I share with you a true story:
Brides are crazy. This is a fact, not a judgment.
I know this, because I’ve been a bride.
I was crazy. How do I know? I made my own wedding cake.
You
know all those “Baking with Julia” shows on PBS that have famous
patissiers tossing off goodies with the venerable queen of the kitchen?
Baking a wedding cake isn’t like that, although I did use Martha
Stewart’s recipe from that series for the cake (not the filling or
frosting or décor – that was Rose Levy Beranbaum all the way).
Here’s what happens.
A
week before your wedding, when you are most insane, you buy a lot of
sugar, and a very lot of cake flour, and a very, very lot of unsalted
butter (it must be UNsalted, not regular butter), plus some other
ingredients that require you to go to the extremely special cake and
candy supply store way the other side of the universe.
You
sharpen wooden dowels in a pencil sharpener to provide the support for
the layers, which will weigh as much as Martha Stewart (her
pre-menopausal weight, not her pre-jail weight, thank heavens), and then
wash them for fear of giving your guests graphite poisoning.
You
measure the quantities of ingredients. This is called mise en place but
might well be called planning the D-Day invasion. Alternatively, one
might call it the Bay of Pigs, at least in my kitchen.
You
realize that your Kitchen-Aid mixer, although the ne plus ultra of
mixers when you got it several years ago, cannot accommodate the very
large quantities of ingredients you are going to have to mix.
You
portion the ingredients into manageable amounts for the now-inferior
Kitchen Aid mixer, organizing by layer size, since you’re making this
cake in tiered layers.
You mix the ingredients, carefully following the directions.
You realize that you haven’t turned on the oven to preheat it, so you turn it on and have to wait.
You
realize that you haven’t prepared your baking pan, so you spray it with
a little Pam (should have used softened butter, but you forgot to get
enough to meet that need), put in the parchment paper, which you didn’t
cut as neatly as you wished you had, then spray it with Baker’s Joy .
Will anyone know you aren’t using the butter and flour? Will this spell
doom for the marriage?
You pour the batter into the pan and are
on the verge of putting it in the oven when you realize you’ve forgotten
to add the vanilla.
You pour the batter back in the mixing bowl,
add the vanilla, re-prepare the pan, pour the batter back in and put it
in the oven, praying that the leavening power of the baking powder
hasn’t been compromised. (Do soldiers fear the power of their missiles
is affected if there is too long a wait before they are fired? I think
not. Baking is harder and more unforgiving than war.)
You hover
over the oven. The rule about watched pots doesn’t apply to baking,
where the art of the hover is finely tuned. You debate whether to open
the oven when the timer rings, wondering once again about that faithless
thermostat which is usually wrong, and how it might affect the cooking
time. You test the cake with a cake tester, which took you ten minutes
to find in your cooking tool drawer because it is so small, but it is
better than a toothpick because it is EQUIPMENT.
You take the
cake out to cool and wonder if perhaps you left it in too long because
the cake has already shrunk from the sides of the pan and Rose and
Martha told you not to let that happen. Will anyone taste the dryness of
the overbaked cake? Will we be divorced by our first anniversary?
You
repeat the process for the remaining layers. Timing must be adjusted
for each because of the different sizes. But the change in timing is not
a linear thing, and besides you’re miserable at math, so all you can do
is hover and pray.
The cake layers cool. You drink a cup of
coffee. You wish for a stiff shot of scotch, but fear the effect that
might have on the cake.
Each layer must be torted, or split into
two equal layers, so there is a place for the mousse filling to go.
Getting the split even, so that the final assemblage doesn’t look like
the Leaning Tower of Pisa, requires a few technical tricks (or trucs, as
the French patissiers might say). Your powers of concentration are
waning, your mother and Julia never taught you the trucs, and one of the
layers does not look quite perfectly even. You contemplate making a
replacement layer. You burst into tears and jettison that idea.
The
cake layers must be frozen, since it is four days before the wedding,
and nobody’s recipe will last that long. There are too many other steps
that must be completed.
You go to bed.
You rise to face
the challenge of the mousse. In a descent into a deeper trough of
madness, you decide to make two different kinds of mousse to fill the
cake, one chocolate, one not. You are modifying someone’s mousse filling
recipe, which is tricky even when sane. You don’t know if the mousse
will freeze, which it will need to do to hold the cakes for the
buttercream phase.
