Cake decorating -- suggestions requested

My #1 deficit as a baker and cook is that I can't make cakes that look good. Give me a cake and a tub of grocery store frosting and I'm going to give you back something that looks like a third-grader did it. I don't know why I'm so impossibly bad at it, but it's probably something that can be corrected.

I've looked into taking a class -- the local Michael's does offer a class, but it seems that I'm always out of town when it's on the schedule. They offer it four Thursday evenings in a row and I'm hardly ever in town for consecutive weeks.

I've looked into DVDs -- but for every DVD I see out there there are always reviews that go "I'm a novice and I was left utterly confused -- the actor moved on from basics to advanced techniques way too fast" and "I'm actually a pretty good decorator and watched this for tips, and the actor was REALLY sloppy." So I have no idea what DVD actually would be good for tyros like me.

I've looked into books -- but guess what? Same gamut of comments -- too advanced, too sloppy, didn't cover essentials, and so on.

So: can anyone recommend a really good DVD or book for someone who really WANTS to be able to make nice-looking cakes but just has no idea where to start?

Thanks!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Camp Services at the 3-Day

"Wanted: a few dozen enthusiastic volunteers to spend a weekend staring off into space for long periods of time mixed with intense zaniness.  Ability to fend off attacks by Godzilla not required."

I'm referring, of course, to the women and men of the 3-Day Camp Services crew.   Anyone who's ever walked or crewed a 3-Day knows them well: they're the folks in outfits right out of a "Let's Make A Deal" episode who hand out towels at the showers, scan you in and out of camp at the beginning and end of the day, answer questions, run the lost-and-found, award legacy pins, and in general, run around in circles keeping the 3-Day Main Street tidy and organized.   They're there when walkers arrive at camp and they're there when the walkers leave camp.   While walkers are in camp, they're busy busy busy like happy little Harry Potter house elves...

But what do the Camp Services crew do when the walkers aren't around?  Ever thought about that?   If you're thinking about crewing for the first time, or you've crewed before and are considering crewing again but want to take on a new assignment, you've probably wondered exactly that.   Do they turn off and go into suspended animation like robots?  Do they sleep?   Engage in merry games of naked volleyball in the dining tent?

The answers to those questions are: "no", "if they want to", and "we recommend you bring plenty of sunscreen."

I've never been a member of the Camp Services crew.  I've been a crewmember at the Boston 3-Day three times and am signed up to crew again this year, but I've always preferred to be on one of the "road crews" -- the crews that are out on the route looking after the walkers at the pit stops.  I've been a member of the Pit 5 crew, the Pit 4 crew, and last year I was captain of the Route Cleanup crew (yeah, someone's got to pick up the trash at the pits and take away all the empty snack wrappers and discarded banana peels and empty water jugs).    It's pretty clear what the life of a road crewmember consists of: get ready for the walkers, work with the walkers, clean up and put things away, and plan to do it all again the next day.

But to speak with authority on what camp crew life is like, I had to bring in an outside expert: my wife, Carole Furr.  Carole was a member of the Boston Camp Services crew in 2010.  I sat down with her recently for a short interview about what Camp Services was really like.  (I brought cookies!)

Q.  What do you do on the morning of Day 1 when the walkers have just left the opening ceremonies and won't actually make it to camp for hours and hours?

A.  Well, as soon as the walkers have all left opening, the first thing we do is help break down the opening ceremonies site.  We go around and pick up all the barricades that made up the corral and we take down all the signage and we put away the tables from the check-in tent and so on and so on.  We don't have to move all the really heavy stuff like the pieces of the stage -- the 3-Day staff have forklifts and stuff to load all that stuff into the big tractor trailers.

Q.  And when everything's all picked up at opening...

A.  We get in a bus and we head over to camp and we sit.  When we get there it's only like 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning, I forget exactly, and there's almost nothing going on!  The Camp Logistics crew has already gotten camp mostly set up -- they've laid out the tent grid and they've got the tables out in the dining tent and so on, so we don't have to do any of that.  But our gear bags weren't there yet -- I don't know where the gear trucks were -- and so we just basically didn't have all that much to do.   They did put us to work putting plastic tablecloths on all the tables in the dining tent and they had us do things like sorting the mail for the walkers in the 3-Day Post Office and we made sure that everything on the 3-Day Main Street was all set up and ready to go ... but there was a lot of just sitting.   You could talk to people and make friends and stuff but the time I crewed it was really hot on Friday and people didn't feel really chatty, so ...

Q. ... so you sat around staring blankly off into space and hoped you didn't actually fall into a coma?

A.  Yeah.  Although a couple of people did fall into comas out of sheer boredom.  That worked out pretty well, though, because it gave the Medical crew setting up the Medical tent area someone to have fun with.

Q. ... have fun with?

A.  Yeah!  They drew on them with Sharpie markers.  You know, labeling where important organs were located and stuff like that.  Like dummies in medical school.

