Wedding Gazette

My Sister's Wedding Cake

By Faye Hess

I promised my baby sister Hannah that I would make the cake for her wedding. In the moment, it's such a nice thing to say. It's easy enough to have a picture of yourself standing next to a blurry vision of the thing when it's done with a smile on your face, accepting compliments from relatives and kisses from the bride and groom.

I dreamed of perfect slices of sponge filled with fruits and cream, surrounded by a general aura of calm and loveliness. And when she first started talking about getting married, I had shown my sister a picture of a cake that she loved. Unfortunately, the memory I had of the cake looked nothing like the original photo when I found it. It is the kind of thing that happens with hairdos, hairdos that you love at the time, but when you look back at yourself a few years later, you wonder about yourself. The cake in the picture was an unfrosted 1970's-has-been, on a Lazy Susan with lady apples, and I had two weeks now to come up with something else. I began to panic.

The first wedding cake I ever made was for my oldest sister. Her guest list went from 50 to 135, and I refused to accommodate by adjusting my cake plan. I just kept going up, layer after layer, so that when the moment arrived, and my mother and I carried the cake, stabilized by mother's shoulder, from the Veteran's Hall kitchen, it had the effect of an ancient leaning tower. I had also refused to compromise my whipped cream with stabilizers, and the cream was slowly sliding off the cake, taking the flowers with it like tiny houses in the path of a volcano. Even though since then I have been hired as a professional to make wedding cakes, in the family circle, my association with this cake has stuck like cement, and when they got wind that I was lined up to make the cake for the sister in waiting, the nicest thing anybody had to say was, "it won't taste bad".

The week before the wedding I got really good at talking about the cake in vague details, and studied every fruit and flower I passed like a crystal ball, hoping that some strawberry or lily somewhere would scream out to me, "I am your idea." I thought about caramelizing lichi nuts, and weaving daisy chains, and none of it made me happy. Then, somehow, I got a vision. I was in the back of my mother's car, driving back from a fish fry. I had broken it down to Baby Cake Basics. "Is your dad a football fan? Make him a winner by baking him a football!"

My sister is a photographer, and her fiance makes wine. I forced myself into a free association exercise, and came up with grapes and photos. I imagined a three tiered cake, and I made an executive decision to use a classic buttercream, which holds up much better than whipped cream, and can be made in advance. For a soft, creamy yellow effect, I used egg yolks. At the market, I bought absolutely fresh champagne grapes, figs, garden flowers, raspberries and grape leaves.

For the cake itself, I made gingerbread, and filled it with fresh raspberry compote, and because I got nervous that my sister's guests were going to serve themselves enormous pieces, I made an additional eighteen inch layer to serve as a base. I decorated it in the cool as a cucumber basement, and as embarrassed as I have always been that my mother saves things like sugar from McDonald's, and keeps them forever in her purse, I was thankful for the multiple leftover chopsticks she had from Chinese takeout, when I couldn't find my dowels to support the layers.

To serve with the cake, I sliced fresh peaches, and made whipped cream, which holds beautifully in a chilled bowl. Using covered wire, I made a bouquet of the garden flowers for the top layer, and arranged a few of the fresh figs around the petals. I wound wire around perfect little bunches of champagne grapes, to fasten them to the individual tiers with a draped effect. At the top of each bunch I wired in a grape leaf and tiny flower buds. I then took pictures of my sister and her fiance from far enough away so that their heads would be the perfect size for tiny oval cut outs. I did a few individual shots, and a couple of them together. When the cake was completely decorated, I adhered the pictures directly to the buttercream, and piped a border around the edge of each one.

I have reclaimed my place as cake baker in the family.