June 17th, 2010

Graduation:

Because I received a certificate of proficiency I qualified to graduate. I was pretty proud of myself for accomplishing something, even though I didn't make it through the entire program. I still want to go back and finish and hope I get to. I got to participate in graduation 20 weeks pregnant! This week I had my big ultrasound and we confirmed that I'm having another boy! Pretty fun! Anyway, back to graduation. . .

Here is my certificate:


Shaking hands with John Krusi (the Culinary Arts department head). He looks so different in normal clothes and not in his whites and puffy hat. I miss seeing John wearing that. :)




Debi, Mart and myself. My mom was there too, but she was taking the picture.

Days 113-121 - March 18-30, 2010

Days 113-121:

This entire time frame is a blur. I started to get too sick during this time to focus on anything. I sadly only made the salad bar 2-3 times. I couldn't function enough to be at school early. I was too queasy to be in the kitchen for long periods of times, smells were starting to affect me pretty bad.
I read 5-7 more chapters in my text book and took those chapter tests.

I ended up talking with Rex and John and decided together that I couldn't function enough to be able to continue for the time being. However, Rex did feel like I had accomplished enough in my time there to be able to receive the beginners certificate so I wasn't walking away with nothing.

Day 121, March 30th was my last day. It was a sad day, I really enjoyed going to school and loved being able to learn and experience new things.

When I am able to, I am going to go back and finish the rest of the program.

Day 112 - March 17, 2010

Day 112:

Today was Adrienne's last day. It was also the St. Patty's day buffet. I made an Irish pub salad with cabbage,lettuce, eggs, blue cheese, celery, beets and a dressing. It was pretty tasty.


Irish Pub Salad

Dressing:
1/2 cup mayo
2 Tbsp malt vinegar or white wine vinegar
2 tsp chopped fresh tarragon or 3/4 tsp dried
1 tsp whole grain dijon mustard
2-3 tsp water

Salad:
4 cups torn Boston or Bibb lettuce
4 cups selected salad bar ingredients (such as pickled beets, sliced cucumber, diced tomatoes, chopped celery, shredded cabbage and sliced onions)
2 hard boiled eggs, peeled and sliced
4 ounces cheddar and/or blue cheese, cut into wedges

We also served corned beef and cabbage, potato wedges (which were delicious!), irish cream cheesecake, a mint chocolate pudding parfait, and green tea.

It turned out pretty good and everything I tasted was good and very festive.

Day 111 - March 16, 2010

Day 111:

Today I was back to the kitchens! I was put on salad bar duty for the next 2 weeks.
Also today Rex, Greg and Adrienne found out that I'm having a baby!

Day 110 - March 15, 2010

Day 110:

Today I tested out of access and I am finished with my computer class! I got a 97% in the class, the only reason I didn't get higher was when I was testing out of sections to start with, I got an 85% on one of the tests and accidentally clicked out of it before the teacher could look at my answers. Whoops. Oh well, can't complain about 97%.

Day 109 - March 12, 2010

Day 109:

Because Friday's there is no computer class, I spent the day in the kitchen computer lab reading my text book and taking tests.

Day 108 - March 11, 2010

Day 108:

Today I finished access. I'm getting super close to being done with my computer class!

Day 107 - March 10, 2010

Day 107:

Today I finished and tested out of Powerpoint

Day 106 - March 9, 2010

Day 106:

Did 2 sections of Access, just still plugging along on the computer stuff.

Day 105 - March 8, 2010

Day 105:

Major slacker day. Sat and caught up with Adrienne all day today and read probably 3 pages of my text book.

Days 102-104, March 3-5

Days 102-104:

We were in Arizona, started prepping for Nanan's reception cake, filled tarts, covered cake with fondant, hauled it all to the reception location and Kace finished the cake.

Day 101 - March 2, 2010

Day 101:

Today I went to school and Adrienne helped me finish making our last components for Arizona. Adrienne made the lemon curd while I made the fondant and then we both made some raspberry mousse. I think we're just about ready with everything now.

