What Statement Should Your Wedding Cake Make?

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Wedding cakes today can be anything: stacks of meringue, fantasies of fondant, fruit pies, layered “naked cakes,” savory creations of rice flour, et cetera, et cetera. Delicious, by Will Cotton, 2008.Copyright: Will Cotton. Delicious, 2008. Polystyrene, acrylic polymer, pigment, gypsum, 30ˮ x 20ˮ x 20ˮ. Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

A little while ago, I received an email from a dear old friend with a delicate question. Hello! How are you? What should we serve for dessert at our wedding?? For some food writers, answering would be a breeze: An eight-layer chiffon sponge with citron curd, crème Chantilly, and Valrhona ganache by Frou Frou et Frou Frou or something like that. But I don’t like desserts, and I’m a bad novice baker. At my own wedding, these flaws were embraced. My mother baked a canola oil–based blueberry cake (we were on an island off the coast of Maine) that tasted more like a breakfast bread. The afternoon was misty. Foghorns called to each other in the distance. Guests ate clams and lobsters and corn and blueberry cake—and some pie, I think—as day turned to night. I fondly recall serving my mother’s cake to the Lions Club members who cooked our lobsters, and watching them wash it down with rum.

I do know that a wedding dessert is not just a dessert. It is a statement! A prominent Beverly Hills wedding planner I call for advice, Mindy Weiss, is adamant that it “represents a couple’s love story.” The cutting of the cake is the bookend to the promise "I do." (Sometimes, when my husband and I fight, I wonder if we should have cut a cake.) It is also political! Even as I write this, the Supreme Court is pondering what it means to help make that statement, via Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—a.k.a. the “cake artist” case.

I consider recommending breakfast bread and rum, but my betrothed friend likes dessert and is a bit old-fashioned. To be traditional, he would break a cake of barley over his wife’s head, as ancient Romans did for good fortune. Or serve fruitcake, ambrosia of the royals. Even Kate and William’s eight-layer confection was, beneath the fondant, fruitcake—that mortar-like substance dating from at least the mid-Renaissance. (Harry and Meghan are rumored to be planning a lemon elderflower cake, but a lemon is also a fruit.) Or be French and serve croquembouches, or Italian and serve crostate and confetti.

For further ideas I turn to those great witnesses of fashionable contemporary culture, Twitter and Instagram, and discover that some wedding cakes today are stacks of meringues (Vera Wang Pour Ladurée). Others are stacks of Oreos (actress Katie Lowes). A food publicist directs me to “naked cakes,” like Christina Tosi and Will Guidara’s seven-tiered one—these are outré and unfrosted and, according to famous planner Marcy Blum, served by “rebels.” Speaking of rebellion, some mavericks choose dessert tables full of cupcakes and dump cakes and pies—as did Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent—or hire soft-serve ice cream trucks, as did Boston-area chef Will Gilson.

I could be pedantic and point out that in British English, dessert means “a serving of fresh fruit after the main course of a meal.” I love fruit. Why not gorgeous bowls of transparent greengage plums? Or what about one of those recent “cheese cakes” that are just stacks of cheese, starting with sturdy Cheddar and ending with a heart-shaped Brie de Meux, with their implicit claim that nothing says “I love you forever” like stinky cheese?

My friend does like cheese. But when I interrogate him further about his confectionary preferences, I receive only the following: I like layers. Why so terse? Then I remember that he, like my husband, is from Vermont. I consider the character of the New Englander. Their signature quality is not asking for help. If my friend actually wanted me to make this layer cake, it would go against his fiber to request it. After considering several cryptic replies, I settle on: I’m working on it.

But I’m still not sure where to start. So I appeal to Maggie Austin, a Washington, D.C., ballerina turned cake designer (she prefers designer to the tendentious artist) who has made sugar chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, sugar topiaries for the Obama White House, and bespoke sugar-flower edifices for anyone able to meet her (minimum) $10,000 fee. Online her creations are featured with headlines like “9 Stunning Cakes That Belong in a Museum.” One made me cry.

Austin arrives at my house on a cool morning, hair in a neat bun. Black-clad and petite, she walks with the ramrod-straight posture of a dancer. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that all her tools fit into one rolling suitcase and a hatbox—from which she produces a beige top hat. It is not a hat, I learn, but a piece of Styrofoam covered in sugar fondant.

“But can’t we decorate a real cake?” I ask. Anyone can bake a cake, Austin explains. Today we will be making the fragile edible art that turns common pastry into visual poetry. Or a match for the centerpieces. Or a status symbol. A statement!

Such edible art is made, I learn, of gum paste. It is a combination of confectioners’ sugar, egg whites, and a gum additive called Tylose. I wonder if we might take a shortcut by using Elmer’s glue. But Elmer’s doesn’t dry the right way and is inedible, if nontoxic. Plus, this is no time for debate. We must make leaves! We roll and squoosh green gum paste with what look like cuticle sticks for giants (they’re called CelPins). We press it into silicone molds shaped and textured like the two sides of a live leaf. And voilà!: lovely leaves, looking ready to flutter in the wind! These quickly dry in whatever position they find themselves, fixed forever in graceful organic motion—a pretty, if entirely too optimistic, symbol for wedding another person.

My eyes fall upon the clock. An hour has yielded two leaves. “How many leaves per cake?” I ask nonchalantly. “A lot,” answers Austin with the calm steeliness of a ballerina.

