it's a good feeling. =] Sometimes I forget how fun it is to harvest things from the garden and then make dinner out of it all. Or that wonderful aroma of bread baking in the oven.
It's been awhile since I've done much of that. Today was a rather "fall-ish" kind of day. We did some weeding and harvesting in the garden. And then came inside and started a fire in the wood stove, baked bread while listening to the Little Women Soundtrack, cooked dinner and had a lovely day!

Here is one of our GIANT zucchini. It is a whopping 21 1/2" long and 15" around. (And probably would've kept getting bigger if we let it!)

Needless to say, we made bread out of some of it...

But there's plenty more where that came from!
Here are some cucumbers and little zucchini from our garden...

And some beans... (One was almost a foot long!)

Plums from our Tree.

What we did with the green beans... (green beans sauteed in olive oil and garlic)

Pasta, which we did not grow in our garden... =] (I was just experimenting with the camera...)

Here are two kinds of Banana bread that Aimee and I made out of 4 of the 10 rotten bananas we had in our freezer. (Scary, I know...)

And I was going to put pictures of the dinner we made, but I was so hungry at the time, that it vanished from my mind. Oh well...
I hope you all had a lovely day! xo ~Marguerite