Day 100 - March 1, 2010

Day 100:

Didn't go to school, started packing and prepping for Arizona

Day 99 - February 26, 2010

Day 99:

Today I took some chapter tests and started on my Access section.

Day 98 - February 25, 2010

Day 98:

Today I officially passed my job seeking skills class! I was given my certificate of completion. It was awesome!

I also spent the day in the computer lab and did the entire Outlook section from start to finish. That means I only have access and power point left and then the final test that includes all of the programs. I'm slowly getting closer!

Day 97 - February 24, 2010

Day 97:

Today I went and took my Excel test and passed with flying colors. This test only took me 21 minutes. After that I spent a minute talking with Adrienne and then Mart came and picked me up. I spent 6 hours at home doing bookwork for my job seeking skills class and finished all the bookwork, videos and writing assignments!

Day 96 - February 23, 2010

Day 96:

I finished my soup chapter and took my test. I also went into the kitchen and made my huge batch of cream cheese frosting for Nanan's cake. After that I spent the day doing job seeking skills bookwork and talking to Adrienne

Day 95 - February 22, 2010

Day 95:

Today Kace came to school and baked all the cake for Nanan's 50th wedding anniversary in Arizona next weekend. She also made a batch of chocolate mousse. We planned out exactly what we are making and our plan for the cake.

After we finished, there was nothing else to do so Adrienne, Kace, Mart and I went to lunch at Firehouse

Day 94 - February 19, 2010

Day 94:

I spent the day doing more computer work in the kitchen computer lab. This is getting to be so ... much .. fun. I can't wait until I'm finished with this class.

Day 93 - February 18, 2010

Day 93:

Today I took my word test. It's supposed to be about an hour long test, and I finished in 27 minutes! Wahoo.

Day 92 - February 17, 2009

Day 92:

My feet hurt pretty bad from yesterday so I spent the day doing my computer class

Day 91 - February 16, 2010

Today was Elle's lunch. I got to school and started cutting out my individual cakes and did a test plate. When I was happy with the design I got to work plating 12 desserts.

Here is the design we came up with for the plates:


Plates with cake, cream cheese frosting and the first layer of lemon curd:



Finished product:





While I was plating desserts I had a high school student (I think her name is Aubrey) dice my potatoes and I walked Elle through how to plate salads for lunch. As it got closer to the time we needed to start plating lunches I fried my potatoes (I was making cottage fries) and tossed them with sauteed onions and the roasted red peppers from Tuesday. They looked pretty good. They were served with Elle's barbecue rubbed flank steak.

Kami helped us serve as I'm a gimp and didn't want to hobble back and forth and chance dropping something and halfway through she came in and told me someone wanted a lunch to go. I switched it all over into a to go box when she came back and said they wanted a salad and the dessert to go as well. I made a fresh salad and then we came to the dilemma of how to box up my dessert. . . Amy came to the rescue. She went searching the storage room and came back with what I lovingly call ... the ghetto cake to go box:

Yes, it is taped together. :) Way to go Amy. I think I laughed for about 10 minutes.

I was extremely happy with what I accomplished today and I thought my desserts turned out really nice, especially for me.

My feet were beyond mad at me by the time I left the kitchen. I'm worried that I am overworking them and I think I might want to take it easy so that they don't take longer to heal. I think I'll rotate out between computer class/job seeking skills class and the kitchen so I don't have to be stuck in a boring one too long but I'm not killing myself in the kitchen either.

All in all I was happy with what I accomplished today and loved being back in the kitchen, regardless of the pain. I'm pretty sure that's a good sign that I'm where I want to be at the moment. :)

Day 90 - February 12, 2010

Day 90:

Today I was back in the kitchen prepping for Tuesday. I started off by making raspberry coulis. About halfway through that process, Rex asked me if I wanted to use the beef bones they had for stock so I browned all those off. By then my feet were starting to ache so I assigned some of my tasks out so I could get some help and get done as fast as I could. Adrienne made my lemon curd and Elle roasted and diced the red peppers for my potatoes on Tuesday. After that I made some cream cheese frosting and called it a day!

