Let me tell you a story about how I got started making wedding cakes.  I was still little Camille working for the Legal Aid Foundation (remember, the job I HATED and many of you had to hear me complain about endlessly?) and making community dinners on Wednesday nights.  Somehow all of the compliments about my food got into my head that I was capable of making a wedding cake: the most important culinary aspect of the biggest day of a womans life.  What was I thinking?!?!  Anyway, my friend Doris was getting married on a small budget and lots of people agreed to chip in to make it work, so I agreed.  She came over, we made sketches…lots of sketches with various shapes, sizes, and stacking options.  The sky was the limit for this debut cake.  We finally settled on one with several round  stacks and sizes with chocolate ribbons around the bottom of each cake and white orchids.  Never did it cross my mind that I was agreeing to make a wedding cake for over 200 people with no prior experience AND it would be as architecturally intricate at the Eiffel Tower.  Never even did it cross my mind that I wouldn’t  make it from scratch!  Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me.

I began making the chocolate cakes and freezing them about 2 weeks before the wedding.  When all was said and done I had made 14 cakes, some small and some large.  Two days out I began thawing the cakes and making frosting, three types to be exact.  I made buttercream to go underneath, a couple kinds of fillings and white chocolate ganache to pour over each cake and give it what I hoped would be a glossy sheen.  The morning of, I began the assembly, which meant cutting and stacking, filling, beating, and frosting.  I was living in a house with a really big kitchen, and when I say frosting was everywhere, it was EVERYWHERE.  It was on the ceiling, in the fan, caked in the stove and on the counters, on the floor and sticking to our shoes to track through the house.  The process was going alot more slowly than I had planned, and an hour before the ceremony was set to begin, the cake was not assembled and I still had no idea how to make these allusive chocolate ribbons.  Thank  God for my roommate, Magda.  She is an artist, actually an art teacher, so she was well-equipped to deal with my immature whining and freaking out that I was going to miss the wedding AND the cake STILL wouldn’t be finished in time.  She rolled out the ribbons, sliced them perfectly, rolled them up, helped pack the car while I got dolled up and I was on my way.

After the ceremony, we scampered to assemble the cake at the reception hall.  As I had never assembled a cake before, I didnt realize that wedding cakes usually have support systems throughout so that they dont have to rely on each other to stay in place.   I am a risk-taker, as you can now see, so I said: “lets just pile them on top of each other!”  Why not?!?! Somehow, by the grace of God, we got the cake to stay in place, wrapped the chocolate ribbon around it, added the orchids (that I later found out are toxic…oops) and voila!!

Doris and Tomis were very excited to see our massive creation.  I am waiting for some pics from her, but let me tell you, this cake would have easily fed 400 hungry people.  To make matters worse, there were other desserts that people had eaten already, and about half the crowd had left by the time they did the cake cutting.  I would say about 1/10 of the cake was eaten that night, no joke.  I really hope that it didn’t go to waste…they were happy, and I learned some valuable lessons, so I guess thats all that really counts.  The real silver lining was that when I got home at the end of the night, the kitchen was spotless!  Wow, I mean wow!  What wonderful, caring girl would clean frosting off the ceiling for a cake made for someone she never met? Becky, sweet Becky.  Thank you again.  THE END