The et cetera in a job description

A lavender sugar rose, made by hand as the others dry upside down

How do you define a farmer? A farmer is… a guy in the field planting some seeds that will grow into a big plant that he will harvest with this big machine and store in a bin to sell later, that grain apparently feeds the world. Well, the modern farmer today is a man or woman paying close attention to the weather, market trends, a land steward (keeper of soil and plant health), planting and harvesting efficiently to be cost effective, providing for their families and doing a job they love all day every day, etc. 

 

As a farmer, farmer’s wife and farmer’s daughter I know all about that life. I grew up in it. My hubs gets to do most of the hard work while most of my job description now is all about the support team (bookwork – number crunching carries weight, maintaining the home base/yard, etc.) and pro combine operator. I can run the air drill but it turns out driving straight is more of an art that I’d thought. But there’s a sneaky et cetera in that job description which covers everything. Like shoveling out the corn bin on a perfect, hot and humid August day, with no wind. Pure excitement over that discovery.

These last two weeks I’ve been off dreaming of this moment, getting to write this post. Turns out that et cetera now covers more than farmer, farmer’s wife duties. A family member got married last week. 

A week before the wedding the cake decorator had a medical emergency. No worries, it’s all good, the cake is baked and chilling in the freezer. All you need is to slap some frosting on, stack the layers (er, tiers) throw some more frosting on and maybe blow some sprinkles on. Boom, done.

I was asked if I had done anything like this before. I responded with a birthday cake with buttercream flowers and white chocolate rose leaves dusted with edible gold powder. Somehow that little admission entered, no, put me in a freefall into the vast world of wedding cake decorating. Intrepid soul that I can be I googled and pintrested my little heart out.

To my horror, I discovered that not only did each tier have stakes in them to support the next (logical, I suppose) but once all the tiers were assembled you drove a stake through the heart of the cake. Hammered a stake, yes, hammered. Poetic justice, I think yes. Have you seen the cake boards? They’re not flimsy, faint of heart pieces of cardboard.

Uff da.

Felt amazing to hammer this together

 Then there was the little matter of covering the cake. Buttercream frosting requires refrigeration (of the whole cake). And it was supposed to be a beautiful, (hot and humid) gorgeous day perfect for wedding photos. Transporting a cake? Not so much. Fondant and buttercream despise heat/humidity. So that left me with fondant or fondant.

I baked up a quick box cake mix, threw way too much frosting on it and rolled out fondant all quick like. Watching a tutorial video on how to drape fondant over a cake and then to smooth it down with no wrinkles really was a smart move. It turned out pretty good for a first time fondant application event. 

When we actually put the fondant on the cake (I wrangled the mother in-law into helping – it was her other son getting married after all) I learned a few things.

What not to do with fondant or a wedding cake:

Do hire the cake to be professionally done from start to finish

Hire. The. Cake. Out.

If you’re cheap and completely unaware of the stress this can cause, ask family

Don’t make your own (fondant). The boxed stuff actually works great

Don’t roll fondant out under hot lights, in a warm (and humid) kitchen – it will stick and then rip

Don’t use a normal rolling pin. Buy the fondant rolling pin  - even if its basically a super expensive plastic cylinder

Don’t roll too thin – it will rip

Don’t store a fondant-covered cake in a warmish room. It will love you and thank you if it sits in a cool, dry basement.

A fondant-covered cake sitting in a warm reception hall (ac can’t keep and everybody keeps breathing) will start to develop wrinkles like an old glass window and start to melt and create piles of wrinkles on top of the next tier. (This actually happened. It was also due to the cake being improperly frozen, according to pro sources. The cakes should be wrapped in saran wrap after cooling and then frozen. Not simply put in a grocery bag with the handles loosely tied shut. It sucks all the moisture back into the cake so as the cake defrosts it will be a little mushy. This also covers frosting and filling the layers before freezing, a no no. But somehow it all turned out.)

We survived the fondant event and the nail-biting, complaint-filled (mine) drive home (MB roads are a wee bit rough) to store the cake in a cool room. Next up, decorating.

From the photo of cake the bride liked I had to deviate from the design, a lot. Okay, basically the whole design was nothing at all like the photo. It had the flowers and the purple frosting. And my skills are not pro level (hopefully they never will be) but I’ll be okay with amateur status.

