Baba Baker Woman

No, I don't mean that title as a variation on "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep!" My darling granddaughter (the most wonderful baby the world has ever known) calls me Baba, in honor of my Ukrainian heritage. That is, when we're around her we all refer to me as Baba. Kaliana is WonderBaby's name, and her mommy (my daughter, Laura) and daddy are getting married in August. I get to do the wedding cake! No, no, I've never attempted to bake and decorate a large celebration cake before, but I'll try anything out of a book!

Laura was interested in a layer of chocolate cake on top of a layer of white cake, with sliced strawberries nestled in a vanilla mousse filling between the layers, and cream cheese frosting over it all. For Trial Cake #1 I used a marble cake mix. I thought I was so clever, separating the chocolate and vanilla batters with a layer of parchment paper, and baking them together in one pan! Well, there was too much chocolate batter, and not enough vanilla, and while baking the chocolate expanded, heaved, humped up, and infiltrated the vanilla layer. When Laura and I separated the layers we had significant hills and valleys in the surfaces of the cake. We made the mousse and the frosting, and the afternoon was growing late, so we filled the layers before the mousse had completely set; then applied the frosting. Actually, our Trial Cake #1 passed the taste test with flying colours, but the finished product looked like a Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree-sort of cake, and did not inspire me to run for my camera. (The mousse never did set!) It was all too obvious that we would not be able to follow this method to create a three-tier wedding cake!

Then came the research phase. (Isn't the on-line public library catalogue fabulous? I place a hold on my list of titles; then it's like unwrapping gifts when I take home my pile of books and open up their covers!) I picked up seven or so wedding cake books--some of them coffee-table-style books with amazing photos of impossible-looking cakes--and kept sneaking peeks at their pages while stopped at red lights, on the way home. I pored over those books, re-reading and comparing segments of one to segments of another.

I had no idea there was so much to learn about wedding cakes. Did you know that tiered cakes have dowels inserted right through the lower tiers, to support the weight of the upper ones? Each cake tier sits on its own circle of cardboard, and the cardboard circles rest upon these dowels. And to transport a cake, the cake-maker sharpens a dowel longer than the cake is high, and uses a hammer to ram it through all the tiers and all the cardboard circles (like a stake through the heart of a vampire). The protruding bit of dowel at the top of the cake provides a handy-dandy handle to grasp, while carrying the cake.

I also learned about the fondant/buttercream controversy. Rolled fondant is a sugar paste with the consistency of pie pastry, that is draped over each tier of the cake. It looks perfectly smooth, with beautifully curved edges, and it can be tinted, painted, embossed, dusted with edible metallic or pearly powder, and even air-brushed. There are specialized ingredients, tools and equipment (of course!) available for purchase, to do all of these marvellous things to the surfaces of rolled fondant cakes. Anything that can be sculpted out of any material, can be sculpted using cake and rolled fondant. One can even mold the desired shape out of rice krispie square mix, cover it with rolled fondant, and paint or decorate it as desired. However Dede Wilson (whom I have chosen to be my own personal wedding cake guru) says she has never met anyone who enjoyed the taste of rolled fondant. Her cakes are made primarily as Delicious Dessert, and only secondarily as Decorative Sculpture.

Trial Cake #2 was baked, cut into layers, filled and frosted at Glendalough (my lake cabin) and served to my family on Palm Sunday, following an afternoon of pysanka (Ukrainian Easter egg) decorating. I am proud and happy to say that Trial Cake #2 looked good enough to photograph! I frosted it using the basket weave technique, because I wanted to try it, and because two books suggested that although the technique is time-consuming, it is easier than creating a perfectly smooth buttercream finish. Laura and I garnished it with red grapes, because they somewhat resemble the raspberries we plan to use on The Wedding Cake.

I made two gi-normous bowls of meringue buttercream, using the recipe I found on the Joy of Cooking wedding cake web site. This recipe does not require the step of making a syrup and bringing it to the correct temperature, however it requires the cake-maker to stand over the stove for quite some time with a hand mixer. We found the buttercream to be extremely rich and buttery. It firms up very well when chilled, which protects the icing surface from smudging. I filled the layers with chocolate ganache, because the name and the recipe sound divine. It was simple to make, and more than passed the taste test! I used my own tried-and-true recipes for a firm chocolate cake (which turned out perfectly) and a firm chip-chocolate white cake, which was either underbaked or chilled too soon, or both, because it was disappointingly dense, gummy and unappetizing. The taste test? After a very substantial meal, we each put down our fork after eating most, but not all, of our slice of cake.

But just look how far I've come between Trial Cake #1 and Trial Cake #2! I'm on a Quest now, a Quest for an optimal (not the perfect) wedding cake! I do feel a little sheepish about what I spent at Michael's on cake circles, a decorator bag and tips, a tool to cut cakes into equal and level layers, magi-cake strips and a baking core. And I did order Dede Wilson's book, Wedding Cakes You Can Make. Oh, yes, and there's the matter of my new Kitchenaid stand mixer. But I bought the less expensive cake leveler, I only ordered one book, and I've only ever had a hand mixer before!

(What's that you ask? Magi-cake strips and baking core? Well, there's a difficulty with baking cakes larger than eight or ten inches in diameter. The sides bake too quickly, and the centre bakes too slowly. This can make the sides crusty, and can make the cake dome up in the centre. The magi-strips wrap around the outside of the pan, to reduce the temperature during baking. The core is a metal cup that sits in the centre of the cake, filled with batter, to attract heat to the centre of the pan during baking. And can you imagine this--a six-inch pan requires less than half the batter that a ten-inch pan does, and a fourteen-inch pan requires twice as much batter as a ten-inch pan!)

I'm excited about the prospect of creating Trial Cake #3 for Laura's birthday, in May. For this one I plan to try the plating technique (no kidding, there's such a thing as a 'plating technique' for serving cake!) of squirting a zig-zag of raspberry coulis on each plate, before placing a slice of cake on it. Easy-peasy (as my friend Jane would say), delicious, and the wedding colours are white and red. I also plan to make a meringue disk, and use it as one of the layers. (Laura isn't crazy about this idea, but I really, really want to try it, and the instructions aren't difficult.) The bride and groom have asked me to omit the chips of chocolate from the white cake, and this time I'll use the same recipe, and see if I can get it to turn out right. And with all my reading about fondant and buttercream, I had completely forgotten that the bride originally requested cream cheese frosting. I'll do a bit more research, and perhaps Dede has a cream cheese buttercream recipe that I can try.

The Quest continues.