Most people know that on Friday evening June 29th 2012 we experienced a "Derecho" which is a storm of straight line winds - I guess like a tornado but no funnel. Never in my many years on the planet had I ever even heard the word "Derecho" but never the less it made a mess of our town. Almost everyone was without power.
Luckily the power at the shop stayed on and I was able to get my work done. I normally work well into the night on Friday night and it would have been very difficult to make other arrangements if our power had gone out. We were VERY lucky. On Saturday the 30th we had 3 wedding cakes to deliver. Again - the universe smiled on us - all 3 venues had power. Our last delivery was to the Vinton War Memorial - a bit of a long distance delivery. We had already noticed insanity at the gas pumps. Most stores were closed with no power. The ones that were open were completely jammed up and some had run out of gas.We had to hit the road hoping to find some place open so we didn't run out of gas in vinton and get stuck there. It was amazing how few places were open during our trip down 460 - this was a widespread outage, but we were lucky enough to be able to buy some gas and make it home.
The 100 + degree heat wave continued into the next week. Our power at home came on Monday afternoon after being off for almost 3 days, but many people didn't get theirs on for over 7 days. Even with power, keeping things cool enough for cakes has been a challenge. I've had to run my air conditioner pretty hard plus window units so I can just get cakes decorated.
I only made one order change due to heat. The cake above was planned to be a buttercream cake with fondant bows, but had to travel almost 1 1/2 hours to the reception venue. If anything happened like having to stop behind traffic causing my car a/c to not put out as well or causing the sun to shine too long on the cake in one spot, the icing could have been ruined, so not wanting to take the chance I covered it with fondant which holds up much better in heat. The picture was taken at the reception site - The Berry Hill in South Boston.
We had 6 wedding cakes to do last weekend - still in temps over 100 degrees. Everything worked out. Now it's raining, cooling things off and I think the temperatures are suppose to stay in the 70s and 80s this week. We can all use the break.