Q.  So it's ... important not to fall into a coma?

A. Yesireebob.

Q.  Were snacks and drinks available during the day while you were setting up and hanging out?

A.  Not exactly.  They did have lunches for us -- the same lunches the walkers and other crew got, and there was water there, but there were no snacks and there was no Gatorade.  And it was really hot that day and we weren't completely totally sitting on our butts the whole time -- we did actually have some work to do to get everything ready, and I actually felt a bit woozy at one point, but there was no Gatorade!   Someone eventually suggested that I go ask at Medical and turns out they had some.  I told Medical that there wasn't any Gatorade for the crewmembers working in the sun and they were real surprised ... and about fifteen minutes later all this Gatorade suddenly showed up.

Q.  But no snacks?

A.  No snacks on Friday.  I got HUNGRY before lunch arrived.  My number one piece of advice if you’re on this crew: bring snacks for the first day.  (After that, the food juggernaut that is the 3-Day arrives and you’re never hungry again… but Friday was rough.)

Q. So there's definitely a sponsorship opportunity here for Dunkin Donuts:  "Dunkin Donuts: Official Snacks And Coffee Vendor to the 3-Day Camp Services crew!"

A. Or Godiva Chocolates.

Q.  So you get the dining tent ready, you set up the 3-Day main street, and at some point the gear trucks show up and you set up your tents and sleeping bags and stuff.  And then what?

A.  Then we wait for the walkers to arrive.   Camp Operations starts at 1 pm -- that's when camp opens.  I was on Towel Service from 1 to 4 that afternoon.   And it was slow.  The only thing worth mentioning is, well, God.

Q.  God?

A.  I had a lot of random shower-related questions that I had to take to the foreman in charge of the shower trucks.  I must have run over and asked him things four or five times.  Eventually I said "You know, I never asked your name.  What should I call you?"  He replied, "God."  I went "God?"  He said "Yeah."   He smiled as he said it... but you never know.

Q.  Huh.



A.  Anyway, around 3 pm things got really, really exciting...

Q.  Exciting how?

A.  That would be "when the skies opened up and it suddenly started to rain like crazy."   There were three of us on towel duty and we weren't far from the gear trucks or the showers, and I looked over and saw our gear bags sitting out getting rained on -- for some reason, they hadn't gotten clear plastic tarps over them yet.  So I excused myself for a minute and ran over and dragged our gear bags under a shower truck.

Q.  Yeah, I remember that rain.  Rained like crazy.   When I finally got to camp after Pit 4 closed, camp was just a lake.  Thank God that we were camping on those soccer fields -- they had artificial turf and drained really well, but still, it was almost impossible not to get drenched.  Remember how I ran off to the camp store and bought a big Komen poncho?  The forecast hadn't called for rain at all and I'd only packed a little windbreaker.  That'll teach me to believe weather forecasts!

A.  I told you it might rain.  I told you.

Q.  Yeah.  I was worried about my gear bag going over 35 pounds and I left out some stuff I wish I'd packed.  Sigh.



A.  It stopped raining around 4 and we thought everything was okay -- and so when I got off towel service I figured we could relax and breathe easy.  I didn't go off and instantly set up our tent.   Since I didn't have any scheduled shift from 4 to 7 I figured I could poke around for a bit, get a snack, and so on.   With a lot of walkers in camp, I helped out a bit by answering questions when I saw people looking really lost.

People who've done the 3-Day before know that the key things to locate are the showers, the dining tent, their own tent, and the 3-Day Main Street, but people who were new didn't know what the Remembrance Tent was and wanted to know who slept over there, and didn't know what the stretching mats were for, and so forth.  So we kept three people in the Pink Information Tent to help with questions like that, but really, all of us on Camp Services helped out by answering questions when we could... people would look lost and you'd say "Can I help you find something?" and they'd say "Where can I plug in my hairdryer?" or "Is there a hot tub around here?" and even "Where's the camp convenience store? I forgot to bring shampoo."

Q.  What's the Pink Information Tent?  Did it give out... pink information?

A.  No, idjit.  That was that little round tent with a pink canopy at the end of Main Street.  We kept two or three people in there to answer questions, but a lot of people didn't realize that was its function.  We probably should have had a HUGE sign reading "INFORMATION" but we didn't.

Q.  Or one reading "PINK INFORMATION?"

A.  *smacks interviewer*  Anyway, just about the time I was starting to think "Yeah, the field's dried off a bit, I should set up our tent, maybe Jay'll get here soon and help me" the rain started again.  Came out of nowhere.  Just boom.  So there I was, frantically trying to set up our tent in the pouring rain.   It was raining harder than I've ever been out in before.  I was crying, I was so frustrated.  But I got it up and got our bags and threw them inside.

Q.  And five minutes later I showed up?

A.  And five minutes later you showed up.  *glares*

Q.  I remember -- it kept on raining like mad.  When we went to the dining tent for supper we had to put Saran wrap over our food trays just to get from the food line to the dining tent without them flooding.