I write down squoosh and roll, uncertain whether these are terms of art or personal illustrative words. An hour later, we have produced two hydrangeas. “And how many of these?” I inquire in a convincingly casual tone. “A hundred, maybe.” I begin squooshing and rolling with urgency. A hand flutters onto my CelPin. “You have ridges on your hydrangea.” It’s true. I do. “People’s personalities,” Austin explains, “tend to come out in their flower work.”

Both fondant and gum paste have a reputation for being tasteless. I don’t know if it’s my flagging stamina or my palate, but I find both oddly delicious. They taste like the outer candy shell of a gumball-machine gumball—fleeting but nostalgic. It is time to begin construction of our statement flower: a perfect replica of a rose by British breeder David Austin. There are dozens of layers of nearly transparent peach petals to make. “You want to do this all in one sitting,” Austin tells me. I take the wrong meaning from this and sit down. A half hour later she says, “Let’s get out the vodka.” This is exciting because I need perking up, but it’s not for me at all. We mix it into rose-gold edible paint, with which we edge our rose petals, hydrangeas, and leaves.

Austin effortlessly arranges our few but lovely flowers, along with dozens she brought with her, by sticking them by floral wire on the fondant-covered “cake.” She steps back.

My breath catches. It all makes sense. Sprays of periwinkle hydrangeas burst in feckless disarray from clutches of kiwi-green leaves, a leafy halo for the diaphanous peach rose. The flowers appear brushed by the gentlest breeze, the sweetness of a fleeting moment captured for eternity. (Gum paste holds its shape and remains edible forever.) I feel hopeful, innocent, confident in the promise of the future. Austin departs on her tiptoes, probably ferried in a chariot pulled by centaurs.

Have I internalized it all? Will I be able to reproduce our meticulous work on my own? No! Not in the slightest! Still, I can’t tarry. There’s the vital matter of the part of a layer cake one actually eats.

I decide to whip up a few options. But after putting on an apron, dusting off my mixer, and flouring cake tins, I am hindered by the discovery that I’ve collected pastry books more for their poetic flavor than their practicality. I’ve chosen three cakes from Malinda Russell’s 1866 A Domestic Cookbook—the first cookbook known to be written by a black woman, brimming with beautiful-sounding confections. I’d settled on A Queen’s Party Cake (1 qt sour cream, 6 lbs sugar, 6 lbs butter, 5 lbs raisins . . . whites of 18 eggs, yolks of 10 eggs, 1 tsp soda, 2 tsps cream of tartar, flour); A Wedding Cake (3 lbs each of flour, butter, and sugar, a lot of brandy, rosewater, 30 eggs); and A Bride’s Cake (24 egg whites beaten to a stiff froth” and very little flour, flavored “with peach or lemon”). But these enticing recipes lack elementary information. Mix what with what? When? Cook how? For how long?

This leads me to the award-winning pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz of New York’s Flora Bar and Café Altro Paradiso, who has recently created a stir with her cakes. She tells me that her resolution last year was to learn more about layer cakes. “I’d been a little traumatized by bad cake experiences,” she says. “But the last thing you taste at a meal is what you remember, so I had to start making them.”

I meet Pickowicz, who wears black Blundstone boots and a dishwasher’s shirt, on a warm, drizzly morning in the kitchen of SoHo’s Café Altro Paradiso. She begins with some philosophy. “It has to taste delicious,” she says, pulling two industrial baking sheets filled with buttercup-yellow genoise sponge from a refrigerator. “That’s the only thing that matters to me.” What about gum paste? CelPins? She laughs. “I don’t even use cake pans except to cut circles out of these big sheets.” Pickowicz is radically au courant in other ways. “My cakes are almost all gluten-free. I want as many people as can possibly eat them to eat them.” Sometimes they’re made of millet; today’s is rice flour.

She gives me a simple recipe for making the sponge and shows me how to use a 9-inch cake round as an extra-large cookie cutter. I taste a leftover corner. It’s only barely sweet. “Sugar is not a flavor,” she says. “It tends, actually, to obliterate flavor.” She has no such prejudice against booze, and we drench each layer in lightly sweetened Prosecco until it emits a burble of wine when pressed upon. “Never skip the soak,” she warns. “It makes the transition to the filling more subtle.” Then come sour passion-fruit puree, passion-fruit seeds, celeriac mousse, and celeriac crumble. The mousse is airy and tangy, and I would love it as much with pink lamb chops as inside a cake. The crumble is lightly crisp and muted—understated savory cotton candy. Our work is quick and casual. “If things don’t line up perfectly, it doesn’t really matter.” The cake is chilled, then frosted with a heavy whipped cloud of barely sweet Swiss buttercream. Onto this go a few live (inedible) cherry blossoms, pilfered from dining-room arrangements, and three small branches on a wabi-sabi slant. I delight in Maggie Austin’s artistry, which is of a different caliber, more sculpture than baking, but there is something to be said for how little time—under ten seconds, by my watch—it takes to decorate this one.

On my two-hour train ride home to Hudson, Pickowicz’s cake gets quite warm; when I open its white plastic container, I see it has acquired a Tower of Pisa tilt. But I rechill it and serve it after a dinner party, and its layers are still beautifully defined. The flavors are subtle, barely sweet, sour, tingly, a luscious array of contrasts that blend beautifully in each bite.

I’ve missed the window for advising my friend. He gave up on me ages ago, anyway, and has planned to order right off the dessert menu at Olm­sted, the Brooklyn restaurant where his (tiny) wedding is taking place. I should really reply to his note about layers, though, before sipping champagne with his grandmother at the ceremony next week. Omnia vincit amor! (“Love conquers all!”), I type to him, thinking that, in truth, a wedding dessert is something everyone should choose for himself.