A Tale of Too Many Cupcakes

So I’m sitting at the head table, doing the bride thing, when a good friend of mine comes up to shoot the breeze.

“The cupcake table is very impressive!”

“I know,” I said. “Aren’t I awesome?”

A few of my bridesmaids might have shot daggers at me. But no one can deny that the whole thing was pulled off rather well.

4th of July weekend was it. My sister, the ever-eligible Maid of Honor (MOH) and her boss helped me bake 295 of them in one night. It took us five hours. The MOH was wilting. She has a 9pm bedtime.

Well, the next thing to do was ice them. So on the day of the rehearsal dinner, I recruited two bridesmaids, the MOH, and my future mother in law and sister in law.

Now, one of my bridesmaids is an engineer, and her jaw dropped when she opened that freezer.

“There are so many!!” She cried. She then took it upon herself to make sure the cupcakes didn’t press against each other in the pastry boxes. It was rather ingenious of her; she recycled all of the tinfoil and wax paper I used to originally freeze the little suckers. She worked all alone in the basement while the rest of us iced upstairs. She later confessed to me that she ate a few.

Meanwhile, mother and sister in law had their own subtle protests. Sister in law expedited the process, having no desire to decorate anything lest she mess it up. She was like our task master. And she ordered pizza later, which was awesome.

Mother in law refused to pipe. She’s a cookie person. She’s comfortable spreading icing with a knife. I think she could have piped, but she was terrified she’d mess it up. So she treated the cupcakes like cookies. This made them look pretty different, so I told the other girls to plaster them with flowers.

She later turned to my sister in law: “I don’t care if it costs a thousand dollars. When you get married, we’re buying a cake.”

But then she wouldn’t have had this bonding experience! Come now, mom, this builds character!

Want to know what the real kicker is? I. didn’t. get. any. Zilch. Nada.

We left the reception for our honeymoon pretty late in the evening, and my mom and sisters were gathering the remaining cupcakes in little boxes.

When we came back a week later, they were gone. Curse teenage brothers and their bottomless-pit stomachs!

The Mother In-Law from Hell

So as I was contemplating the pain involved in a Brazilian (cough), I let my idle mind stray from wedding-ish things to the daily blogroll. And there I found wedding-related stories! Apparently there’s no escaping it once it’s crunch time.

If I have ever complained about my future in-laws, I take it all back. Because this story just takes the cake. Imagine the Devil Wears Prada on speed. Apparently, a future bride and mother-in-law had a slight altercation, and an email was sent. Well, the bride-to-be was so taken aback that she sent it to her friend. Who sent it to her friend, and on and on until it was viral and made headline news.

Here is is, in all it's astounding glory:

The mail online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2009518/Carolyn-Bourne-Mother-law-hell-sends-email-bride-Heidi-Withers.html

Mattress on roof, will travel.

Putting a brand new box spring in the rain is certainly not advisable, but who takes advice when they should? Not us. Oh no.

"Gee babe, looks cloudy. Think we can make it?"

My fiancé and I bought a queen mattress and box spring this weekend. Super cheap, great quality. We were able to grab a mini van, but the box spring would not fit in the back. So, we strapped it to the luggage rack. As we pulled away from the loading dock, I cast a wary eye at the clouds above. We had a 45min drive ahead of us.

"It won't rain," my fiancé said. "God loves us."

"He does," I replied, "but he also has a sense of humor."

Boy did He. As soon as we merged onto the highway (driving at a cautious 45 mph) the deluge started. The box spring was covered in plastic but we had no hope. It looked like a wind sail. Every car on the highway passed us like it was their business.

But we made it into town. I grabbed my cell phone.

"Hi dad, happy Father's Day. Guess what."

My dad, brother, and fiancé moved the box spring and mattress into my apartment in the pouring rain. (I stood to the side supportively.) There was much hauling, pushing, pulling and maneuvering. The men-folk decreed that they could not get the box spring into the apartment thought my front door, as the hallway was too narrow. So we shoved it up to my second-story balcony. With the "help" of my brother (he was busy abusing one of my cats), I pulled it over the ledge while the other two pushed it up to us. It was a success. We cut the plastic off and drenched my floors, but to our utter amazement the box spring was very dry. One corner was a bit damp, but not soaked.

