Wine, Cake and Family

Y'know, rather than explaining what I've been doing with my Wednesday evenings for the past few weeks, or apologizing for not posting recently, I think it will be more interesting to simply launch into my post. My daughter Laura turned twenty-five on May 18th, and we celebrated her birthday as a family on the Victoria Day weekend ("MayLong," as Laura used to call it). She requested a wine-tasting party, which made sense, as she and her fiance Steve are in the process of choosing wine to serve at their wedding. Laura, Steve and Kaliana Joy stayed at the cabin from Saturday through to Monday, and I must say it was quite delightful to have a family around, with a little one exploring close to floor level again!



There were eight bottles of wine, and seven adults tasting, and now I know that eight Tastes are too many for me! We accompanied our wine with various cheeses, crackers, and fresh fruit, and in between lunch and dinner and tasting and walking in the forest, we indulged in a tremendously detailed conversation about where in the yard the wedding tent should be placed, where the bride and groom should stand for their ceremony, which way the door to the tent should face, whose eyes might be blinded by the sun at various times during the wedding day, and various combinations of these multiple considerations. Much better to hold these negotiations now, rather than the day before the wedding, but at the time I felt someone could have capitalized upon our situation by making us into a movie.



There was definitely potential for touchiness, as everyone had their own idea about how to best arrange things--the bride; the groom; my former husband; my current husband . . . looking back, it was a little edgy, but amicable overall, to the credit of everyone present!



We served beef wellington with salad and baked potatoes, WATER to drink, and of course, Trial Cake #4! (Trial Cake #3 was baked earlier this month for my Dances of Universal Peace Support Group retreat, with white cake, vanilla 'moistening syrup,' a filling combining seedless raspberry jam and frosting, a meringue disk, more jam/frosting for filling, chocolate cake, raspberry 'moistening syrup,' and a vanilla cream cheese/buttercream frosting. I used the basketweave frosting technique, but the glitch was that tiny chunks of cream cheese kept clogging the cake decorating tip and making the frosting very difficult to apply. Oh yes, and the white chocolate ganache that I improvised refused to set, so it couldn't be used in the filling. In a moment of spontaneity, I even managed to create a frosting circle of interlocking hearts on top of the cake. Oh, and I served it with yummy raspberry coulis. It was a big hit with my DUP group, and the leftovers, with my singing group!)

Trial Cake #4: white cake, vanilla syrup, seedless raspberry jam, meringue, jam, chocolate cake, raspberry syrup, and the white chocolate cream cheese frosting that I used for Trial Cake #1. This frosting worked very well, and flowed smoothly through the decorating tip--I'm quite certain that I could make a workable cream cheese/buttercream, provided that I beat the cream cheese before adding it to the mixture. The bride and groom prefer the white chocolate cream cheese frosting, and I find it tastes quite agreeably like cheesecake. This time I smoothed the sides and top of the cake, rather than repeat the basketweave technique, and I was rather pleased that I was able to do a decent job of it! The glitch? (Yes, still experiencing glitches!) I warmed the raspberry jam so that it would flow through the sieve, leaving the seeds behind, but when the seedless jam cooled it remained runny. When I placed the meringue and chocolate cake layers on top of the filling, it flooded down the sides of the cake and pooled onto the plate. I scraped much of it away, however it bled through the frosting layers--crumb coat, 'final' layer, and even the patch-up layer. It looked like a deep red wound, with the frosting skin splitting, peeling away, and bleeding. But delicious!

Each cake iteration increases my confidence, and my willingness to experiment. I want to attempt a two-tier cake for Laura and Steve's 'couples shower' next month! (Laura has requested vanilla syrup throughout, rather than raspberry, and I will insist on using something firm for the filling.)

I went to bed that evening with a very heavy tummy--blame the wine; cheese; dinner; cake; all of the above--and the room gently twirled around as I laid my head on the pillow. (That only happened once before, about thirty years ago!) I can say with absolute certainty now that red wine is a migraine trigger for me. I felt better in the morning, and spent much of my holiday Monday soaking in the hot tub, reading, and generally doing as little as possible. It was a happy ending to the weekend for my teaching buddies, as they sampled slices of leftover cake at school on Tuesday.

My Other Two Daughters!

