Make Me a Cake

Courtney, Heidi, and I spent a fair portion of our time in Michigan working on our assigned task, the wedding cake. We had done some research in advance: exchanging photo ideas, recipes, and YouTube videos about assembling and decorating a tiered cake. Courtney also contacted the venue, a beautiful church that had been converted to a brewery and restaurant, and they generously arranged a work area and some space in the walk-in for us to use. 

So we were not unprepared on Friday afternoon when we arrived, as they were closing down the beer brewing operation for the weekend. Our plan was to fill and frost the layers so they would be ready for assembly the next day, and we started by chopping and macerating the strawberries and whipping some cream stabilized with cream cheese and meringue powder. We only had a couple of hours before the rehearsal dinner, but we accomplished our mission for the day and left the three layers on their cake boards, filled and frosted with a bottom coat. 

The next day was the wedding, and we got over there around noon, ready to assemble and add preliminary decorations. These tasks were a bit trickier, involving cutting cake dowels to size and using a skewer to punch through the cardboard rounds the second and third tiers were sitting on. The whipped cream was softer than we hoped, and considerably less stable than the buttercream they used in the videos, but we were making a strawberry shortcake, so we had to work with what we had. 

It was also challenging to thread the cake dowels through the skewer holes, so they weren't as tight in the cake as we wanted, and it was a little wobbly. Even so, our model had always been a less constructed, more organic look, which we definitely achieved. We had ordered some edible butterflies to go with the insect-theme of the wedding (a riff on how the couple had met, their shared love of performance art, and deconstructing classic princess iconography) and, as a tribute to their musical backgrounds, ribbons of edible musical notes to go around one or two of the layers. We had strawberries and fresh flowers, too, but the final decorations would have to wait until after the ceremony, and we dashed back to the rental house to change for the wedding. 

As the reception was warming up on the patio, we were shivering in the cooler in our summer dresses and sneakers, adding bugs, fruit, and flowers to our masterpiece, emerging a few minutes before everyone was summoned inside for dinner. The restaurant staff did the rest-- bringing the cake up a little while before the cutting so all the guests could admire it. 

And they did! Although one of the bride's more musical friends told us the notes we had so carefully placed were the song Happy Birthday. Honestly, it never occurred to us as non-musicians to even consider them beyond their decorative value, but he had been hoping for a more intentional Easter Egg experience. 

Our research told us that a cake that size should feed between 100 and 120 guests, but every crumb was gone within minutes of cutting it. A friend told Heidi and me that it was the first time she had ever finished a piece of wedding cake; it was that good, so light and delicious. 

As happy as we were at how it turned out, and as relieved as we were that we had accomplished our task, I couldn't help wishing I could make another wedding cake. We'd learned so much, and I had lots of ideas for ways that we could improve the process, and not just by finding more appropriate music!