We all stood around boasting of our mattress-moving prowess for a while. Then I wished dad a proper Father's Day with the first volume of The Walking Dead comic book. He was pumped. I got a text message later that said "great gift!" In the end, all men want is a picture book about zombies eating brains. (Me too, for that matter. Oh well.)

Of course, as soon as we walked out onto the porch, sopping wet, the clouds dissipated and a heatwave hotter than Vulcan's gonads hit. You can't win. But I guess I got a queen mattress, so take that, weather!

Shower Shenanigans

Imagine a fluffy, tan carpet. Now imagine raspberries. Oooooh….

The wedding shower is over. We made it through. With a few stains, but that’s what makes these things so epic.

My mother did an excellent job- she hosted it at our house and set it up like a fancy tea-party. My sisters and I had bets on who would be the first to spill/ drop something on my mom’s carpet. We saw my cousin (who will remain unnamed) drop her entire parfait when she went to sit down. It was like a slow-motion drama. I could see the look of “Oh my Gooooood” in her eyes as the cup flipped over. She cleaned it up and ate the rest of her meal in the kitchen. She’s older than me, and I’m 23. Just sayin’.

But, to my surprise, she wasn’t the only one to drop the little parfait cup. Apparently, one of my esteemed coworkers chased a rolling raspberry around the room before I walked in. This little fact came out at work the day after, and she burst out laughing at her desk. I can’t imagine her stooping over a tiny piece of fruit in her platforms and office dress- while balancing a teacup. It’s like a scene from Fantasia.

I got some nice stuff. People should pretend to be getting married, collect all of the shit they can, and then leave the state. My fiancé called me with cries of, “What’d we get? What’d we get!?” It’s like Christmas.

I made personal thank-you cards with my scrapbooking material, just to give everyone something different.

Wedding Stress!!

When I think of the overall goal of a wedding, (I do, you do, the end!) I can’t help but get annoyed with the details I’m told I “have” to attend to.

It’s become readily apparent that my fiancé and I have very different ideas about formality. He wants a limo, I just want to car pool; that type of thing. He tells me I have to do something a certain way, and I retort, who says so, and on and on it goes.

in saecula in saeculorum, amen.

Speaking of things you are told you “have” to do . . . the fiancé and I have ditched the china. No, I didn’t toss them out for target practice with my .38. (But that would have been most entertaining.) We just looked at each other one day, and asked, “Why are we getting this stuff?”

We are going to be moving quite a bit, so packing expensive dinnerware would be more stressful than anything. Plus, we wouldn’t use it. Holidays will be spent at one of our parents’ houses. And then we plan to have kids. Who break china. Plus, I'm more of a klutz than any kid I'll have.


Two more months. The devil is really in the details.

Let them eat....cupcakes.

My mother's 50th was this past March, so I was able to have some cake-making practice.

My dad thought I'd bought the flowers. I made them. It's a small victory.

My cupcake tier came in the mail lat month! It's a 6-tier that will hold about 150 cupcakes. I'm going to make the 4" cake on the top. Here we go!

Mom's still trying to get me to go to Guss' Goodies. It's a challenge now.

An eye for an "e."

I really don't care that there's a mistake on my wedding invitations. Is that bad? You tell me.

Here's the text the future hubby and I prepared before we sent it out to the printers. Read and be in awe:

This is what we got when the invitations came in:

Did you catch it? I sure didn't. I signed the proofs with the carefree innocence of a newborn babe. I didn't even catch it when I picked the box of invites up. And then I got home.

"Isn't there an "e" on the end of "Bellaire"?" My dad asks.

I thought he was messing with me. But he was right. Crap.

I think of what I can get away with-will anyone notice? I test it on my sisters and random friends. They didn't notice until I told them about it. One friend typed it into her GPS, and she didn't correct her spelling. It got her to the church. If you type it into google, it auto-corrects. But it gets you there.

I want to get away with it because I'm cheap. :) Buying invitations AGAIN for an "e" seems so silly. And after the wedding, who the heck is going to remember if it was spelled wrong anyway?

But apparently, this is the seventh deadliest wedding sin. If Dante were around, he'd probably have put me into some low level of Hell.

Where this hits me (metaphorically) below the belt, is that these invitations were generously paid for by a friend. And now we have to re-order. And of course, that friend cannot be expected to pay again.

So I picked them up yesterday. My parents shelled out $120.00 for an e. They're so proud.