By the end of the day, my feet were crazy sore, but I managed to stay in the kitchen all day!

Day 89 - February 11, 2010

Day 89:

I got to school today and headed to my computer class for an hour or two. I did half of the second Word section and then got bored with the super quiet room and so I headed back to the kitchen to watch Adrienne assemble Skyler's wedding cake. I was also assigned potatoes and a dessert for Elle's lunch on Tuesday. I had the option of making a dessert out of chocolate cake or lemon cake that we already had and needed to use. Adrienne and I looked up ideas for a lemon cake dessert. We found one that looked super delicious. It was a mini triple layered lemon cake with cream cheese frosting and lemon curd. On the plate there was raspberry coulis (sauce) drawn into designs. It looked good, fancy-ish and pretty easy so I decided I would do that for Tuesday.

Day 88 - February 10, 2010

Day 88:

Today I went to my computer class for 2 1/2 hours. I completed the entire first section of Word. Went to the library and passed off more stuff in my workbook and chatted with Adrienne for a little while and continued on with computer stuff. On my way out talked to Jon and Rex about maybe getting back in the kitchen soon. They want me to help Elle with a lunch party she has going on next Tuesday. It would be her first one and I've done quite a few. It would be pretty fun to get out of the computer lab and back into the kitchen!

Day 87 - February 9, 2010

Day 87:

Today sadly was just more book work. I did finish my first of two workbooks for my job seeking skills class though which is something! Halfway done! I also came home and spent an extra 6 hours working on homework. What a LONG day.

Day 86 - February 8, 2010

Day 86:

You guessed it. Another fun filled day of workbooks and writing assignments ... and chatting for that matter. I'm 6 or 7 assignments into my workbook, only 3 or so to go until I move on to the next one. At least I'm making progress.

Day 84-85 - February 2-3, 2010

Day 84-85:

Once again . . . workbook. Boring.

I also finished reading chapter 7 after about a month of working on it and took the chapter test. I think I got 100%. Yahoo! That's probably the most exciting thing that's happened to me since I broke my foot.

Day 83 - February 1, 2010

Day 83:

Today I woke up with crazy sore and swollen feet. I think I was on them for too long yesterday picking up my house. Again... more with the workbook.

Day 80-82 - January 27-29, 2010

Day 80-82:

Jon and Rex put me on medical so I am out of the kitchen until my foot is better. I can use all that time to do the things I don't normally want to do, like job seeking skills class and computer class. Boring.

Anyway, both of these days I went to school and just played catch up. I wrote all the rest of my evaluations and continued plugging on with my job seeking skills workbook.

Day 78-79 - January 25-26, 2010

Days 78-79:

From here on out until my foot is better, all my posts are going to be rather boring. I'm positive not very many eventful things will happen, but for my own records:

These two days I didn't go to school again. I stayed home and continued on with my job seeking skills workbook.

Day 77 - January 25, 2010

Day 77:

Today ... I didn't go to school.

Saturday I sprained my left ankle and broke my right foot. Lovely. I ended up staying home with swollen feet and did my job seeking skills workbook at home instead.

How did I break my foot??


Here is the story:

Ethan's birthday was on Sunday the 24th and he turned 2! Because he's such a wild little man who loves to run, run, run and play all day long we thought that he would LOVE to go play and run around at the fun park. We were all sorts of excited to take him and just have a fun day with him. It was fun, but it had some not so fun parts as well . . .

Well we got to the fun park and he was a little nervous at first, but after Mart dragged him up to the top and went down the slide with him he thought it was a blast! He would run all over the place and then to the arcade games and push the buttons and then back to the soft play area.