Yes, I'm a mother of four--not just two! When I 'launched' my blog a couple of weeks ago (that is, I 'came out of the closet' as a blogger, and shared my blog site address with my Honey and my kids), my beloved third daughter called me on mentioning her brother, and telling all about the sister who is WonderBaby's mother, but completely neglecting to mention Other Daughters, # 1 and #3. Rose is my redhead, standing next to me in the photo. (Of course, it's a wedding photo, taken October 7, 2006.) Rose was an Only Child for the first three charmed years of her life, and the absolute belly button of my personal universe for that period of time. I took her to Baby Exercise Class, Water Baby swim lessons, any number of Educational Field Trips, and she even toured Europe with her father and me. I recorded her favorite story books on tape while reading them to her, and she learned to operate the stereo and use the headphones to listen to them around the time when she graduated from diapers to training pants. Before I knew any better, I transformed our kitchen into a little language arts classroom, started her on her own personal picture dictionary, and taught her to read by the age of four. We sang together and painted together. Sometimes it seems a shame that she doesn't remember much about those days of basking in her mother's undivided attention.

And my Rose in 2007? She's my academic daugher, with an undergrad degree in women's studies from the University of Victoria, and she's currently going for a master's degree in social work from Carlton University in Ottawa. She's my away-from-home daughter, who once boasted about how many provinces she resided in, in a single year. She's my daughter with a social conscience, who participated in demonstrations ( . . . which demonstrations were they, Honey?). Rose is my Amazing Knitter daughter; my foreign languages daughter (French and Hebrew--no kidding!). Rose astonishes me with her genius for living on a shoestring--I think I am more surprised at the fact that she chooses to live frugally, than I am at the fact that she manages it so well! Rose and her born-in-Israel-partner, Ze'ev, are off tomorrow to visit that country. I hope they have a wonderful time, and I am so looking forward to hearing about their trip!

Christina is my Baby Daughter--the youngest of my three girls, although her brother is the youngest of the entire brood. She's my blonde daughter; my designer fashions daughter, and for the moment, the only one of my four kids with a full-time job. Christina is the one on the far right in the photo--she had to dash into the frame before the shutter clicked. Yup, she took the picture. We hired her as our wedding photographer. She's a photographer by profession. This came as a tremendous surprise to me, as Christina insisted throughout her childhood and early adolescence that she intended to be a nurse. (I kept asking her, "Why be the nurse when you could be The Doctor?) Photography seems to suit her much, much better than nursing would have--she's always been interested in images; in drawing, and I just can't see her doing physically-demanding work, or any kind of work where she repeatedly has to Touch People! Tina has a day job at McBain Camera in Southgate Mall, and she is a Whiz-Bang Photographer. You can check out her work--heck, you can even hire her!--at her very own web site.

Christina's birthing was the easiest one I ever achieved, she was born on her due-date, and she had a perfect Apgar score. I remember how besotted I was with her when she was born--there was a TV commercial out at that time for Maria Christina wine, a jingle with a floaty melody repeating the name of the wine over and over, and that jingle kept singing itself through my head on my Christina's birth evening. Tina was the only one of my babies that 'planned herself,' her birthday is December 20th, and we named her Christina Louise after Christmas, after her father (Christian), and after her mother. She has always had astonishing eyelashes--thick, black, upward-curving, and the longest you have ever seen. Where, oh where did those eyelashes come from? The first time I had my eyelashes dyed I happened to have Tina with me. I pointed to my small daughter, and said to the cosmetologist, "Make my eyelashes look just like hers!"

Christina is a goal-setter; a purposeful dreamer. She had kind of a ho-hum attitude toward scholastic achievement until the beginning of Grade 5. She shared with me a dream that she walked into her classroom, and there was a gift from her teacher on Tina's desk. The gift had a card that said something like, "I'm so glad you're in my class, Christina. We are going to have a wonderful year together." And that proved to be a strong achievement year for Tina, indeed! Years later, she had a daydream/vision of herself tanning solo on a sandy beach in Australia, her camera set up nearby on a tripod. My Tina manifested that vision by saving up for and organizing a trip, on her own, to Australia, at the age of nineteen (if I'm not mistaken).

How can any parent possibly write about her children without sounding boastful?


My four children represent my Supreme Lifetime Achievement: I have helped bring four magnificent young people into the World.

Baba Baker Woman

No, I don't mean that title as a variation on "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep!" My darling granddaughter (the most wonderful baby the world has ever known) calls me Baba, in honor of my Ukrainian heritage. That is, when we're around her we all refer to me as Baba. Kaliana is WonderBaby's name, and her mommy (my daughter, Laura) and daddy are getting married in August. I get to do the wedding cake! No, no, I've never attempted to bake and decorate a large celebration cake before, but I'll try anything out of a book!