It was decided by yours truly that there would be sugar roses and gardenias in purple, the bride’s most absolute favorite color, and there would be white apple blossoms with a pearl center. I spent a total of 24 hours making the dozen sugar roses and 8 gardenias, using cut outs and various tools and a lot of hand labor. Then just in case to cover any imperfections I whipped up 80 royal icing (it dries rock hard) apple blossoms.

Hand-piped apple blossoms

Sleep was not in the equation that week of the wedding. Nightmares of the cake toppling to the floor in a mess, or mushing into the car seats chased me through my zzz’s. (Pickups are not meant to haul wedding cake tiers across some of the worst sections of road and let’s not even think about all the other bad drivers out there.) I was never so happy, and vindicated feeling, to drive that stake through the center of the cake.

Why cake leveling is important

It was a bit of a puzzle to figure out to fill in the gaps between each tier but I figured icing would do the trick. Can’t go wrong with a whole lot of sugar. Cake leveling is a real thing, apparently. And this is why. (I didn’t bake the cake so I didn’t have any input there but I dealt with what I got😊)

Then it was the fun part. ‘Gluing’ the blossoms on with left over royal icing. The creative side is released and seeing the blossoms flow down the cake was magical. Or that might have been the stress of the last week finally starting to let up as I saw the cake come together and look like a wedding cake.

Finally finished... now for some sleep

Turns out that et cetera can get you. And it will take you into some interesting jobs and experiences. Overall, cake decorating was fun but the stress of the unknown and wondering if it would actually turn out was not so fun. But I did learn how to make some fab sugar roses. The cake turned out, it was delicious or so people told me. I completely avoided eating any slice. Too much up close and personal time with it I guess. No, actually I’m gluten-free and this was a bona fide, yummy, made-with-real-flour cake.

May your week be free of the et cetera, perhaps bask in the rain like a cat in the sun and have

iced coffee always at hand.

What no one tells you about the holidays

Clearly a big little snow

The holidays aka Christmas are a time of family, shopping, baking and radio stations stuck on repeat. There’s snow, maybe some big snowmen and ice skating. And there may or may not be hockey (typical winter sport right?).

What no one tells you about the holidays:

                Snow, no snow, big snow, little snow

                All the cleaning!

                Don’t lose your kittens

                Eating too much good food

                New Year’s resolutions are right around the corner

Okay, so December typically has snow right?! We had some snow but a warm snap melted most of it. I got so excited last night that there was a big snow system on the edge of the radar and coming our way. This crazy thought popped in my mind that I should prolong the blog writing until morning and post some good snow photos too. Yeah… that didn’t quite happen like I’d thought. The snow this morning was a little snow, mini snowflakes that danced and leaped as they fell from the foggy sky.

While I was anticipating the snow hubs was eagerly cleaning the house. Now, this phenomenon had started while I was finishing harvest in SoDak with dad. I don’t know how to explain hubs’ atypical behavior other than he likes things organized and tidy. Now when I say hubs was cleaning, I mean he was digging into closets, sorting through the cupboards (lucky for him, I’d been waiting for such a time to get rid of a few things) and prowling the garage. He even sorted through the unending collection of jackets he collects, much like those ball cap collections every farmer has. 

No, he didn’t even glance at the closet that holds his zippered hoodie jackets; claiming that he’s always cold so he has to keep them.  You’d think I’d asked him to shave an eyebrow from the look he gave me. Ah well, he was so industrious that I couldn’t force a downsize on those hoodie jackets. He and Scooter quickly volunteered to take the new donations to the local thrift store; he even cleaned the shop (!) and took a truck load to the dump and recycling center.

All his hard work and energy was repaid with a new rawhide and those bacon jerky strips he loves. Scooter never passes up opportunities for treats. Hubs got an apple pie and homemade whipped cream.

Farmer modified, forget the hand crank bolts

Don’t lose your kittens. I know it’s hard because cats are difficult creatures to herd and they’re always right there to trip you up on the pretense of showing affection (and leaving hair on your pants). The middle of the week was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, above freezing in other words. So he decides to let the kittens out of the shop to play outside and sunbathe. At lunch time he comes in with a worried look. He’d lost the kittens. 