You make the raspberry base for that mousse.
Making the base takes longer than you expect. You think this project
will never get done.
You wait for the raspberry base to cool. You
do not think of melting the chocolate for the chocolate mousse, even
thought this will require a cooling period as well, because you are
insane. Rational thought has left the building.
You finish the
raspberry mousse, and take out the frozen torted layers to fill, rewrap,
and put back in the freezer. You thank the gods of baking and your
landlord, who had a big freezer in the basement of the house you are
renting. The gods are smiling.
You start the chocolate mousse,
melting the chocolate, doing all the whipping cooking tasting adjusting
things that one does for the chocolate mousse. It is 7 p.m. and the
child wants dinner. How dare she interrupt this process with something
so mundane?
You stop and cook dinner for the child. It is 9 p.m.
You
take out the layer that will have the chocolate mousse. You fill it,
but realize that proportionally there isn’t enough mousse to make that
layer the same height as the other layers. It will be ½ inch shorter.
You burst into tears.
You dry your eyes, rewrap that slightly shorter layer, and put it into the freezer.
You go to bed.
Waking
is not pleasant. Today is the day of the buttercream. This is not your
mother’s buttercream, made with confectioner’s sugar, butter, and a
little vanilla and maybe warm cream. No, this is a classic buttercream,
made with an Italian meringue base per Rose’s Cake Bible ( the chemistry
text for those who bake – Rose is the Marie Curie of the field).
This
is not only classic buttercream, it is VAST QUANTITIES of classic
buttercream. Rose takes pity on you and gives you the proportions of
ingredients for a cake the size of the one you are making, but once
again the iniquitous Kitchen Aid is unequal to the task. You must break
the ingredients into smaller portions (mise en place times two) and pray
that the two different batches are the same in appearance, so the
finished cake doesn’t look like the Washington Monument, with a
demarcation line where work stopped when they ran out of money.
Buttercream
completed, you bring up the layers to be frosted. You unwrap each one,
dust off any crumbs, and apply what is called a crumb coat of frosting
to, logically enough, keep any crumbs from marring the final finish
coat. Invariably a few stray crumbs manage to sneak by, but you are on a
roll. The cakes, being frozen, take the icing quite well. You finish
off each layer by running a hairdryer over it to slightly warm the
frosting so you can smooth it. You think that you have truly descended
into madness, using a hairdryer on a cake.
You put the layers,
unwrapped, into the freezer for a brief time to harden the icing before
you rewrap them. You put the leftover buttercream into a plastic tub and
put it into the refrigerator. You think little of that act at the
moment, but it will be your salvation later on.
After an
appropriate time, you once again take the layers out for the assembly.
Each layer is on a thick cardboard pedestal. Just layering them without
supports will cause them, once the cake defrosts completely, to sink
like the lava dome at Mount St. Helens. You hammer in the wooden dowels
with a rubber mallet as you construct the layers. This is just as Martha
and Rose have taught you. Baking as construction project. The assembly
is now almost three feet tall and weighs as much as a six-year-old
child. You put it back in the freezer.
You think about what ordering a cake from the supermarket might have been like.
You sigh.
You go to bed.
The
prospect of making flowers from an odd substance called gum paste
sounds crazy. That’s alright, because we have already established that
you are crazy. Gum paste, an amalgam of gum Arabic, sugar, glucose and
other household chemicals, gives you a material that you can use to
create the most delicate of flowers. You have decided that you are going
to make gum paste flowers because Rose talks about them, and you’ve
seen them in wedding cake books, and you know you can make the most
beautiful things that are just like the flowers in your bouquet.
Somewhere, the notion of just getting more of your flowers to decorate
the cake, rather than creating an imitation of them, has slipped away,
perhaps with your sanity.
You make the alchemical mixture. You
start to form it into flowers, many flowers, many different kinds of
flowers, each tinted slightly differently. You make gum paste roses, gum
paste jasmine, gum paste ivy. You dust them with bits of edible gold
dust, a silly thing to worry about since these flowers, though made in
large part with sugar, taste awful, and no sane person will eat them..
You use the same sculpting techniques Rose has taught you when you make
roses from chocolate modeling clay; at least that tastes like a grown-up
Tootsie Roll. This tastes like you might expect from something called
gum paste.
At midnight, you are still crafting gum paste flowers and assembling little sprays of them for the cake.