Mart was the one chasing Ethan around the soft play and was starting to get worn out so I told him I'd go play with Ethan for a while. I was all excited to go run around and play with him so I grabbed his hand and we headed in. Well the soft play area is kind of dark and it's super full of squishy padding to help protect the little kiddos. We got in and around the first corner and Ethan bolted for the opening to a slide. There were a zillion kids running around and I didn't want him to get pegged so I lunged to grab him. As I did so, I fell off a step and onto the 6"-10" thick foam padding. Because it was padded and not hard ground I wasn't able catch myself and my feet just crumpled below me. I heard 4-5 pops in both feet and went dizzy and sort of blacked out for about 5 seconds.

When I came to, I first looked to see where Ethan was and he was just standing there watching me. After a minute or two I realized that I was able to stand and took Ethan's hand and started walking up the ramp in front of me. As I rounded the corner I called for Mart to come and help me. He came up to get me and saw the tears running down my cheeks and knew something was wrong. We got back down and to a bench and within minutes my feet were crazy swollen, but I was still able to walk.

I still had to go to walmart to pick up a few things for Ethan's birthday so I had to rely heavily on the cart to keep walking. I refused to use the wheelchairs, they would make me feel like an idiot. After walmart, we headed to find something to eat. My baby boy was so hungry and was getting antsy. We decided to go try the new fox's pizza place. They were so good to us. Ethan has been super picky and only eats select things ... like soup. They don't sell soup but had a sample batch in the back that they were testing out so they could start selling it. They pulled it out and warmed it up so he could eat it. After we were finished there, he was running all over the room and was being really pretty good. Mart told him to go wait by the door so he did. After a second, he figured out how to open the door and ran outside. Just as he was about to hit the parking area he stopped and turned around to see if we were chasing him. He thought it was a fun game. Just as he turned around to look at us a car drove by. If he hadn't stopped to turn around he would have been hit by that car. There was no way they would have seen him coming either, two cars were blocking him from their vision. Just after the car passed, he turned and bolted toward the lee's parking lot. That kid is fast too! He's probably one of the fastest little kids I've ever seen.

I started screaming "OH MY GOSH! OH MY GOSH! OH MY GOSH!" and everyone turned to look at me and Mart took off after him. In that second my adrenaline kicked in and I totally forgot my foot was in crazy pain and I started running after him too. I'm so thankful that he paused for that one brief second to turn around to look for us, I can't even imagine my 2 year old getting hit by a car like that. Martin and I about had a heart attack and are hearts were racing the entire way home.

It was definitely an eventful birthday celebration, and one I will probably never forget.

After getting home and checking out my feet, I was able to assess the damage. I'm pretty sure the left ankle is just sprained. It's huge and purple, but not so bad. I'm also pretty sure my left foot probably has 1 if not more than 1 fracture in my toe bones on the top of my foot. My toes are turning dark purple and both of my ankles are purple and bruised. Most people if they hurt their ankle only hurt one so they have one to fall back on. Sadly that was not my case.

Anyway, they are still huge and sore but I'm doing alright. Here are some pictures:

Day 76 - January 22, 2010

Day 76:

Today I talked about my next couple weeks with Rex and we decided that I'm going to be doing salads, dressings and the salad bar. I started out by making some blue cheese dressing for the salad bar that day and it was delicious! Last time I had blue cheese dressing it was surprisingly bland considering it was blue cheese so I was a little nervous. I ended up using gorgonzola instead of traditional blue cheese (so much better!) and added salt and pepper. I loved it! I will definitely be making it from now on.

Delicious Blue Cheese Dressing:

1 cup blue cheese (I used gorgonzola, so much better!)
1 1/2 cups mayonnaise
1 1/2 cups sour cream
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp Dry mustard
2 Tbsp onion, minced
2 Tbsp chives, minced (or scallions)
Salt and white pepper

In a bowl combine the mayo, sour cream and lemon juice. Add the dry mustard, onion and chives. Stir in the cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste.