Three of these kittens we’d gotten young and had to bottle feed them. The other two had only been with us a short month. After all the hard work and time we’d put into these little buggers we didn’t want them to disappear on us. Hubs and Scooter, who was a terrible tracker with his nose, tramped the wind break for an hour before finding the kittens. Kittens who were happily playing in a set of tires stacked behind the machine shed. Scooter, the silly pup, didn’t see them until hubs pointed them out. Crunchy leaves, sticks and trees oh my were apparently such fun to tramp through and pounce on. Herding cats are tough but hanging on to squirming kittens with claws is a challenge.

Chow time is the war for food

As with any holiday, good food abounds. It seems as if there’s always a turkey or ham to be found and the traditional accompanying sides. If you’re really fortunate though, there’s lutefisk (boiled, not baked, to perfection) with melted butter to drizzle over it, perhaps rumegrot (a warm, sweet custard), lefse (a delicate and thin potato bread that’s spread with butter and dusted with cinnamon sugar; and maybe a few non-standard cookies like krumkake (a rolled, fluted almond flavored cookie) or rosettes (a delicate, deep-fried cookie and gently doused in sugar for a frosted look). I do miss lefse as the one attempt (so far) to make it gluten-free was a dismal failure. It ended up more like mini pancake sizes than the big pizza pan size, before it’s folded and cut into smaller serving sizes. I steal a bite from hubs when he gets a piece.

Scooter watching tv & the dog in the movie

Of course, the New Year and typical resolutions quickly follow the Christmas holiday. But does anyone really think of their resolutions (current or new to come) during the holiday? I know I don’t. I usually forget about whatever I had resolved to do by March. Unfortunately that elephant-like memory kicks in January 1 about what my previous resolution was. Usually it’s a good effort on the ‘x’ resolution; I can’t even tell you right now what this year’s is. Maybe it was a resolution not to have a resolution. An easy win, eh?

 

May your holiday shopping be enjoyable, the presents hidden (or under the tree), and your snowman building skills on point.

Time flies

Wintry prairie view

Before you know it, it’s Monday and the weekend turned into the week. Throw in a holiday and it feels more like a Wednesday than the first day of the week. Of course, it’s Cyber Monday and sadly I didn’t spend my day shopping. Instead, I attempted to conquer the chaos of post-holiday travel and accumulated bookwork. Yeah, the bookwork didn’t get too far because, well, it’s Monday. And who wants to do bookwork right after a holiday? (Hand not raised.)

Thanksgiving was fun in a whirlwind let’s-clean-everything-and-bake-everything-eat-wash-too-many-dishes and then finally collapse. The fun part was probably due more to an out-of-town cousin joining the festivities and all of us cousins playing a card game, Ligretto. If you don’t have good eye-hand coordination resign yourself to having a negative score (cards leftover in your deck count double, in the negative). Surprisingly, because hey a migraine wanted in on the fun too, I managed to win. No, no applause, really I mean it. A lot of laughter was shared over our mutual inability to pick up cards quickly as the tablecloth invariably came with the card.

Somehow, Thanksgiving speedily came and went; now the calendar is informing me that it’s hubs’ and my second anniversary tomorrow. Wow, does time fly. It feels like it was July just a week ago and harvest a couple days ago. I have to say I’m getting the hang of this thing called travel for my almost-monthly visits back home. Still, long hours of driving get dull so lucky for me I have a co-pilot for most of the road trips to SoDak.

Looking back, it was an interesting year, from the anniversary time clock, that is. I have driven through more auction lots (coincidentally on or right before an anniversary), gone on ‘dates’ to crop scout or check out potential equipment purchases. Side note, some of those equipment review ‘dates’ were booooooring because some old-school Mennonite or Hutterites will not talk to women. You might as well not even be there. Guess my opinion wasn’t needed, right? At least there was good convo and coffee before and after those sketch encounters. Ah well, hubs did well though, he randomly bought flowers (or had flowers waiting when I came home from planting/harvest) and will cook the occasional meal. I taught him well, haha. And we actually made plans for a vacation this year. T minus one month!

He really wanted a goofy photo :)

And speaking of time moving on fast forward, Christmas is the next target up. Who has their shopping done? One of my best friends had her’s done in August, it’s disgusting really, and is half done for next Christmas! I consider myself ahead of the game if I’m making an ideas list in July and saunter through the shopping process. Casual-like because Black Friday shopping is amusing to watch but insanity if you’re wading through it.

May you have survived Black Friday (your wallet too), indulged in the candy cane mochas and start December (this Friday yikes!) with gratitude for (fill in the blank). Me, gratitude for family.