Thursday, June 6, 2013

my father's retirement

Today is my father’s final day at work. He’s retiring after 29 years at the District School Board of Niagara where he was the Manager of Projects and Maintenance. He had a retirement party on Tuesday night with over 200 guests. It’s hard to know what to give someone for retirement, especially since my dad (as echoed in many of the speeches at the event) is very unassuming and understated. He always said when he retires he plans on playing golf and spending time with Owen & the family. Nuno suggested we bake a cake for the occasion as our gift for the event, naturally, I was thrilled. When he proposed the idea he had already drawn up the blueprints. So much of these sculpted cake rely heavily on Nuno’s talents and his idea was to make a perfectly square cake of the DSBN logo with gum paste sculpted figures of my father and Owen. 
 
The job began with a 7 hour cake baking blitz. I used this Versatile Vanilla Cake recipe (my go-to for sculpted cakes) and baked 7 10” square slabs.

From there Nuno made the magic happen, surprisingly quickly with no snags or glitches along the way. We’re getting to be veteran cake builders learning with every cake we produce. The final cake weighed close to 50 lbs. This is the largest group one of our cakes ever had to feed and luckily it tasted great.

As you can tell by the figures, someone is going to Disney World. As a retirement gift my parents, sister and her boyfriend and our family are all spending a week together at Disney World in September. We wish my dad, mother (a teacher who is retiring at the end of this school year) and father-in-law happy retirements filled with relaxing and fulfilling years ahead.

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