Laura was interested in a layer of chocolate cake on top of a layer of white cake, with sliced strawberries nestled in a vanilla mousse filling between the layers, and cream cheese frosting over it all. For Trial Cake #1 I used a marble cake mix. I thought I was so clever, separating the chocolate and vanilla batters with a layer of parchment paper, and baking them together in one pan! Well, there was too much chocolate batter, and not enough vanilla, and while baking the chocolate expanded, heaved, humped up, and infiltrated the vanilla layer. When Laura and I separated the layers we had significant hills and valleys in the surfaces of the cake. We made the mousse and the frosting, and the afternoon was growing late, so we filled the layers before the mousse had completely set; then applied the frosting. Actually, our Trial Cake #1 passed the taste test with flying colours, but the finished product looked like a Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree-sort of cake, and did not inspire me to run for my camera. (The mousse never did set!) It was all too obvious that we would not be able to follow this method to create a three-tier wedding cake!

Then came the research phase. (Isn't the on-line public library catalogue fabulous? I place a hold on my list of titles; then it's like unwrapping gifts when I take home my pile of books and open up their covers!) I picked up seven or so wedding cake books--some of them coffee-table-style books with amazing photos of impossible-looking cakes--and kept sneaking peeks at their pages while stopped at red lights, on the way home. I pored over those books, re-reading and comparing segments of one to segments of another.

I had no idea there was so much to learn about wedding cakes. Did you know that tiered cakes have dowels inserted right through the lower tiers, to support the weight of the upper ones? Each cake tier sits on its own circle of cardboard, and the cardboard circles rest upon these dowels. And to transport a cake, the cake-maker sharpens a dowel longer than the cake is high, and uses a hammer to ram it through all the tiers and all the cardboard circles (like a stake through the heart of a vampire). The protruding bit of dowel at the top of the cake provides a handy-dandy handle to grasp, while carrying the cake.

I also learned about the fondant/buttercream controversy. Rolled fondant is a sugar paste with the consistency of pie pastry, that is draped over each tier of the cake. It looks perfectly smooth, with beautifully curved edges, and it can be tinted, painted, embossed, dusted with edible metallic or pearly powder, and even air-brushed. There are specialized ingredients, tools and equipment (of course!) available for purchase, to do all of these marvellous things to the surfaces of rolled fondant cakes. Anything that can be sculpted out of any material, can be sculpted using cake and rolled fondant. One can even mold the desired shape out of rice krispie square mix, cover it with rolled fondant, and paint or decorate it as desired. However Dede Wilson (whom I have chosen to be my own personal wedding cake guru) says she has never met anyone who enjoyed the taste of rolled fondant. Her cakes are made primarily as Delicious Dessert, and only secondarily as Decorative Sculpture.

Trial Cake #2 was baked, cut into layers, filled and frosted at Glendalough (my lake cabin) and served to my family on Palm Sunday, following an afternoon of pysanka (Ukrainian Easter egg) decorating. I am proud and happy to say that Trial Cake #2 looked good enough to photograph! I frosted it using the basket weave technique, because I wanted to try it, and because two books suggested that although the technique is time-consuming, it is easier than creating a perfectly smooth buttercream finish. Laura and I garnished it with red grapes, because they somewhat resemble the raspberries we plan to use on The Wedding Cake.

I made two gi-normous bowls of meringue buttercream, using the recipe I found on the Joy of Cooking wedding cake web site. This recipe does not require the step of making a syrup and bringing it to the correct temperature, however it requires the cake-maker to stand over the stove for quite some time with a hand mixer. We found the buttercream to be extremely rich and buttery. It firms up very well when chilled, which protects the icing surface from smudging. I filled the layers with chocolate ganache, because the name and the recipe sound divine. It was simple to make, and more than passed the taste test! I used my own tried-and-true recipes for a firm chocolate cake (which turned out perfectly) and a firm chip-chocolate white cake, which was either underbaked or chilled too soon, or both, because it was disappointingly dense, gummy and unappetizing. The taste test? After a very substantial meal, we each put down our fork after eating most, but not all, of our slice of cake.

But just look how far I've come between Trial Cake #1 and Trial Cake #2! I'm on a Quest now, a Quest for an optimal (not the perfect) wedding cake! I do feel a little sheepish about what I spent at Michael's on cake circles, a decorator bag and tips, a tool to cut cakes into equal and level layers, magi-cake strips and a baking core. And I did order Dede Wilson's book, Wedding Cakes You Can Make. Oh, yes, and there's the matter of my new Kitchenaid stand mixer. But I bought the less expensive cake leveler, I only ordered one book, and I've only ever had a hand mixer before!

