Even For Me

I always swore I'd never work with fondant. It's nothing more than glue made out of sugar, and in spite of the fact that it can be worked into a marble-smooth finish I'd always been turned off by the taste. So when a friend asked me to make the cake for her upcoming wedding, I said I'd be happy to but that I refuse to use fondant.

I also said I had no experience with wedding cake. Cake, yes, but mostly of the birthday, single-tier variety. Not wedding cake. No multiple tiers, no sugared flowers cascading down the side of a Corinthian-pillared masterpiece. The plan, then, was to make a small cake for cutting, making two tiers, and then a big sheet cake for serving. Easy.

But then I got to thinking about how to decorate it, and after relative success with the architectural bits of Nick and Jaime's cake(which involved things like cardboard layers under each cake, dowels under each layer to support the layer above it, and a large wooden dowel down the middle to keep the whole thing stable) decided I could possibly take on more than I initially thought.

The funny thing is, I've always hated cake. Mostly, I still do. But lately I've been obsessed with bastardizing the recipe for pineapple upside-down cake, one of the few cakes I will actually make and lust after. However, the sticky brown-sugar-and-butter goo that makes pineapple upside-down cake so luscious is not at all suited to wedding cake construction. So I omitted the fruit and the brown-sugar-and-butter-goo and found myself with a nice, not-too-sweet buttermilk cake.

It was nice.

But then I added coconut oil in place of half the butter, and it got even nicer. Generally, you can get two kinds of coconut oil; the kind that neither smells nor tastes of coconut, and the kind that does. For cake, I like the kind that does. It flavors the cake but not in an overpowering kind of way, and has the added benefit of making the cake a little more dense at room temperature. Which is a good quality for a cake to have if you plan on building a small town out of it.

With a good cake recipe in hand, I moved onto the frosting. The final result has yet to be determined, but for this trial run I used Deb's Swiss Buttercream. The instant I tasted it, I had flashbacks of my cousin's wedding. I was only 11, but I swear the frosting on that cake was a Swiss Buttercream. I remember thinking it was the best frosting I'd ever had, and try as I might I had never found its equal. Until now. It is heavenly. Light and buttery, not too sweet, not too airy, just a hint of saltiness and a ribbon of vanilla woven into its silkiness; plus, it's shiny like satin. It is officially my new favorite frosting, a beautiful compliment to a cake that's made without a lot of sugar.

With good cake and good frosting, all I had left was decoration. The bride will most likely be carrying calla lilies, and after seeing a whole bunch of really pretty pictures of fondant calla lilies I decided they can't be that hard to make.

They aren't.

Turns out, they're ridiculously easy.

In fact, I could probably do it in my sleep.

So I went ahead and made a whole bunch of them, thenpainted the stamens gold, which is a little out of control even for me. But hey, it's wedding cake.

Or in this case, Friday morning cake.

Now I have to go tend to all the things I neglected during all that cake business, like feeding my children and rescuing the living room from the layers of child resdue which have taken it over. But when I come back, I'll have an actual cake recipe and a fondant tutorial.