At 6 o'clock on the morning of the second-last day of my bachelorhood, I am on my knees in my underwear on the kitchen floor with my head deep inside the oven, gawping at the yellow bubble on a carpenter's level. The bubble is listing far to the left of even passable flatness, and my sanity hangs in the balance.
The oven's middle rack is slanting. A slanting rack means slanting cakes. I'm baking a lot of cakes today, two each of 11, nine and seven inches, plus a single five-incher for the top. If each cake is not perfectly flat, the Master Cake, as I've come to call it -- a four-tiered, 20-kilogram, half-metre-high construction of fresh ginger, molasses, sugar and cream cheese icing -- will teeter, then topple, and I will look like an ass on the biggest day of my life.
I am baking my own wedding cake. It is probably the dumbest thing I've ever tried to do.
The job will require nearly 12 litres of batter. The icing alone will weigh more than four kg, and between a month's worth of dry runs and this final, day-and-a-half long scramble, what started out as a great idea will have taken about five full days of high-pressure work.
Weddings come packaged these days. Unless you're a) very rich and b) very lucky, you're bound to get pretty much the same venue and food and music (hello! Chicken Dance!) and pictures and cake as every other schlub who's ever married before you.
Carol and I bought partway into the pre-fab wedding industry, renting a 150-year-old hall and a caterer who will make us wild Pacific salmon with a tarragon beurre blanc. As a balance, we decided to DJ our own dance music -- we're more Toots and the Maytals than Macarena -- and hired a photojournalist, rather than a wedding photographer, to take the pictures.
Even then, we still wanted the day to be more us, less assembly-line. You can't get less assembly-line than baking your own wedding cake. Although many better bakeries now offer chocolate fudge or lemon or classic carrot, I'd never had one that I particularly liked. Plus, right about the time we were talking about cakes, we had just dropped $700 to book a custom ceremony. I was looking to save some money.
I decided to make the thing myself. Then I announced it to enough people that I couldn't take it back.
Wedding cakes used to surprise. One of the earliest recipes, British chef Robert May's 17th-century "Bride Pye," called for lamb, ox and rooster testicles, cocks' combs and a pint of oysters. The recipe was best made as several pies baked one inside the other, like Russian nesting dolls, with the innermost pie baked hollow.
"Put in live birds or a snake, which seem strange to the beholders, which cut up the Pie at the Table," May wrote. What better way to amuse one's guests?
Pies gave way to spice cakes. Spice cakes gave way to fruitcakes. Fruitcake often yielded to fake fruitcake. The seven-foot wedding cake of Queen Victoria's first daughter, Vicky, featured just one real cake layer. The other tiers were made of sugar.
And even now in Japan -- and no doubt here in North America -- wedding cakes are often made of moulded rubber. The rubber cakes contain a slot in their rear where the bride and groom can insert the knife for The Picture, whereupon the knife triggers a smoke machine, whose purpose, one supposes, is to mask the fact that the cake is not really cake at all. I learned all this in Simon R. Charsley's fascinating Wedding Cakes and Cultural History.
Happily, North Americans have mostly moved past fruitcake, yet I couldn't quite shake what a childhood of freezer-ready wedding cake slices had taught me.
Prosper Montagne probably said it best. You can just picture him, scowling as he wrote the entry for his famed Larousse Gastronomique. Wedding cake, Montagne wrote, is made of "English plum cake." It is "a symbol rather than a delicacy."
Which might be why people wrap it up and freeze it.
I decided to do something different. Our cake would not smoke; no birds would fly out of it. I wanted a cake that could perform the greatest trick of all: It wouldn't only look spectacular, but would taste it as well.
I'm what a lot of people would call a food snob. My favourite dish, after pan-seared Perigord foie gras, is Montrachet souffle drizzled with scallion-infused oil. And if something isn't made from scratch, I don't often see the point of eating it.
Carol, on the other hand, has a taste for novelty. Her favourite apple pie doesn't actually contain apples -- it is made almost entirely of Ritz crackers. And if there were a way to get deep-fried Snickers bars onto our wedding menu (and over my dead body), she already would have found it.
For years now, she has been raving about a peculiar Southern U.S. specialty called Red Velvet cake. Its key ingredient is red food dye -- four tablespoons worth. Call it Dixie's after-dinner answer to Lucky Charms: spectacular colour, what-were-they-thinking taste.
If we relegated the red velvet to the top tier, I could live with its relative blandness. For the bottom three tiers, I chose a dark, elegant, old-style ginger cake that I knew could make people rave.
Then I started baking testers. I didn't think it would be so hard.
You have to plan for a job like this. You have to go into it knowing that the baking itself isn't going to be the hard part. It's everything else you've got to worry about.
This much cake was not meant to stand so tall. It takes several metres of wood dowelling, cut down into even lengths and stuck vertically into each of the three bottom tiers to support the cake above it. You need foam board discs to keep each tier from sagging. You can choose to stake the cake -- to drive a sharpened dowel through the top to the bottom -- to keep the whole thing from sliding. Or you can take your chances with gravity. (I am firmly in the pro-staking camp.)
Making the whole thing look great is even harder, especially when it matters what it tastes like. I've chosen -- okay, copied from a magazine -- a design that I like to think of as simple, yet elegant.
Cream cheese icing is the perfect cooling complement to ginger cake's punch, but in recent weeks I've learned it can also be a disaster to work with. Picture a wedding cake with drooping icing, gobs of cream cheese gathered in a roll like neck fat at its base.
Now watch as an agitated baker places a calla lily atop the cake and the icing seems to open up and swallow the lily whole. You've just seen my best effort so far.
Until exactly 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, everything seemed to be going well.
As I trimmed tops off the cakes in preparation for icing, they looked perfect inside: chestnut brown and moist with the smell of ginger.
Then I found a dark, not-quite-baked mass in the middle of an 11-incher.
I trimmed the other one. It, too, wasn't quite cooked.
I did the only thing I could. I put them back in the oven. I'm fairly confident the second baking did the trick.
Suffice it to say the cake looks homemade. Not bake-sale-at-St.-Ignatius-By-The-Sea homemade, but just homemade enough so you know it didn't come from the shop. Which, I suppose, is the look I was going for.
One other thing: On Thursday, I clipped three calla lilies and placed the buds, delicately, atop the cake. They did not sink. The icing, though imperfect, did not budge. The lilies looked as though they'd been grown for this.
There are two particular wedding cake traditions that I find oddly appealing. In 1832, The Gentleman's Magazine suggested that the groom thread slivers of cake through his bride's ring nine times, then seal them in envelopes and deliver them to the bridesmaids. "If the fair idolatress deposit one of these amulets in the foot of her left stocking, when she goes to bed and place it under her pillow, she will dream of the person who is destined by fate to be her partner for life," the magazine advised.
The second tradition is more modern, and I like it precisely because it bears the same general provenance -- the Southern United States -- as Red Velvet Cake. The bride and groom, after cutting their cake, each pick up a slice and prepare to feed it to each other. Then they smear it all over each other's faces.
When Carol and I cut our cake today, I may hand out special slivers to a few of the singles, if only because I'm dying to know if anybody will actually put their cake in a sock.
As for the other tradition, barring an in-the-moment change of plans, I think I've made my decision.
This cake's going to be too good to waste.