A Really Fast Cake

When Peggy and Kerry told me they were Nascar fans, they weren't joking.

When we were trying to set up a consult for their wedding cake and the only day I was available was a Sunday, they said, "No way, that's race day". So we waited another week before I went to their home to talk cake.

Peggy was prepared, she wanted a traditional cake with a Nascar twist. She showed me pictures she had found on the net of cakes she liked, the problem was, none of them went together very well. One was a traditional wedding cake, surrounded by red roses, another was a modern black and white cake with a ton of filgaree work and the last one, well that was the only Nascar wedding cake she could find online. It was a poor job, that is for sure, but it did include the one major element that she wanted on her cake... the checkered flag top tier.

So bourbonbaker pulls out her sketch pad and starts drawing. We have a nice cake with a black and white diamond pattern on top to mimic the checkered flag more traditionally and lower tiers covered in red roses. We have another that has a large red draping coming down from the checkered flag tier. None of them are working.

Finally we realize that Peggy's idea of traditional and mine are different... let's find a way to meet in the middle. So the final cake gets sketched. The top tier of course, is checkered. The middle tier, has a large "S" in red, their new family name and that colour that she so desperately wanted to include and the bottom tier, well, we're a little stuck on. We talk about roses, but Peggy doesn't think they'll fit in. We throw a few ideas around until bourbonbaker gets one that sticks... mini checkered flags.

So Peggy and Kerry's cake wasn't as traditional as she had planned for it to be, but I don't think you could have pulled off traditional and Nascar in the same cake. There is definitely some traditional in there with the initial, but the rest of the cake was just fun, and well-suited for the couple that commissioned it.