The glass cupboard

We will be hosting a party to celebrate our oldest son's marriage over Memorial Day. The thought of that event has me traveling between excited to overwhelmed and back on a regular basis. The important thing is that I always come back to excited. This party will be a picnic on our farm for lots of people. The planning has evolved since we first made the offer to host the Wisconsin celebration of Kit and Violet and has settled happily on a manageable (I hope) level of simplicity. Simplicity, however, multiplied by over 100 becomes a little less so. It falls further out of the realm of easy when I allow myself to fall prey to good suggestions from my overachieving older sister.
My original plan was to have a table of cakes. All bundt cakes (because their shape alone makes them pretty). A table of cakes requires a table of cake plates. And naturally, since cakes look prettier still on pedestals, a table of pedestal cake plates is in order. All good and all manageable. Until my sister planted the seed of a cake for every table (or as she said, a table for every cake). Baking the cakes is not the issue. I can be a baking machine, especially since I found this great blog by the Food Librarian who made a bundt cake a day for the entire month leading up to National Bundt Cake Day (Really! who could make up stuff like this?) The discovery of this woman's journey through a month of bundt cakes gave me more than enough inspiration for the baking. It's the plates.
Think about the concept behind a pedestal serving piece. It is to raise an item up for presentation, right? Well, if all items are raised to the same height, the whole idea of showcasing one item becomes moot, doesn't it? That's my thinking on it anyway. So, when imagining a table of cakes, I had to imagine each cake on its own pedestal, but the pedestal has to be as unique as the cake to make an impact. So, I started collecting glass plates and objects to use for pedestals. I have decent collection and enough for a table of cakes. (All parts will meet the miracle bonding E6000 glue just before the event. Who has enough space to store this many cake pedestals?) Now that the plan has changed a bit, I need more. And, of course, this need flies in the face of my vow to swear off thrift shops.
I found myself at Goodwill twice in the last week and found a few little gems. At this very moment I am feeling anxious over the possibility of not getting to a thrift shop at all this weekend. Even though I am fully aware of the fact that they will still be there next week, it is a bit unnerving to think the best plate yet may fall into someone else's hands. I only need a few more since I went a wee bit overboard on the first hoarding-er-collection of plates. And, it occurred to me yesterday that the number of cake servers is highly inadequate. I'm going to have to make a concerted effort to find more of those, which, of course means that swearing off thrift shops is simply inconceivable.
I'm off to a conference for work on Monday and Tuesday. Karen, my always dependable thrift shop patron saint, tells me that there are some great ones I have not yet discovered. She, in fact, called me from Goodwill this week to tell me she found a great plate, named the price, and asked if I wanted it. In addition to acting as the guiding light in my thrift shop hunts, she also taught me the valuable lesson that you buy it if you think you like it. Leaving it there while you think about it is a certain guarantee that you'll never see it again. (That lesson was learned the hard way when I left Goodwill at 8 on a Thursday night to think about the black Scottie Dog cookie jar that I really loved, plus it reminded me of Aunt Mary's bathroom black cat, called Karen at 9 the next morning to ask her to go and pick it up for me -- she is conveniently located about 5 minutes from the store --and learned it was gone. "You always buy it," she scolded. "They'll take it back and give you store credit and you can always find more junk at Goodwill.") Karen bought the plate for me and I'll see it next week sometime. In the meantime, I'll be at a conference in Wisconsin Dells this week. My way home may very well be dotted with stops in Baraboo, Portage and Wisconsin Rapids. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that people far and wide have seen fit to donate cake servers to thrift stores along my path. And, that they haven't donated too much other junk I can't refuse.