(What's that you ask? Magi-cake strips and baking core? Well, there's a difficulty with baking cakes larger than eight or ten inches in diameter. The sides bake too quickly, and the centre bakes too slowly. This can make the sides crusty, and can make the cake dome up in the centre. The magi-strips wrap around the outside of the pan, to reduce the temperature during baking. The core is a metal cup that sits in the centre of the cake, filled with batter, to attract heat to the centre of the pan during baking. And can you imagine this--a six-inch pan requires less than half the batter that a ten-inch pan does, and a fourteen-inch pan requires twice as much batter as a ten-inch pan!)

I'm excited about the prospect of creating Trial Cake #3 for Laura's birthday, in May. For this one I plan to try the plating technique (no kidding, there's such a thing as a 'plating technique' for serving cake!) of squirting a zig-zag of raspberry coulis on each plate, before placing a slice of cake on it. Easy-peasy (as my friend Jane would say), delicious, and the wedding colours are white and red. I also plan to make a meringue disk, and use it as one of the layers. (Laura isn't crazy about this idea, but I really, really want to try it, and the instructions aren't difficult.) The bride and groom have asked me to omit the chips of chocolate from the white cake, and this time I'll use the same recipe, and see if I can get it to turn out right. And with all my reading about fondant and buttercream, I had completely forgotten that the bride originally requested cream cheese frosting. I'll do a bit more research, and perhaps Dede has a cream cheese buttercream recipe that I can try.

The Quest continues.

Glendalough

Well, now, Special Events will prevent me from writing my 'regular' Wednesday evening post! On March 21 I hosted a parent meeting at my school, and last week--spring break--I was at my cabin, without internet service.

What is it that I love about being at my cabin?

It's really hard to say, although without fail, every time I drive along the road that leads to the cabin, I can feel my troubles slide off my shoulders and away, and a joyful buoyancy lifts my heart. I love waking up without an alarm clock, and sneaking into the hot tub 'first thing,' before eating breakfast or having to put on my Nice Face to talk to anybody. I love cooking at the cabin, and reading while eating. I love walks by the lake, and watching the changes through the seasons. I love taking a step back from the everyday-ness of my life, and seeing things from a fresh perspective; collecting insights from a slightly altered vantage point.

I love rare surprise wildlife visits. Once during a magical early winter, early evening snowfall, my husband and I watched a coyote trot into our yard, and pick up and make off with a semi-deflated soccer ball that the neighbor's kids had left out. Another time, I was sitting in the hot tub in the morning, and Ken tapped gently on the window glass to draw my attention to two cow moose who walked right through our yard; then returned at a right smart pace when the local dogs began to bark. Sightings of swans, pelicans, and blue herons on the lake are rare treats. (Other people have told me that birds like these are on the lake 'all the time,' but to me, they seem exotic and magical.) Last week I was delighted to see and hear that the gulls, crows and Canada geese had returned for the season. The geese, especially, were kicking up a fuss everywhere I went, and toward the end of the week I noticed that they had all paired up into cute couples. Resting contentedly on the ice; taking off together in flight; waddling pigeon-toed along the shore, these couples kept their tandem formation at all times.

My former husband and I bought this little old cabin (built in 1955, same as me!) in late spring 1992, when our kids were 13, 10, 8 and 6 years old. I was off work, recovering from hip surgery. We would load up the car on a Thursday evening, have supper at a restaurant, and spend the night at the cabin. He would drive the three girls to school early on the Friday morning, leaving me to spend the day with our youngest, Jonathan. (Jonathan was in kindergarten that year, but maybe kindergarten ended a few weeks before grade school did.) I would have supper ready for the girls and their dad, and we would enjoy the water and the sunshine for the weekend, and return to town Sunday night.

I inherited the cabin when our marriage ended in 1995. It felt so strange when my ex-husband came to pick up our children, and take them to spend weekends at his house, but I had the cabin as my refuge. The kids and I continued to use it during the summer, until one by one, they became busy with summer jobs, or more interested in spending time with their friends than in being out at the lake with their mom. Eventually, it was just Jonathan and me out there again, and finally, just me (or sometimes me and a friend).