After I finished my dressing I helped Adrienne weigh out and shape rolls and then scoop chocolate chip cookies. After that I set up lunch for 10 in the class room. We needed their dessert so I attempted to plate some coconut cream pies, but they hadn't set up quite yet and that turned into a royal disaster when I scooped an entire slice out plated it and then looked back in the pie plate and saw the entire crust sitting there . . . Yeah I passed that job off to Adrienne at that point. After that I helped serve lunch and everybody loved it. We served philly cheese steak prime rib sandwiches (always a hit), with homemade potato wedges and slaw.

After lunch I cleaned up and stopped to talk to Jon for a bit about next weeks schedule. I was on for the salad bar, dressings and he assigned me to be in charge of a lunch for 150 people on Thursday. We would be serving chicken cordon bleu, rice pilaf, a veggie, rolls and a salad of sorts. I would be organizing it.

That was about it for my day

Day 75 - January 21, 2010

Day 75:

Today was the day to cook and serve my ham for lunch! We pulled it out of the walk in and put the glaze all over it and let it in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour and a half. Every 20 minutes or so I would pull it out and add more glaze to it building up the flavor on the outside. When there was only about 45 minutes left until we were serving I added the fruit skewers and glazed it all one last time.



About 20 minutes before lunch was going to start we pulled it out and let it rest under the heat lamps we had set up earlier that day.


The second part of my assignment to cook the ham was to slice and serve to on the spot at my carving station. Rex was out there helping me too.




Everybody loved it! It was the first ham I've ever cooked and it was a hit. I stayed out there through almost the entire lunch while people came back for seconds. I didn't try any of it, but I had people tell me that it was probably the best ham they've ever had.

Twice-Smoked Orgasmic Ham (Yes..that's really the name)

1 (12-15 pound) smoked bone-in ham
Whole cloves
Pineapple slices
Maraschino cherries
1 cup frozen tangerine juice concentrate
1 cup Polaner apricot perserves
1/2 cup French Pommery mustard
1/2 cup Grey poupon dijon mustard
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp coarse ground black pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne

Smoke the ham at 225 degrees for 3 hours. (We cold smoked ours with apple chips for about 4 hours). Remove the ham and place on a sheet pan. Secure the pineapple slices and the cherries to the ham with toothpicks.

To make the glaze, combine the tangerine juice concentrate, preserves, mustards, brown sugar, ground cloves and peppers in a bowl and mix well. Generously slather the ham with glaze and bake in a 350 degree oven for 1 1/2 hours. Brush the ham with the glaze every 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and let rest for 30 minutes before carving. "This ham is soo good it will have you Oooing and Ahhing!"

**Side note: Amy's husband showed up right after lunch and had some leftovers..he liked it by the way ... and Amy decided to try a little bit of it. She looked at me and told me it was soo good and basically told me that it lived up to it's "orgasmic" name! Ha ha ha. I know she won't like me writing that in here, but I just had to. :)

Day 74 - January 20, 2010

Day 74:

Today wasn't a very eventful day. It was crazy busy in the kitchen so I stayed in the computer lab and worked toward getting caught up on my evaluations. Once people cleared out a little bit I headed into the lab to cut up some pineapple for my ham.

That was seriously about it. Pretty low key day

Day 73 - January 19, 2010

Day 73:

Today I got to school and was told that I was making a ham for a lunch on Thursday. I pulled the ham out and weighed it to make sure we were going to have enough for the party. After we figured all that out we put it in the smoker. We were going to do some cold smoking with apple wood chips. Once that was going, there's not much else to do to it, so I just left it alone.

When I finished with the ham, Adrienne and I made parfait's with our leftover strawberry mousse from Marcie's wedding cake. We both decided that we couldn't just do mousse and whipped cream, that it needed something else so we decided to make some granola and put that with it. We found a recipe on Cooks Illustrated that looked good and got to work making it.

