S/O- I survived my Mom's Wedding Cake Fail (barely)

This is in "honor" of the wedding cake fail post I read today. I'm not trying to make fun at ALL. I know it is a super stressful thing!

First. This happened in Aug 2010. I sent this email to a friend and every once in a while (like when my mom is asked to make a wedding cake), I try to remind her of this debacle and that I will have NO PARTS OF IT hahahaha.

So, my mom & dad are in Germany this week visiting relatives. They've been planning this trip since before Christmas. They left this Thursday [note:  the email I pulled this from was dated 8/16/2010]. So naturally, my mom accepts two jobs to make cakes for two different weddings before she leaves.  

My mom makes birthday cakes and wedding cakes occasionally - she doesn't charge a lot and usually does a good job. Of course, this time she is running around b/c not only is she trying to get ready for her trip, she's watching my kids, and now she's gotta make 2 wedding cakes, PLUS a groomscake. and she's leaving Thurs, so she has to deliver one cake/groomscake Wed evening, before she leaves. She asked me to deliver the other one on Saturday.



On Wed, she brings the cake over to my house. Now, normally, she would have made the three pieces (bottom, middle & top layers - and each layer is 2 cakes w/ frosting in the middle), and put them together at the reception site. but since she's not here to do it, she has to assemble & frost it at her house. however, on the way over, it is so hot & humid, even with the AC on full blast, the bottom tier top cake slides off the bottom tier bottom cake. does that make sense? So she keeps telling me, oh, it will be fine, etc... but I insist she has to come back and fix it. I have bunko that night, so I go and when I come back, the cake looks lopsided and focked up - but DH insists that she has come back and inserted more dowel rods into the cake (to keep it from sliding and support the upper tiers), and re-iced it. However, instead of scraping icing OFF and re-applying, she's just slapped new icing over the old. It looks like SH!T. Pictures are attached =)



To boot, the topper (a bride dragging her groom behind her LOL), is an oval shape, and the cake is a circle. I realize that the topper will hang over the sides of the top tier. lovely.



I start thinking I have two friends who sort of do cakes for their kids, maybe they can come and help me... but then i think, i don't want this to become their responsibility - what if they make it worse? so I decide just to leave it the way it is.



I ask her, should we freeze it? and she insists we just leave it on the kitchen table. She's also piped some blue detail frosting, so I am sure she thinks if we freeze it, and take it out, the blue will bleed into the white. So we just leave it on the table.



Over the next three days, I have horrible headaches, stomach aches, etc - I am sure it's from the stress of dealing with this cake. I don't even want to be in my kitchen to see it. I feel horrible that we are going to bring a bride this cake. DH is praying no one we know sees us as we bring it over to the reception... lol.



So Saturday morning, we load up the car - i'm driving and DH is holding it. You can see where this is going, right? The reception is at a nearby lodge - 15 minute car ride... and the icing starts to crack, and starts falling off the cake. DH is yelling at me to help him, but there is literally nothing we can do. We get to the reception and DH gets out of the car - icing just falls off of his shirt - I'm chucking hunks into the woods, and I'm in tears because I am mortified.



The caterer shows up, and I go over to her car and tell her I've brought the cake, but we have a serious problem. She takes one look at the cake and tells me I have to call the bride. I tell her I don't even know WHO the bride is, but the caterer gets me her number and insists I call her. I want to crawl in a corner and die.



So I call the bride and explain that I'm the daughter of the "baker" and that her cake is falling apart. I hear this shuffle and another person gets on the line - it's her mother. the bride can't talk b/c she's crying too hard. she asks me, can i fix the cake? i tell her, no ma'am, even if i had the tools/tips to do it, I'm not the one who does this... esp not for a wedding cake. i ask if she knows anyone, and then the hairdresser says she knows someone. I'm dying - this poor girl is getting her HAIR DONE and I'm calling her the morning of her wedding to tell her she has no cake. So the bride gets back on the phone to get the caterer's number (so she can let the person in to fix the cake) and the mother is on the phone w/ this person who will come to fix it. I hear the bride say, she's going to have to make a batch of buttercream... and I go "wait a sec... my mom used duncan hines icing - I saw the can." and the bride SCREAMS at me "THAT IS NOT WHAT I ORDERED!!!!"



As I pray for a hole in the ground to open & swallow me, I apologize profusely and finally tell her that I wasn't trying to make light, or excuse what my mother did, but that every wedding has a hitch, and that this is it, and hopefully years from now she'll look back and laugh. She kind of calmed down and said, "ya, maybe." and then I told her good luck and to have a great day... DH and I & the kids jumped into the car and flew out of there like a bat out of hell.



Yesterday (Sunday), the caterer calls me - she's got the wrong number, but i recognized it so I tell her that I was the one w/ the cake and could I ask if they were able to fix it. She tells me, no, they couldn't. The person got there and said the cake had slipped too much, and they would have had to de-ice it and redone the whole thing - so they went to a grocery store, got 3 rectangle cakes, and assembled them in the traditional wedding tier cake. she said it actually turned out really pretty, and later the bride went and got pictures taken with the old cake "for her album" but I just know it was to document how horrible it looked - I am sure my mom will be getting a phone call. And she rightly should. In a way, it was a blessing, b/c the cake at that point was over 5 days old - I am sure it would have tasted like stale cupcake. BLECH.



Pic 1 -

This is the cake sitting on my kitchen table. You may think, its not that bad, but you can see the icing bulging out of the middle tiers's layers (beneath the blue "detailing") and the bottom tier's top layer is slightly hanging off the bottom layer (on the right)- and you can see how she "fixed" the cracks, but adding a third "detail" string of icing around the center of the bottom tier.)



Pic 2 - Another view, this is Friday (DD in the background). DH has magazines under the side to keep it from collapsing, which did nothing really to help, but squeeze the icing. This one is more straight on, so you can see how it's leaning, collapsing on the left, and the beautiful "fix" job in the middle of the bottom tier of the cake:



I am hoping I will be able to laugh at this now - or at least not traumatized so much that I can't go to another wedding, LOL. I love my mom, but sometimes she can be such an asshole. I was focking LIVID that I was the one who had to do this. Hopefully she'll learn her lesson, but knowing my mom... ugh. I can't imagine she'll get a lot of referrals after this! LMAO!