A.  Yeah.

Q. So after dinner, what did you do?

A.  I didn't have another shift scheduled until 7, when all the Camp Services crew who weren't on duty got together to put together all the lunches for the road crews -- route safety, sweep, the bus crew, and the pit stop crews.  We packed them into individual bags and then bagged the individual bags up into big bags that we gave to the crew captains.   We had a list showing how many regular meals and how many vegetarian meals we had to make up for each crew... you were the only vegetarian on the Pit 4 crew so I wrote a note on your lunch bag saying "Hi!"

Q.  Yeah.  Unfortunately, another Pit 4 crew ate that lunch.  When I asked if there hadn't been any vegetarian lunches, someone said "Oh, so-and-so ate that, she was curious what the vegetarian lunches were like."

A.  Nice.

Q.  Well, I made do with snacks.  I was crewing Pit 4, after all.  We had a few snacks we could spare.

A.  Anyway, after the lunches we had a Camp Services crew meeting, went over the day, talked about Saturday, and then went to bed.

Q. So what was Saturday like?

A.  Saturday was the slowest day.  Other than a towel service crew shift in the morning -- which I wasn't scheduled on -- there wasn't much to do from breakfast time until camp opened at 12.   I'd told Karen, our crew captain, that I'm not a morning person, so she never put me on a morning shift.  Being up at 5 to hand out towels wouldn't'a been fun.



Q.  So after breakfast was over and the walkers all went out on the route and there wasn't really much of anything to do until camp opened again at noon?

A.  Coma.

My first shift was from shift from 12 to 3.  Unfortunately, it was the most boring job imaginable -- it was crewing the "Save your Spot" table, where people could come and register for the 2011 3-Day... in other words, for the next year's event. I'd scan their credential and they'd get an email later on to confirm their registration, but they also got a special legacy pin on the spot just for registering on-event.  My spot was right next to the legacy pin station where people could come and get the pins they'd earned for raising so much money and so forth, only I didn't get to help with that because a different member of our crew was on that.  So the two of us just sat there at the table and hoped people would want to register or get pins, but really, it was super-slow.  No one was lining up to register for 2011, at least not while I was sitting there.

Q.  And after your shift ended at 3?

A.  I wasn't actually scheduled to do anything the rest of the afternoon.    We had lunch assembly duty again at 7 pm and I could have gone and taken a nap or something, but instead I just roamed around and found ways to help out.

Q.  So how did the crew keep everything organized?

A.  Our crew team captain, Karen, had a notebook with everything in it.  She knew where everyone was supposed to be and was constantly circulating around seeing if everything was okay and how everyone was feeling.  A bunch of us had radios too -- that way we could  radio in if there was a problem or we needed something.   I had to pick up my radio at the start of each shift and get a fresh battery, and turn it in at the end of my shift so someone else could use it.  I was amazed how smoothly things ran.

Q.  So Saturday evening you just had lunches for the road crews to do again?

A.  Yeah, well, no.  We did have the lunches to do, but the real work came later.  The hardest work we did all day came at 9 pm... when the 3-Day Main Street closed and we had to break things down.  By 10:30, we had pretty much everything from Main Street put away except for the tents themselves... that way, the minute the walkers left camp in the morning the staff could start taking down the  tents and loading them back into the tractor trailers.  We worked really hard for about 90 minutes and then were done for the night.

Q.   And on Sunday?

A.  On Sunday there was a towel service crew slot, but I wasn't on it.  Once the walkers had all headed out we broke down camp.  Not just the part we'd had a hand setting up -- we broke down the whole thing.  Picked up and folded all the chairs in the dining tent, stacked the tables, picked up trash -- there was a lot of trash.  People bring all kinds of stuff to the 3-Day, use it, and then just throw it out.  Air mattresses, tent decorations, shoes, three or four hairdryers, a bunch of bras, a Gideon Bible (one of our crew kept that), a large inflatable rubber octopus... there was just no end to the crap that people just flung aside as they were trying to get packed up and headed out on the route.

Q.  So when were you done with all that?

A.  Around 11, I'd guess.  Once we finally had camp all cleaned up and the staff were loading the tractor trailers, we were bused to closing ceremonies at UMass Boston.  We got there around 11 and from that point on we were either cheering walkers in or just relaxing in the air conditioning in the gym.  It was niiiiiice to finally be back in the air conditioning.  It was hot that weekend.

We picked up our gray victory shirts, went to the all-crew meeting at 3:30 (indoors, thank heavens), and then marched in to closing together.   Closing ceremonies was great, but as hot as it'd been, we were glad to be finished.



Q.  And then?

A.  And then we were done.  There were a lot of hugs and then we were done!

Q.  So did you have a good time, I mean, other than the rain and the heat and the long periods when you were bored out of your gourd because there wasn't anyone around at camp?

A.  Other than that?

Q.  Yeah.  Did you have a good time?

A.  Yesireebob!