Classic Granola

1 cup walnuts, chopped
3 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup blanched almonds, slivered (or halved)
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1/4 cup honey
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup raisins

Heat oven to 325 degrees. Mix first 6 ingredients together in a large bowl.

Heat syrup and honey together with oil in a small saucepan, whisking occasionally until warm. Pour mixture over dry ingredients. Stir with spatula until mixture is thoroughly coated. Put mixture onto a cookie sheet and spread into an even layer.

Bake, stirring and re-spreading mixture into an even layer every 5 minutes until granola is light brown, about 15 minutes. Immediately turn granola onto another cookie sheet to stop the cooking process. Stir in raisins, then spread granola evenly in pan. Set on a wire rack and cool to room temperature. Loosen granola with a spatula. Store in an airtight container.

Once the granola was finished and we tasted it, we both liked it a lot but agreed that for this dessert it needed to be a little sweeter. We decided to toss it in some brown sugar. That made it so delicious and it was my favorite part of the parfait for sure!

After we finished with the parfaits we decided we should go get information on our job seeking skills class that we needed to take. We went down the hall and talked to Sean about it and on our way back to the kitchens the fire alarms went off. We kept heading toward the kitchens and headed out in the back with the rest of our class. I was super grateful that it was not a -20 degree day and frigidly freezing, but the sun was out and it was not snowing! It turned out that a water pipe had broken, and some how the pressure of that set off the fire alarm...?? Something like that.

Anyway, after that I went over to the business department and talked to the lady about my computer literacy class that I also needed to take. I was able to test out of two sections, and it only took me 30 minutes - 1 hour. Nice! I was going to attempt to test out of the Word and Excel sections too, but after looking through the book I saw a few things I didn't know (I don't use Microsoft Office 2007...I use 2003) so I decided that I would just take those sections and have a refresher course. It wouldn't take me too long to get through it.

After I finished that, we pulled my ham out of the smoker and put it in the walk in to chill.

Anyway, that was about it for my day. Pretty eventful. :)

January 15, 2010

The day of Marcie's wedding:

This morning I woke up and started getting everything together that I would need to take to Salt Lake with me to set up this cake. In the middle of all that, I got a message from Rex telling me to call him. I called and was told that somehow the cake board ended up with cola droplets on it and there were now spots on the fondant covering it. How that happened, we have no idea! When we put it in the walk in, it was perfectly clean and white. During the day today the guy came to fix the walk-in (good timing, right?) and so they went to move our cakes to the back and that's when they noticed it. Rex wiped the soda off. Luckily it was the board and we were covering it with flowers and cake anyway. After that, we loaded everything into the back of my car and we headed out.

Thankfully we arrived safely and everything was good with the cake. The only thing that happened on the way there was the cake had sunk probably about 1/4" so the dowels stuck up just a little bit in the middle tier. No big deal. We were going to be putting ribbon on it anyway.

We got to the reception location and got to work. We were only able to get in 2 hours before it started and by the time we got everything together we only had about an hour and a half total to get it set up and decorated with flowers.

Adrienne and I are a good team and we work together well and quickly. Kendall (Adrienne's boyfriend) came with her and helped us as well, and that was really nice! It made it a bit easier.

Here is our cake all stacked up waiting for ribbon.


Figuring out how we wanted the ribbon. Each layer was going to be different.


Kendall holding our ribbon straight in the front while we adjusted the back.


Just finishing up the ribbon:


We were pretty proud of our cake and how well it turned out, especially after all the problems we had with it. It's even more awesome that the entire thing is cake and there are not any fake layers! Go Adrienne! (With a little help from me...)


Our cake all ready to go, waiting for the flowers


The back of the cake. I used corsage pins to hold the ribbon in. I like the look of the pearls on the back.