But I was hatching plans for that cabin--big plans, and in 2005, I had it renovated. Ken and I designed a new, slightly expanded, and much more open floor plan. A pool buddy of his came and camped on the site in April of that year, and tore down everything but the bathroom and the floor! He disposed of it by cutting it into chunks and burning it for heat, and even used the fire for cooking. I went on a trip to Ireland in May of that year (another story!) and that's where the name Glendalough came from. By the end of June it had in-floor heating, full insulation, an outdoor hot tub, and was ready to move into. My heart's desire was fulfilled when my four children, along with their four partners, came to celebrate Christmas of 2005 with Ken and me at Glendalough!

What a wonderful treat it is to know that I can drive there in an hour, when I need a dose of solitude, or of nature, or some uninterrupted time to spend on a pet project. I try to spend alternating weekends out there through the winter, and periods of a week or two at a stretch in the summer. I am so thankful for my beloved Glendalough.

Movies

I may be getting into the habit . . . I've been thinking about my blog this past week, and wondering if perhaps I will make Wednesday posts a regular thing. I have the luxury of a part-time job (or perhaps, now that I'm Older, I should say instead that I'm Semi-Retired!). I only work Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This year I 'have kids' on Wednesdays--I'm a teacher working with home educating families--and, much as I love the wonderful young people in my classes, by Wednesday evening I'm usually bagged. I come home thinking about dinner, cranberry juice with a splash of vodka, and disappearing into a good book or . . . my new blog!

Watching a rented movie with my new husband, Ken, has become my favorite thing to do on Sunday evenings, and he never objects, so perhaps it's a favorite thing of his, as well. We take turns choosing our weekly movie--exploding relationships one week; exploding helicopters the next. We bring cups of tea, and sometimes, bars of chocolate, to the coffee table, and curl up on the leather couch with my cat, Fiona. Fiona thinks she's my mother--she kept me company through many evenings when I watched movies on my own, before I met Ken, and as she came into my life before he did, he tolerates her presence now. She claims dibs on my lap, whenever I sit down.

Last Sunday we rented Stranger Than Fiction with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. (Yes, yes, I know: Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, but I'm Old, and when I think of actors, I think of the Older Actors.) It delighted me from start to finish, and left me with a wide grin on my face when the credits began to roll! A geeky IRS employee falls in love with a totally radical Tattooed Baker Woman, and the twist is that the guy is the main character in a novel being written by Emma Thompson's character. What grabs me and intrigues me in movies like this one (apart from the Love Interest, of course) is the Alternative Reality angle. I've always loved time travel fiction, for this reason, I think. I've always loved magically entering another world, as presented in a novel, and time travel fiction goes one layer deeper than that--the main character in the novel magically takes me with him/her into a world beyond the world of the novel.

Other favorite movies:

• The Lake House, with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves: Boy meets girl; boy wins girl;same place; different time!
• Sliding Doors, with Gwyneth Paltrow and John Lynch: What would happen if she found out about his cheating, and left him? What would happen if she stayed with him? She does both!
• Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell: Poor jaded weatherman wakes up on the same date every morning. He knows what everyone else will do and say, and when. He tries out a variety of responses on hundreds of repeats of the same day and eventually . . . he Redeems himself! It's priceless.
• Only You with Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei: This is the only movie on my list without the Alternative Reality angle. It came out right around the time of my separation from my first husband, and Fiona and I made a ritual out of watching it on New Year's Eves, when we had the house all to ourselves! It's a delicious romantic comedy, with lots of hidden surprises that I discovered during repeated viewings. My daughter, Christina and I have a pact to travel to 'It'ly' together, rent a hot little red convertible, and re-trace the journey of Marisa's character in this movie. Luscious scenery.

Are you tempted to enjoy one of these Popcorn Movies?

New Beginnings

How to start?

Visiting my students' blogs has inspired me to try one of my own . . . I have a major journey coming up, (well, not until July of 2008, but with my temperament, any event less than two full years in the future is imminent!) and I'm imagining friends and acquaintances visiting my blog from time to time, for updates on my adventures.

For me, 2006 was a year of significant and wonderful beginnings. I became an empty-nester when I moved from my house in Stony Plain--my home of sixteen years--to an apartment-style condo near downtown Edmonton with Ken, my husband-to-be. My daughter Laura and her partner Steve made a grandmother out of me, with the birth of Kaliana Joy Fuchs Armstrong on July 16. Then I became a Grandma Bride at Lily Lake on October 7. I'll say it again: you're never too old!!

Let this blogging experiment be another new beginning. May further entries become a habit for me!