Recently I entered the oughties with the purchase of a printer/scanner. It was an accident - I thought I was buying a significantly cheaper printer and I was too lazy to walk it back when I found out it was about $40 more than I wanted to spend.
Turned out to be a good thing. For more than 10 years I've been sitting on a portfolio of pictures from my pastry days. Anyone foolish enough to sit on my couch with more than 10 minutes on their hands found themselves forced to look through 2 small albums of photos of desserts I had made from 1997-1999. The albums also featured photos of cakes I had made for friends' weddings. Until the scanner's arrival I had no way to overshare my personal life. And now I do. Aren't you lucky?
For me, cake making is a hobby rather than a business. I only make cakes for friends and usually only charge the amount for ingredients if I'm asked to charge them anything. Usually I just give the cake to the betrothed as a gift. My mom is usually my second in command and acts as the baker while I'm at work or otherwise occupied.
Only recently has the mania for representative cakes (it looks like a bridge! It looks like your dog! It looks like the cover of your favorite book!) taken hold at weddings. At the time these cakes were made there were only a few art cake makers around the country. I've never been one to focus on appearances - if the cake I make isn't one of the tastiest cakes my friends have ever had, I consider my effort a failure.
So here are the cakes and their stories.
Sarah and Ivan, 1999
Sarah is one of my closest friends from high school. Ivan is, obviously, her husband (who first met as toddlers...but didn't date until grad school). She's an artist and I wanted to make a cake that reflected her personality. I hadn't made any wedding cakes before but I knew how to handle fondant and build up layers, so I figured I was ready.
Turned out I was only part right. I didn't yet know about gum paste, and tried to make small bees from fondant - they wilted and didn't really hold up. It didn't much matter, however, because I hid them under flowers - real, inedible flowers. I had -and still have- a rule about using inedibles on anything I make. I think it came from one of my chef instructors at culinary school, but I can't really remember. Inedibles are verboten; stems, pieces of plastic, most flowers and anything else I forgot to mention that can't be eaten should never be included on a cake or on a plate. But in this case I told myself I was only kinda sorta violating my rules, as the flowers were on top of the fondant, which, as it later turned out, was peeled off and thrown out by the caterers (a move that initially upset me then ultimately made me happy when it spared the guests gummy mouthfuls of sugar clay).
Although you can't quite tell, the cake is in the shape of a bee hive and is decorated with gold leaf and sugar bees. Sarah had made a bee painting and I wanted to try and capture its spirit in a cake. The cake itself was lemon and it was filled with ground pistachios and white chocolate mouse. It was moist and delicious. Because it was wiltingly hot outside the cake spent most of the wedding in the air conditioned sanctuary of Sarah's Dad's office and only came out for the cutting.
JJ and Anthony, 2000
JJ and Anthony were getting married in the fall and didn't want a traditional wedding cake. They wanted a rich chocolate cake and I was only too happy to comply (thank you Grandma's Chocolate Cake). We decided on a fall fruit marzipan cornucopia - along with slightly out-of-season ivy leaves (oops) and the occasional donut (front, center).
A week before the wedding I started working on the marzipan fruits. A day into painting them with edible colors I realized that I needed help. JJ came over to my friend Weldon's house and together the three of us painted the fruit, which I affixed to the cake with toothpicks (there I go, violating my rules again).
Douglas and Lisa, 2001 (?) Cake Topper Only
Douglas is a friend of mine from college who originally wanted me to make his cake - unfortunately I was too busy with work to do a good job so instead I opted to make his cake topper - a gum paste koala and a tree. This was definitely not edible - I used wires to connect the leaves into a free-flowing canopy. I dusted the koala in gold dust - I'm still not quite sure why. The cake and fruits were done by someone else.
It took me a week to put the cake topper together because of the time I needed to wait for each piece to dry. This was especially important for the tree - if the leaves weren't completely dry, the wire loop fell out. I transported it very carefully from my mom's house outside of Boston to the wedding in New York. I kept having visions of it crashing to the ground and shattering it pieces. Obviously that didn't happen.
And then there was a long lull. I went to grad school. I avoided pastry. Cake fashion changed. Suddenly the 'cake decorator' job description was a viable career. I was, meanwhile, working a corporate job and finally able to afford to buy decent pastry. I thought I'd never make a cake again.
And then two of my grad school friends got married and I came out of retirement (along with my long-suffering mother, who tolerated -just barely - my kitchen rants during our previous cake partnerships.
Elikem, 2003
I remember so little about this cake, completed during my last month in grad school. I made it in honor of Elikem's 30th Birthday to Elikem's spefications ("pink and white cake!"). I remember making it in my tiny apartment kitchen and storing the cake layers in the freezer, taking up all the space, while it was in process. I really don't know how I managed to make the cake look good considering I had very little equipment and absolutely no room to work. I didn't use any gum paste or fondant on this cake - it was all marzipan, butter cream, and extravagant mousse and curd layers.
I ended up hosting a sit-down buffet for more than 30 dinner in my apartment. The cake sat in the center of the room the entire time, another guest of honor.
Leti and Mandy, 2006
This cake was simple. White butercream. Edible flowers (I think I spent about $150 in edible flowers alone). Tall. The only complexities were the cake and the filling. That and the fact that when I arrived chez mom to do the work, she didn't have a working Kitchen. Nope, it was under construction, although the electrician kindly connected a few of the outlets and the double oven so that I could mix and bake.
Each of the four layers was different. I wrote about this extensively here at the time of the wedding. I may not have mentioned that the cake started to list after it had been out in the heat for about 5 hours and I was worried that it might collapse before the cutting. For some reason that I cannot entirely recall, I ended up slicing the cake back in the kitchen with the catering manager and hustling it out to the table once I had sliced up enough pieces. Staff kept coming back and talking to me and the catering manager without doing much of anything. I learned a lot about their weekend plans while I sliced cake in my nearly strapless silk dress.
I'd like to make more cakes. Just nothing dog- or baby- shaped.