Helping Debbie put all the flowers on


Our cake 100% finished. It turned out awesome and I'm completely proud of it. Marcie liked it and told me it was better than what she thought she even wanted! (Debbie and I planned out the whole thing)

Day 72 - January 14, 2010

Day 72:

Today was wedding cake assembly day.

Adrienne started off the day by making the strawberry mousse for the filling. We wanted to wait until the day of so it would still be as fresh as possible for tomorrow. After that was finished and chilling, we started to assemble the cakes.

We were concerned with the fact that the filling on this cake is mousse and the middle and top tier combined would weight quite a bit and cause the mousse to squish out the sides of the bottom tier. After talking it over with Kacean, she told us we needed to pipe a ring of a good thick Italian butter cream around the outside and then fill the inside with the mousse. That would be enough to hold it in. **Note from after the wedding: The butter cream trick worked and the mousse stayed in the cake after it was all assembled!!**


Here is Adrienne filling the bottom tier with mousse and Megan is watching in the background. (She's making her own wedding cake this summer and was trying to learn as many tricks as possible before then):


After the tier was assembled I started frosting them with the butter cream while Adrienne started filling the second tier.





Because the second tier was so large, we would need some hefty dowels in the center to hold it up. Rex helped us out with that part. :) I have to say, it was super weird bringing a hand saw to school that day in my backpack. . .


After they were all assembled and covered in butter cream we were ready to start covering them in fondant.


The bottom tier was 14" in diameter and we needed a space large enough to roll out the fondant. This is the only counter space we had and it's pretty tall, so Adrienne had to stand on a crate to get it rolled out.

We were able to cover the top tier okay with no problems and the board the cake was going to sit on. After that point, we started to have some issues. The fondant we were working with had been made about a month ago and frozen. To help it become more elastic-ee (is that a word??) we put it back into the mixer and added extra glycerin. In that process, I guess we over mixed it and that caused more problems. The fondant was super crumbly and wouldn't hold together like it was supposed to. We kept tearing it when we tried to pick it up. We tried to cover the middle tier and it was so large and so tall, and the fondant was rolled out so big that when we tried to cover it, it just ripped and fell right off the cake. To solve this problem, we ended up just making a fresh batch and putting it on the cake fresh instead of chilling it overnight and letting it set up. We covered the cake and let it chill for a few minutes after it was already covered. That was so much easier than our other options. The fondant rolled out a lot thinner (which was super helpful for this large cake) and was a lot more elastic-ee. :)

Then came our next challenge. We had to cover the 14" tier. Rex convinced us to try with our old fondant so we didn't have as much waste and it would save some time. It was so awful, Adrienne and I both thought that there was no way it would turn out. The fondant cracked right in half and so we had a huge seam in the middle of the cake. We also had huge chunks missing and cracks all over the entire thing. It seemed completely hopeless. Rex could see the stress, anxiety and doubt in our faces and told us to just wait a minute. He doctored up one side of the fondant for a few minutes and turned it around to show us and in some spots, you almost couldn't tell what we went through. We ended up covering everything with shortening and powdered sugar/cornstarch mix and some how, miraculously we ended up saving that tier without making a fresh batch of fondant. In the end when you looked at the cake, no one would have even the slightest clue what we went through on that tier. You almost couldn't tell it was there...

Here is the bottom tier when we started out before we fixed it. This is what Adrienne and I saw and thought that there was absolutely zero hope saving:



Here is the bottom tier, about halfway through being doctored by Dr. Rex.


Here are all three of our tiers ready to be set up tomorrow. We were super happy with how they turned out, especially after we had so many issues with the fondant.



At the end of our super long day (Adrienne was there for 11 hours, I was there for 9 1/2) we started to clean up and had to come up with a place to store the cake overnight where people would leave it alone. One of our walk-ins was broken and no in use, so we put it in the walk-in and locked it up so no one could go in there.

That was it for our day, we headed home to get some sleep so we could come back and load it all up and take it to Salt Lake.