Sunday, April 14, 2013

Ganache






The car was warm and the cake was heavy. Really, really heavy. Well, maybe it wasn’t the cake itself, the unmatched layers covered with beginning-to-drip ganache, maybe it was the two and a half inch butcher block we had somehow decided to carry it on. In any case, it was heavy, and my duty was to balance our creation (well, mostly Kate’s creation, but she was busy at the wheel) all the way to Monterey. And I was killing it.

We were going to Dre’s wedding, at the Naval Post Graduate School where she worked and had met her sweetie. The drive was two hours long, down the freeway and the coast past Santa Cruz, our university stomping grounds. It was a winding road, and I balanced the cake on the plane of my lap, working the centrifugal force by stacking left and right, keeping my side of the conversation going and the wedding cake intact.

the gown.
Probably, the cake would have survived regardless of my MarioCart-inspired acrobatics, but I wanted to feel that I had contributed just that much more. The week preceding, Kate and I had traveled down to see Dre and Peter, for his going-away party (in a UHaul full of DJ equipment, positioned open, facing the dolphins and seals and sunset of the bay). We had ended up in a pink champagne and Ben & Jerry’s fueled girls’ night arranging of Dre’s bridal costume, a gorgeously appropriate layering of classic lace and bright orange embroidery. Kate had volunteered our presence for the Big Little Day, and then her cake concocting for this last-minute affair.

Like other weddings of my international friends, this one had been pushed forward by the requirements of Green Cards and cross-continental travel. Peter is Swiss-Austrian, and the two of them would be Europe bound soon enough. The ceremony itself would be aptly silly. Complementing the bride’s orange gown, the groom would wear a lipstick kiss in all his wedding photos and, after the outdoor naval-base ceremony involving dancing and bubbles and singing along to Home Is Where You Are, we would all have to stop and freeze for the playing of TAPS.

It had been unexpected, this wedding. For me anyway. I had found out about the engagement some months before by phone outside in San Francisco’s financial district.

“I have something to tell you,” Dre had said, on speaker in her car during commute hours.
“What?”
“I’m getting married.”
“WHAT?”
“I’m GETTING MARRIED.”
“Hold on, I can’t hear you…”
“Ok, is that better?”
“Um, yeah. Yeah I think so.”
“I’m getting married.”
“WHAT?”

And so on.

marzipan  and construction paper.
But really, it’s that time. Kate had gotten married a year or two earlier, in a wedding filled with tiered cakes and mason jars, with forage-inspired floral displays and a mountain lodge retreat on the side of Mt Tamalpais, where the fog and wind whipped at all of us but my friend the bride looked so serene. There had been quite a few others. Mostly out-of-the-ordinary, non-religious, and with unmatched bridesmaids. The most traditional looking was secretly an open marriage, and the least- involving second and third takes, sheep, two bands and a jam session, a campfire, and a double teepee- has proven one of the strongest and longest so far.

So I suppose I am starting to evaluate things I had never considered. Maybe that’s why I would act a little weird once we arrived in Monterey. Maybe because of the couplings all around. Maybe because of her impending escape to the very place I had just left. Maybe because I was tired from drinking too much wine the night before while the Kitchenaid threatened to fling batter all over Kate’s linoleum, maybe because of uncertainty in the face of the surprising inevitability of Time Marching On.

Meanwhile though, I was working so hard to hold this now-intact velvety chocolate cake aloft, to prove my support for one of my closest friends’ great big decision, for everything that had happened before and would happen after. To prove my capacity for tackling a task at hand. So, every turn, I paid attention. I looked ahead. I anticipated motion and kept it all level. So that this cake would arrive and be beautiful and delicious and worthy of all the things I and we wanted for her. Worthy of her. And through the hilly expanse of agricultural Northern Califonia, flanked by cows and sheep and what would be artichokes, with my other best girl at my side and my stomach aching from laughter and travel, with a mind full of silly memories and the pushed-back feeling that things were changing regardless of me, with an extra towel just in case the ganache slipped, and a cup of coffee wedged in the door of the City Car Share rental: I had to feel like I was killing it.