You should have a time penalty for misspelling: please add 24 hours to response time for each misspelling incident.

I’ve been promising myself I’d write up the process of making this three-tier wedding cake for Vivian and Julian’s upstate NY half-wedding, so even though it’s been well over a year now, it should still be worth documenting.

The process:

1. Find a pretty design and a delicious cake recipe.
2. Make two colors of royal icing: mauve and a deeper purple.
3. Pipe hundreds of tiny little mauve flowers with purple centers in a couple different sizes over a couple of afternoons while watching trashy television. Let dry.
4. Buy foamboard and custom-cut plywood for cakeboards (the plywood gets glued to foamboard for the bottom one). Carefully wrap in foil.
5. Bake seven cakes. Weep in frustration when an entire 12 inch layer cracks and crumbles (hence seven and not six).
6. Wrap cakes and let sit overnight to firm up.
7. Start chocolate ganache for top tier’s frosting, which also has to sit overnight.
8. Level cakes (4 layers per tier) and brush with simple syrup.
9. Start whipping ganache and weep again when it breaks for no good reason. Start over with a simple chocolate frosting.
10. Make an ungodly amount of simple vanilla buttercream frosting. Ditch the idea of tinting it ivory due to the sheer volume. Remind yourself to buy a covered bucket for next time.
11. Fill each tier – dulce de leche for the bottom, strawberry jam for the middle, and chocolate for the top.
12. Carefully construct each tier on its base and crumb-coat.
13. Put each tier into a box and transport all materials to car. Drive car 2 hours to the wedding.
14. Unload everything at the house and put an apron on over the pretty dress you’re wearing because you’re also giving a best-friend speech.
15. Cut straws to size and insert as supports (I like them way better than dowels – easier to cut, less wasted cake, and just as sturdy).
16. Stack cakes, lightly icing each one. Slide parchment paper strips under the edges of the bottom tier to keep the board clean. Don’t bother with a center support.
17. Really ice the whole thing and make it all pretty and swirled. Sigh because the heat and humidity are making the icing slump and not hold stiff peaks. Get over it because it’s dusk anyway.
18. Arrange flowers all over the place. Allow your husband to attach some flowers and roll your eyes slash giggle when he makes straight lines instead of pretty clusters.
19. Pipe their names in extra royal icing on the board. Contemplate learning a prettier ampersand another time.
20. Go give an awesome speech.
21. Hold your breath while others carry the VERY HEAVY cake out to the table.
22. Smile shyly and say thank you hundreds of times while cutting and serving the cake (no caterers).
23. Go home and be glad you did not try to make your own wedding cake the month before.

I actually had a TON of fun doing this, but for me it’s definitely a hobby, not a career. Our kitchen was a DISASTER and I don’t even really like sweets to begin with, so I was very much caked-out by the end.

The super-awesome cake recipe I used, from a book that is 100% worth buying. The 12-inch and 4-inch tiers required slight adjustments in baking powder. The exact science of leavening can be found in some other cake book, but I cannot remember which. Either one of the Rose Levy Berenbaum ones or the also-awesome Martha Stewart Wedding Cakes book.

Yellow Butter Cake
from Baking at Home With the Culinary Institute of America

Ingredients:
3 1/2 cups cake flour
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon Baking Powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, diced, at room temperature
1 cup whole or low-fat milk (divided use)
4 large eggs (room temperature)
2 large egg whites (room temperature)
2 tsp. vanilla

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Coat two 8″ pans with baking spray (the kind with flour).
2. Into the bowl of your mixer, sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
3. Add butter and ½ cup of the milk.
4. Using the whisk attachment of your mixer, mix together on medium speed until smooth, about 4 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl as needed.
5. In a separate bowl, mix together the other ½ cup of milk, eggs, egg whites and vanilla.
6. Add egg/milk mixture to flour mixture in three additions, mixing for two minutes after each addition. Scrape sides of bowl after each addition.
7. Divide the batter between prepared pans. Bake 35-40 minutes or until layers spring back when touched in the center.
8. Remove from oven and allow cakes to completely cool in their pans on wire racks. Release sides and bottoms of cakes with metal spatula or knife. Unmold and finish with filling and/or frosting.

they are like little postcards
– Vivian

i think the only thing that shocks me is when people don’t like chik fil a
- Vivian

And gays aren’t going to get equal treatment by chasing straight men and screaming like little girls. PULL IT TOGETHER.

