All Over Again!

       The time has come in a full repeating mode, meaning a special time is now dawning upon us--myself included. In a sort of ray of excitement I look forward to the stretching of my brain beyond the normal capacity and to have it stuffed full of new information. Ah, yes the days where my head swims from the overload and tries to digest the information in smaller amounts. How the summer days had delighted me with great adventure and the stretching of my character but now comes the great test of it all, SCHOOL!
     
       Yes, ladies and gentlemen, college will be starting once again for myself and though I look forward with great optimism, I cringe slightly at the thought of tests and exams. But do not fear! I shall be the victor!

   With much gusto,
       ~Laura Arminta

Hit the Ground Running

Hey ya'll!
     Life has been a crazy whirl wind of activities since the day I left for Romania and the day that I returned. When I am done with speaking to the church's that supported me I plan on writing a couple posts about the trip and include a slideshow of numerous pictures. For what kind of post is without pictures?
     As soon as I arrived back in the States from Romania I embarked on a weeklong vacation with my family. It was so much fun to be able to explore parts of the U.S. that I had never seen with my family. But that is also another post in the future. After the vacation, I started back into work at my job as a CNA and I started to plan the details for my friends wedding cake. I forgot how much planning goes into the design and the layout of a wedding cake. The theme was country. So it included camo, daisy's and simple elegance.
      I went onto pinterest to search out ideas for a wedding cake the contained moss hunting camo and lo and behold I discovered my inspiration.

 

      I love the tiered squares, and the giant daisys. It was the country and elegant cake I was looking for. And so the planning began in full force. With a cake idea and I began to figure out how much batter was needed, how many batches of icing and how many flowers would have to be created.

 

    With the help of a great friend, my mom and my siblings, I was able to make over about two hundred miniture daisys, twenty medium sized daisys, and eight large daisys. They looked stunning. I do not think that I could have been more pleased with how they turned out.

    Then began the crazy part of the cake. I decided on a three tiered, square cake and to give the cakes a wood like texture I wanted to try drizzling white chocolate all over the cakes. Yes, I know, everyone thought I was crazy and I hoped that it would work.

 

     So at about 11:00 PM after work I started to ice the cakes and smooth them out. Upon completion of that, I began one of the most messiest things that I have done yet in my cake decorating adventures; drizzling white chocolate at vertical and horizontal angles. It was a lot of fun  to drizzle chocolate all over with no purpose but to be crazy and make it look cool. I have to say when I started I was saying in my head, "Oh boy! This had better look good or I'm ruined." But I think it turned out pretty sweet in the long run.

 

 

     I went to bed around 2:00 the next morning and slept for three hours before we had to load up three, two layered cakes and three sheet cakes into our mini van and head up to Minnesota to get the cakes put together. It was an intense car ride as I kept praying the cakes would not move or shift. The only small catastrophe was when mom made a sudden stop at a stoplight and all the cakes scooted forward into each other. But we praised the Lord when we saw that only a few dents had been made in the icing and a few of the chocolate lines had been broken, nothing more. I sighed with relief when we arrived on the scene and I could go into my cake decorator mode. It is where I usually block out everything but the cake and hardly notice what others are doing.

 

     With my sisters help, I touched up the dents that had been made, stacked the tiers and began to add the moss hunting camo, daisy's and other little details to the main cake. For the sheet cakes I added the cutting lines, and my mom and sisters placed the miniture daisys, rosebuds and camo leaves in a quilt like fashion.

 

    As I stepped back from the cake, I took it all in and sighed with relief. The cake was complete and it looked amazing! Even better than I had hoped, and the bride and groom loved it! That made my day complete. Now I could enjoy the wedding to its fullest.

 

        ~Laura Arminta