You
fear you have developed diabetes from all the sugar products you’ve
used over the course of the cake-making. You’ve read somewhere that a
chef said he thought all chefs were fat because they absorbed fats
through their skin. Perhaps this has happened to you.
You wonder if you will still be able to fit into the wedding dress you made for yourself – another foray into madness.
You
put the assembled flower sprays into flat plastic shoeboxes (clean, of
course) with tissue paper to protect them and keep them dry.
You go to bed.
You
rise the next day, knowing that various relatives are coming to town
today. You start the day by making the frightening trip to church with
the cake. It will wait there, slowly defrosting for a day, in the huge
refrigerator where it will share space with the half and half for coffee
hour and the apple juice and baby carrots for the children in Sunday
School.
You pray no one will touch it. You leave a sign on the
door saying (in a very Christian way, of course) “Don’t touch this cake
or you will die a painful, horrible death.”
You go home, take a shower, and dress for the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. Your back hurts from carrying the cake.
Your
directions to the rehearsal dinner are fatally flawed: one of the key
road signs has been stolen. The out-of-town guests drive miles out of
their way before finally making it back to the gathering. You are
mortified. The children are bored.
You go to bed wishing you had just gone down to Town Hall, gotten a damned marriage license, and went to Bermuda.
You
wake up the morning of your wedding, and realize that the sky is blue
and you are happy. For some reason this shocks you, perhaps because you
are insane.
You dress in casual clothes to go to the church and
finish the assembly and decorating of your cake. You do not have any
coffee, because you want your hands to be steady.
It is Sunday,
and you arrive during the normal Sunday service. The giant refrigerator
is in the kitchen where the coffee is prepared for the post-service
Coffee Hour. Edgar, the 92 year old man who has made the coffee since
the Johnson Administration, is there. His moods swing between charm and
curmudgeonliness. He is reasonably sane, though.
You are insane.
The cake awaits you in the refrigerator.
You
will take it out and put it on one of the rolling carts, for final
decoration and moving into the chapel, where your reception will take
place. You reach in to take it out of the refrigerator. Edgar says, “Let
me help you, dear.”
“No,” you say.” I’ve got it.”
He
helps anyway, tipping the cake into your chest. Fortunately, this is as
far as it tips, and you manage to get it onto the cart with no further
problem…except for the two roundish dents in one side of it.
You
contemplate killing Edgar, but realize this will not solve the cake
problem and will distress your guests, not to mention your fiancé, who
is opposed to murder on principle.
You realize that there may be
enough extra buttercream to address the dents. You smooth it on, put the
golden ribbon decoration around each layer, add some additional
buttercream edging in swirls and flourishes, gently place the gum paste
flowers, glistening with the gold petal dust, on the cake, and carefully
move it into the chapel. You manage to safely transfer it to the top of
the piano, where it will be displayed during the reception. You say a
prayer to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Saint Honore, patron saints of
bakers, to keep it safe while you go home to prepare for the evening
wedding ceremony.
You go to the hairdresser, where Lucien has
made a special trip to fix your hair. He makes it excessively poufy a la
Priscilla Presley (the early, Elvis years), but you still feel lovely,
particularly after the drink of brandy he gives you to calm your nerves.
He makes the child look like a little princess, which she is anyway.
You go home to dress and put on the makeup.
By now the boys are
in their tuxes. They have relented after making cash offers to be spared
the indignity, offers which you have refused. You complete your
preparations. You are on some other planet now, watching yourself move
through the various preparatory steps to making a marriage.
You think this is what hope is, doing this again, loving again after a disaster.
You
go to the church, you see your beloved, you know that this is more than
hope, it is belief in the essential rightness of this love.
You
have the ceremony. The music is lovely, the flowers are lovely, the
words spoken are lovely, you remember nothing of it but the quality of
the light in the evening.
You are still floating during the
reception. The toasts happen, kind words are spoken, people seem
genuinely happy for you. People bring you food. You eat, but do not
taste.
The time comes for the cutting of the cake. There it sits,
in all its glory. The work of a week, of a lifetime, waiting to be
sacrificed on the altar of love. You wonder, for a moment, if it will
taste good. You cut, with the cake server your mother used at her
wedding. You each take a bite.
It tastes sweet. It is sweet. All is good.
Happy 15th, dear PH. Fifteen more 15ths would not suffice.
