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.