20 Replies

Hi Maria, I totally feel with you! If you’ve fixed most of it like you said and warned the head waiter, then you should probably be OK. If it looked “OK” to you before you left, then no one will know what happened because I think we are our own worst critics, so if it felt ok, then it should be ok!!!

Hope you will get great news soon…

I can’t even imagine what you must have felt but if you thought it looked “ok” then I’m sure no one will ever guess that anything went wrong. Please let us know if/when you hear back from the bride. Your cakes are always gorgeous so I’m sure the bride loved it.

Oh dear, feel for you! Keeping my fingers crossed on your behalf, am sure it will be a positive feedback. Going forward, use sugar glue to adhere the fondant to the board and then “gunge” to attach the cake to the fondant covered board – i.e if the cake has been iced on another seperate board. Gunge can be made from either adding some water to flower paste or mexican paste, forms a really sticky paste and dries rock hard.

Your cakes are lovely dear, do not allow this incident to dampen your spirit!!

Oh Maria I fell your pain. Thankfully you are very resourceful and saved the day!. Disasters will happen but how we handle them shows our character. I am sure the bride will be pleased. We have bumpy roads in Cayman so I always use a central dowel after a similar incident.

Thank you all for your kind and encouraging words. It means alot to have support and advise from fellow bakers. No word back from the bride yet so I can only hope no news is good news, but she is on honeymoon now.
Thanks again.

I’m sure the cake will be fine – maybe it was too warm in the car and that caused the cake to slide off the board. it was great that you brought extra decorations and that the fondant didn’t tear -

Don’t worry… I’m sure it will be great!

I’ve always used decorator’s gel on the boards when covering them with fondant. The down side is if you don’t position the fondant just right the first time, there’s no repositioning it! The cake looks amazing.

OMG it looks beautiful, I had a disaster on a wedding cake just over a year ago and I am still traumatized by it, it was a very hot day and the cake was in a fridge and as we finished it in air conditioning, when we took it out to bring it to the event, the car was cooled but obviously the cake was too cold, it was like a cake “hurricane” we took it into the venue and as we were working on it we could see it was like it “blew up” one whole tier, the base tier just broke apart, like almost totally split in half which made the rest of the cake unstable, we repaired it to the best of our ability and left telling the venue staff about the problem and to be careful in the cutting and moving of the cake, well an hour after we departed the event staff called us to say the cake was almost totally a disaster but they had fixed it and sent us a picture. It all worked out and they said it was the best cake they ever ate but I still shake thinking of it.

OMG, Irishsparklemom, thank you for sharing your story. That sounds so scary. I’m so glad you had a positive outcome in the end. Last year my oven died on me in the midst of baking cupcakes for a wedding just hours away and I thought that was the end of my career but that worked out and I pray that this works out too. Major lessons learned! Thanks all for your support and well wishes! This is such an inspiring and caring group of artist and I appreciate your support so much!

I had a novelty cake – that the customer decided to store right by the venue ovens. Since it was a cake that was shaped like a golf bag complete with clubs sticking from the top, by the time the party came – the cake had leant over at an angle similar to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Lesson learnt – always say to the customer, store in a cool place. (You would have thought the caterers at the venue would have known better – but there you go!)….:) Kx
Fortunately no wedding cake disasters!!

Thanks again to everyone for your words of encoragement and sharing your own horror stories! I know my bride returned from her honeymoon over the weekend and haven’t heard anything yet. I’m going to keep positive and think no news is good news. I’ve moved on but this is in the back of my head still. I always want to hear from the bride after the honeymoon and it drives me nuts when they don’t respond, this happened back in March with another wedding, which went perfectly to my knowledge, so who knows… maybe some brides are flaky or just exhausted after all the wedding stress and just don’t bother…
Thanks again!

OMG! Its been about 6 weeks since this wedding and today my bride put a 5 star review for me on a wedding wire. She said the cake was beautiful and delicious. Just when I’d given up and lost hope and pretty much wrote this off as a failure, it turned out to be just the opposite! Getting good reviews lets me know that I’m great at what I do and that I care so deeply about pleasing my clients. This made my day!

Finally Maria, I can now uncross my fingers, after 43 days since I last commented on this ! The lesson I have imbibed from your experience is – keep your head up, no matter what and on no account, should one allow a customer who chose to remain incommunicado drive you nuts!

I’m so glad everything worked out.

rooneygirl, I’m glad to hear that everything worked out well and that the bride was pleased. It just goes to show that we, as bakers, are our own worst critics! I did have a question – Did you use a center/master dowel on the cake?

Thank you xclusive, Goreti, and Jennifer for your kind comments.

Jennifer, sadly and stupidly I did not center dowel that cake because I thought it would be fine since the venue was only 5 minutes away from my kitchen. I’ve center doweled every single cake since then, inluding tiny 1 tier cakes! I’ll never make that mistake again. Valuable lesson learned.

Thanks again!

Glad everything turned out well. I always brush my board with alcohol and the paste sticks fast and will not move.

Maria, woohoo, so happy for you!!! I can’t even imagine the anxiety you had to endure all these 6 weeks ;-o
Glad you had lovely feedback!

I feel your pain. That happened to us once ^’
We always stay next to the cake holding it, I drive and my sister hold cakes :p
but not sure how, slid off the fondant covered board. Lucky that my sister could hold it but we had to go back to remake it, cover again the board and have some flowers in the place where my sister hold the cake, that were damaged.
We arrive to the celebration just in time for desserts ^’

Your cake was beautiful and I’m glad it worked out in the end!