"frozen" - second time's the charm

i've probably been decorating cakes for about nine years. under the moniker "sassy badger" for about six. and this cake officially proved to be a first in many, many, many ways.

first, i wasn't even supposed to make this cake, really. however, after some intense and dragged out (my fault) negotiations with my boss, we settled on a version of this frozen cake that i felt capable of making. however, i might have been overconfident. which, for me, is just a regular level of confidence...

oh, right, this isn't my therapist's office. anyway.

second first, this cake is massive. the largest cake i've ever made. it's two layers of cake that take 3 cake mixes each. which is fine for the first layer. you bake it, level it, flip it onto the cake board, and voila. that's easy. flipping a second eighteen-pound layer on top of that, making sure it lines up, making sure it's level, making sure it doesn't split in half. that's another story. 

but, i managed to do that, and then i decorated it with icing and (third first) those sugar paper snowflakes. those were a real treat because they stuck when i didn't want them to stick, and they were very delicate. it was just a lot of hard work, you guys. do you feel sorry for me, yet?

once all of that hullaboo was finished, it took a lot more work to maneuver a 52-pound cake into a cake box that it didn't quite fit into without messing up the edges, but i managed to make it happen. i loaded it into the front seat of my car, and i set off for my boss's house. i got to the fire hydrant about two houses down when the cake shifted. ok. cool. no problem. 

problem. 

so, i took the cake back home and was just going to do some minor "surgery" on the icing, but, when i went to scrape the icing off the top of the cake to start over, the 73-pound cake went with it, and onto the floor it fell. 

after dusting it off, i got right back to work...

jay to the kay, y'all. i didn't need to be fired over a cake, although that would be another first. but, i did have to remake the whole thing, which was a first. in my nine years in "the biz," i had never encountered such a disaster. but i thought to myself, what would annie/elise/whatever do? wwaewd? let it fucking go. which is what i did, and i actually think the second cake turned out way better than the first one. and, because i'm a genius, i asked a friend to help me take the cake back the next day. success!

this isn't actually what the cake looked like at the party. my boss added a castle and some figurines and a snow man because i sure as fuck didn't want to build him. (jokes!)

TOTAL DECORATING TIME: (in total) 8.5 hours + 2 viewings of frozen, which is more than enough.

for the first time in forever, 

sassy badger