A Lovely Wedding–and My Part In It

I haven’t been writing much on this blog lately (as you well know if you’re a subscriber), but I am working away on m cookbook, my compendium of party food, tentatively titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind.  I had said that the last thing the world needs is another cookbook, but I’d already written quite a bit of material for it. So I’m putting it together, editing and testing the recipes, and saying more than you could possibly imagine on various food-related topics, such as proper muffin mixing technique and how to make many mini tarts.

Saturday I got to put some of my ideas into practice as I was asked to do the food for a outdoor wedding. My dear friend Nancy’s second-oldest daughter got married in their back yard, a necessity for this era of social distancing, and you just would not believe all the work they did making their already-lovely back yard into a veritable fairyland. Strings of lights! Acres of organza/netting/tulle, much of it wrapped around said lights! Flowers! Refreshment tents! So great.

How did my food come out? Pretty well, but I had a couple of fails which I will share here in the interests of full disclosure:

1. I should have stuck to my guns about making only small desserts. I got carried away with the idea that since we were having cupcakes instead of a big wedding cake that the cupcakes should be regular sized in order to equal a slice of cake. But that was wrong-headed thinking on my part, breaking my rule about having treats be only a bite or two so that the guests can try multiple items. By the time people had a full-sized cupcake, a fruit skewer (which I did not make—they were little works of art), and a bag of popcorn (the groom’s family runs a gourmet popcorn business on the side), they didn’t also want a small lemon tart and/or a rick dark-chocolate brownie and/or a small cheesecake (which I also made the size of a normal cupcake because I was afraid they’d dry out too much if they were too small). I will try to resist the siren call of making treats too big the next time I do something like this.
2. I had an epic fail with my Swiss meringue buttercream frosting. I think I’ve figured out why and have tweaked the recipe to fix the problem. But there I was on Saturday afternoon with a hard 4:30 PM departure time and my frosting was soup. I kept whipping it and it kept just sitting there. So I finally decided I’d just have to break down and add a bunch of powdered sugar to get it to set up. The cupcakes and the little cutting cake I made looked fine, and they tasted okay, but the frosting was kind of gritty and overly sweet, just the problems that going to the trouble of making this type of frosting is supposed to avoid. Oh well. At least I didn’t use Crisco.
3. Chocolate cake really isn’t worth making, especially if you have brownies on the menu also. Just make the brownies! What was I thinking? Chocolate cake is almost always dry! And it was a Martha Stewart recipe that I’d fiddled with to make it work for high altitude! Just another point to remember.
4. I knocked a whole panful (24) of the mini lemon tarts onto the floor because I had put it so that it was sticking out over the edge of the stovetop. I have a very small kitchen (which I love, and which on the whole is very efficient), but I should have known better than to do that. I was running out of cooling racks and space and thought it would be okay. Well, it wasn’t! But we still had lots of lemon tart leftovers.

On the whole I did pretty well with prepping ahead of time. I’ve always said that there’s never been a wedding for which I’ve done the food where I’ve actually attended the ceremony, but this time the ceremony and the reception were in the same place and so I knew I didn’t have that cushion. I didn’t get quite everything done on Friday that I’d planned, but I wasn’t in too bad of shape when I got up on Saturday morning. I will probably never make up a timetable the way my friend Wendi does, but I have learned a few lessons over the years in the course of having many nervous breakdowns.

And now the event has receded into the past. Who knows when there will be another event for which I can do the food? I’m pondering the possibility of some kind of block party for Labor Day. We could stand around in the yard without having to worry too much about germs, I think. It would be nice to reach out to the neighbors. And I’m doing the food for a women’s retreat at our church in October. But for now there will be no picnic for 100 people or so to celebrate the start of the Cherry Creek Chorale season, since we can’t have that many people at once—and since we aren’t starting the season in October because our venue is not allowing outside groups to use the facility for the rest of the year. No Saturday morning retreat breakfasts. No post-concert receptions. None of that for now. So I’ll write my cookbook instead of cooking.

This is a hard, lonely, scary time for so many people. I feel very fortunate as I sit in my cozy little kitchen typing this post. Who knows what things will look like a year from now? But one idea is certain: people will congregate together again, because that’s what people do. And when that happens, I’ll be there—with my trays of mini cupcakes.