My First Paid Order!

The majority of the cakes I have done so far have been for family and a couple for friends - all of which won't mind some imperfections on the cakes.  But when I received my first real "order" for a cake, I was ecstatic and terrified at the same time.  It was a high dollar order ($100) and it was for an acquaintance of a second cousin.  It had to be perfect.  The order was for 5 different flavors of cake, three different flavors of icing and the customer had a very specific picture in mind.  She wanted a dozen each of the cupcakes:


Red velvet with cream cheese icing
Chocolate, yellow and strawberry with vanilla buttercream
white cake with chocolate icing


Then for the smash cake, yellow with vanilla icing.  Fondant covered with polka dots for a little boy turning one. 

Simple enough, right?  Well, it should have been.  And it would have if I didn't have to learn so much with this order.  

First of all, this order was due during the first really humid week of the year.  I hadn't turned the air conditioner on just yet because it was still cool enough at night to keep the house cool for most of the day.  Lesson learned: icing and fondant do NOT like humidity.  

So to keep the cake from completely melting on me, it made several trips in and out of the refrigerator.  Unfortunately this caused a great deal of condensations and I didn't learn until a few cakes later that this is ok and JUST DO NOT TOUCH IT UNTIL IT DRIES!  Since I didn't know that, there were several fingerprints on the cake because I could not keep my hands off of it. The original design called for a lot less polka dots, but I needed them to hide the flaws I continued to create.  

The third and final lesson learned: use paper towel to try your hands.  I was my hands a lot while making cakes and always use paper towels to dry my hands, so when I ran out toward the end it didn't occur to me that using a regular hand towel would wreak such havoc.  Unbeknownst to me, my beautiful new red hand towel left red fuzzies all over my hands.  Once they were clean and dry, I used my hands to smooth the cake and ended up a gazillion red fuzzies everywhere.  Now, if the fondant covering the cake was dry, this wouldn't have been such an issue, but it was sweating so they stuck and there was no way of getting them off.  Believe me, I tried.

The mom was thrilled with the cake and the cupcakes and colors and had no idea what went into such a simple order.