Free to good home – wedding cake, only used once

[stephbg]

Near enough to 21 years ago, Husband and I got married in a fairly traditional manner, and this included a two-tiered fruitcake-based wedding cake. The lower tier was consumed at or around the time of the wedding, but the top tier remained intact and on display in our homes for, let's say a long time.

How long is a long time? Well, one tradition suggests that the last of the wedding cake should be consumed to celebrate the birth of the first child of the marriage, expected somewhere between 9 and 12 months after the wedding. A fruit cake soaked in alcohol and sealed in thermo-nuclear-rated sugar would easily last that time. After about 18-19 years we looked at our cake, still standing proud in a display case, and thought it really was time to let it go. (Although I had harboured thoughts of it being a critical supply of sugar after the apocalypse.)

After all this time and multiple house moves, much of the spidery icing sugar decoration remained intact.

But how do you dispose of a wedding cake? You can't just chuck it in the bin. For a long time we looked for opportunities to give it a decent send-off. Viking funeral was high on the wish list, but the logistics defeated us. Death by flame was impossible for many months of the year, and tricky enough at other times. I'm not a fan of boats nor especially attached to the ocean, so burial at sea never happened. Vague thoughts of launching it off a cliff into the sea never came to pass ("Fly! Be free!"). A shallow grave in the traditional shallow grave hotspot of Perth located conveniently close to Sector 7 seemed a little too grim, even for our dark sense of humour. We liked the idea of cutting it up and distributing the pieces to friends to deal with as they saw fit (we really didn't mind how after that point), but that involved way too much organisation.

Ever hopeful--but without any specific plans--we took the cake with us when we went down south to the Pemberton region a couple of weeks ago (it also went to Dunsborough last year). Nothing really occurred to us for the bulk of our stay, but when we decided to drive home via Nannup that gave us ideas. We honeymooned in Nannup, and hadn't been back since. A shallow grave in the forest around Nannup started to look good (there's several stories embedded in there), but it was somewhere along the scenic Nannup-Balingup road that we found the perfect spot.

A spot.

OK, maybe not the perfect spot, which would have been in thicker forest, but we didn't want to trespass on private land nor defile a national park. A remote roadside copse of trees it was, surrounded by startlingly green fields and close to a flowing river. Decent granite-based geology decorated the landscape. It was quiet, pretty, and simply Felt Right. We took the following shot in situ, then buried it amongst the deep leaf litter.

A spot, close up.

Hopefully we've done no more to the local environment than make a lot of bugs quite happy, and possibly drunk.

We took a selfie for posterity and drove on, forever leaving this symbol of our union to enjoy the great outdoors.

Husband and I after ~20 3/4 years of marriage, somewhere near A Spot.

And that's how you dispose of a wedding cake in the event of a long and happy marriage.