Edit: I’m going to put this after the jump to keep my blog cleaner and a little less in-your-face personal – trying not to make my blog a diary. So, I’ll be posting these only on The Asian Letters from now on.

September 20, 2010

Dear Asian,

I love that we can both watch the same documentary, discuss similar feelings, and yet ask different questions. To your “why the HELL am I here,” I say, “what the HELL is wrong with everybody?!” Why in the world do people here have the (serious) idea that Chinese food consists of sweet and sour and General Tso’s? Sure, people make jokes about black people eating fried chicken and drinking orange soda (or so I hear, ahem), but people know that’s a joke, right? How come I have to answer dead-serious questions regarding the contents of General Tso’s, of which I had never heard until I worked at a “Chinese” restaurant?

I have to admit, I wonder if Faith will be better off becoming Americanized/Jew-ized because her parents are American Jews and she will thus be able to understand them, even though it broke my heart when she lost her ability to communicate in Chinese/Cantonese in the end. I am so conflicted about whether or not she really needs to retain much of her Chinese-ness given that she will likely live in America for the rest of her life and may or may not have contact with the homeland after a while. I also no-longer-secretly feel jealous that she might be able to avoid familial culture conflict in a way that I cannot. Then again, I’m not jealous of her position as adopted without choice and she may end up experiencing the same thing merely because she is racially different. That makes me sad.

Right now I am feeling particularly distraught over my relationship with my mother – she never embraced being American, even though she is naturalized, and even says that she wishes she could renounce her citizenship. We keep getting into arguments wherein she tells me that I need to understand Chinese thinking and I have to remind her that a) she originally moved to the U.S. by choice and had her kids here, b) she wasn’t there to teach me those Chinese ways anyway, and c) my dad is perfectly happy embracing the (conservative) American way and raised me as such. Maybe it’s just getting worse as she continues to live in China. Maybe she sees Angela as her real Chinese daughter and wonders what the fuck is wrong with Kathy and me.

This weekend I went to go see her because I felt like it was my duty as her (Chinese) child to respect the fact that she was in the states for once and that she spent so much time/energy/money on us this summer. Things were okay during the day, but at the end of the night, I finally got up the courage to remind her that she had promised to pay me back for the online certificate that I’ve registered/paid for, partly because I feel pressure from her to go back to school for something. She got all obtuse with me and then asked “do you want me to?” Well, DUH, of course I WANT her to! So I said about as much, and then tried to be polite/do the right thing by saying “well, but of course it is up to you and what you want to do.” She then proceeded to completely flip her shit and pummeled me with “WHAT YOU MEAN WHAT I WANT?!?!?!” before launching into something about the monetary weddings gifts we received. Oops, I mean I received. Are you confused? Because I definitely was. Seriously dude, it was like talking to a schizo.

Why was she talking about wedding gifts? After some wrestling to get her to explain herself and then trying to unravel the half-bad-English, half-Chinese lecture, I finally figured it out. According to her, the Chinese way is to pay back those gifts in kind, so she has to pay all these people back for their weddings gifts to me. Oh, and right, apparently those were for ME, not for US, so her take is that I am supposed to have used THAT money for the class and the fact that she is paying that back to the gifters-I-mean-loaners was like paying me back or better. Can I also mention that she gave me the UGLIEST look when I said that I put the money in our joint account because it was for us and was using it as such? UGH. I am so baffled by this development and am skeptical that it’s really a Chinese thing as opposed to just another invention of my mother’s crazy. If I had known or could even conceive of things being this way, I would never have accepted those gifts. The real bottom line: I’m out a sizeable chunk of money, which is made even worse by my continued demi-employment, and I feel shafted by my mom.

Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, the shitfest continued for another hour, going through such topics as Adrian’s parents, the way her constant questions make me feel like I’m doing something wrong (complicated by the fact that she vehemently denies asking some of the more pointed questions), how I fully intend on being a mostly-home semi-working mom, how we can’t get along because we are completely different people and her idea that we are similar because we are mother-daughter is wrong, and how she’s a bad parent because she never says no. I’m not kidding. I told my own mother that she is a bad parent and needs to learn how to say no. I don’t regret it at all, even if (especially if?) it means she says no to me. Maybe then I could finally say no to her.

Also, when discussing Adrian’s parents, she showed me that she has a very skewed concept of what a relationship is like and doesn’t recognize that mine is healthy and happy. She essentially lectured me on how I need to understand that he loves his parents a lot (duh), that sometimes he might be upset with me because I was rude to them this summer (another duh, though not a proud one), and that I need to be careful because it’s clear that I love him more than he loves me (whaaaa?). I have no idea what Chinese couples are actually like – do they not communicate about feelings? Is the woman devoted to her slobbering, disconnected man? I guess that would explain why she thinks that we are that way. Fortunately, we are not, but I guess there is no convincing her. Even Adrian’s mom telling her that love cannot be measured and that Adrian is clearly the more affectionate one hasn’t helped one bit.

The issues here are many – her complete lack of understanding of a healthy relationship/marriage, the Chinese traditions that I know nothing about (and seem rather suspiciously like they may not really be traditions at all), and the intense denial she has going on. I know that a lot of this stuff has to do with the fact that she’s crazy, but I can’t help but wonder how much of this conflict is happening because she is stubbornly Chinese and I am distinctly not. I feel a little guilty about my lack of Chinese-ness but mostly I just feel angry that I have been subjected to this crap all over again. I’ve been doing so well with leaving all of this behind and being independent at home with my husband, but just 30 hours with my mother puts me right back into adolescent anger and depression.

Why can’t she recognize that she made the decisions, happily or not, to have American children and then leave us with our father? Why am I being punished for being exactly as I should be – an individual who happens to be an American-born Chinese? Am I wrong for continuing to wish that we could all be individuals rather than racially motivated? After all, at the end of the day, I’m not particularly American, either. You know I judged the crap out of the parents in that documentary and that I love that Adrian judged them even harder.

I definitely feel the foreign-in-America, American-in-China feeling bearing down on me, even though I know that my identity lies very squarely in being Asian-American, rather than Asian in America. I guess we shouldn’t generalize Asians, but I definitely believe that there is a unique Asian-American experience (or, a set of shared experiences among different Asian immigrant children) and I hope we can help each other figure it out.

Love,
Asian

Vivian: wow that’s like filipino verb conjugation

me: so i was reading some lost recap type things
and i realized that i am so not into this whole lost-ology shit

Vivian: ugh me neither

me: i mean i love lost
but i don’t know what they are talking about sometimes

Vivian: oh haha i don’t

me: it’s a good show
totally sucks you in
alias-style

Vivian: i’m more interested in shows that are heavier on the philosophical allegories
rather than just twisty turny symbolism and suspense

me: ah i guess i had never thought about lost as a religious allegory
which is apparently what people keep talking about
like here this whole time i’ve been calling a character “dude in the black sweater”
but apparently the rest of the lost world has named him esau because his nemesis is jacob
sigh

Vivian: WHATEVS
that was a great book by the way

[about 10 seconds]

me: the bible?

Vivian: HAHAHAHA
omg no

me: HAHA

Vivian: “jacob have i loved”

me: sorry i was totes confused

Vivian: i seriously LOL’d

me: hahahahahaha i did too

It even has online RSVP with administrative access! Try to top my wedding present now, other friends of V+J!