To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part I: A Prologue

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This is Sierra.

And me. The gawky one on the right.

Sierra has been my best friend since we were eleven. Not just friends that catch up when we return to our home town at the holidays. She’s the kind of friend that still edits my resumes (and I hers). The kind of friend that calls me at seven in the morning just to tell me about how crappy the Phoenix traffic is, still references events from middle school, and who holds the other membership in our two-person book club. The kind of friend who helps me strategize and plan elaborate parties despite the fact that we live 2000 miles apart.

We’ve been through quite a lot in our fifteen-year friendship. We’ve traveled together, both in this country and out of it. We spent the better part of our high school years taking most of the same classes, singing in the same choirs, and spending hours and hours of time in our high school theatre program both on stage and off.

It wasn’t always glamorous. I’d like to say we were Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother. We were not. That’s us in the horse costumes.

Not. Even. Kidding.

On top of everything, we’ve celebrated milestones together at every age. Graduations, proms, AP exams, making the cut for Colours honor choir, landing jobs, losing jobs, getting into college, getting OUT of college, 4-H, first dates, and most everything else.

And now, for the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about another milestone that is coming up next fall…

Sierra’s getting married (and blogging about it too!) To another dear friend of mine, Sean, who actually WAS Sierra’s aforementioned first date waaaay back in high school.

They’ve been together now for a little over nine years, and have had many adventures of their own.

There aren’t many people who get so lucky on the first shot. They have, truly, a beautiful love story.

And true to some giggly conversation Sierra and I probably had at a sleepover years ago, I’m following through on a promise I made regarding her then-future wedding.

You guessed it… I’m making their wedding cake! (gulp)

Now, what, you might ask, makes me possibly think I have any business making a wedding cake for someone? Well as it turns out, in addition to cooking and blogging and working too many hours, cake decorating is a bit of a hobby for me and has been since I joined 4-H as an eight-year-old.

AND, this isn’t my first wedding cake. In addition to a number of “practice cakes” I completed the year I took a tiered cake to competition, I’ve actually made cakes for honest-to-god weddings, one of them in collaboration with my sister (check out my killer HP glasses, I was totally fated to love those books), and one of them on my own. The latter, in fact, was just a little over a year ago for Kassi & Mark, another great pair of dear friends.

That cake was made, oh, several months before I started this blog, so there is little documentation of the process. But there definitely is a process, and since I’m in the business of sharing, I’m gonna tell you alllllllll about this one. The designing, the recipe hunting and testing, the nail-biting moments of terror, the late nights falling asleep with frosting stuck in my hair… all of it.

So stay tuned! You’ll get an inside view of all those little things you want to know (or may not want to know) about building a wedding cake, from concept to crumbs.

And I get to give the greatest wedding gift I can think of to the best friend I can possibly imagine.

 

Next: To Bake a Wedding Cake, Part 2: Um, So, What Are We Doing?