Finding the Easy Way

The cake I made for my daughter's wedding.

When I was a teenager, I went to some cake decorating seminars with my mother. Yes, I was a strange teenager.

One of the lessons I learned back then, was to get royal icing to work properly that it needed to be beaten with a wooden spoon. It wasn't just any wooden spoon, either. It had to be one kept specifically for royal icing, with no chance of being contaminated with any oils or other non-royal-icing material.

I've just finished making and decorating my daughter's wedding cake.

You know how I made the royal icing? I beat it in my Kenwood Chef electric mixer. There was no way I was going to be able to beat a kilogram of icing sugar into four egg whites.

Guess what? I couldn't tell the difference between that and the royal icing I used to make "properly".

For those flowers on the cake: I used "soft icing mixture" (a gluten free one) instead of pure icing sugar, and the sugar paste I made with it was actually easier to use. It took less kneading, didn't need the board and all my tools dusted with cornflour, and it was just as easy to shape.

I also used a new cutter I bought, which does five petals at once, which are also easier to shape once they're cut, rather than the one petal at a time I'd learned. It's faster, but it's also less tiring, and less work for fingers to do.

The lesson from this?

Lupus makes life much more challenging, but sometimes there's easier ways to do things than the way we've always done it. Finding an easier way, can make it possible to still do the things we love, despite our limitations.