Our son Larry called to announce his engagement. A bachelor in his 40s, our eldest planned to marry Nancy, a charming Jewish woman with two lovely young daughters, and they would remain in Cleveland. We were thrilled.
The couple wanted a small wedding, six weeks hence, and already had decided on the location, rabbis, cantor — even the menu, including specially selected items for a dozen children. There was nothing more for me to do except kvell and buy a beige dress.
Or so I thought.
In typical fashion, Larry planned the most minute details. When he asked me to make the wedding cake, I felt sure he was just being kind because, years ago, I had baked his sisters’ wedding cakes. Knowing our firstborn’s penchant for perfection, having heard the couple’s precise plans and being somewhat out of practice in the wedding-cake department, I was intimidated.
But he really wanted me to bake his wedding cake!
So I scoured my recipes as well as magazines and cake photos. Larry looked them over, too.
“Wedding cakes are white with frosting,” he maintained. “None of those gooey fillings or cheesecake, chocolate stuff or phony flowers.”
Looking at my cake pans, which I had assembled upside down on top of each other to simulate the cake, he remarked, “That small? I always wanted a big wedding cake.”
Wedding-cake recipes are composed according to the number they serve. My inverted 10-, 8- and 6-inch layer pans translated into 50 servings, which was more than adequate. Still, according to my son, the proposed cake appeared puny.
I had already gathered my recipes for a white cake and for a white buttercream frosting — and I had a diagram for the decorations. To add another layer, thereby increasing the size of the cake, would require the higher math skills of my husband, Keeva.
Our visiting Israeli cousin, Herschel Marks, helped with the computations. After the numbers were worked and reworked, I nervously began to bake the layers.
After each layer cooled, I wrapped and refrigerated it. Fortunately, our neighbor’s spare refrigerator was available that week. Herschel became the official carrier of cake layers. After all the baking was done, I applied two layers of frosting to each cake layer, then assembled and trimmed them. Herschel taunted me that one layer was frosted three times. Maybe it was!
Somewhere along the way, the ad hoc wedding-cake kitchen committee decided that every couple needs something hokey at their wedding. Larry loves his sports car, so we snatched a small model from his bookcase, then hunted for bride-and-groom figurines that we could purchase and seat in the car. We soon discovered that no seated models of a bride and groom exist. Again, Herschel came to the rescue.
“Nothing else to do,” he said, as he reached for a handsaw and performed a “tushectomy” on the little plastic models. They now fit perfectly, Then the committee really got hokey and added miniature balloons.
The kitchen committee voted for tiny purple Dendrobian orchids to cascade down the sides of the cake. Five days and many laughs later, we delivered the cake in one piece, after warnings about another wedding cake that had been dropped en route.
The bride and groom loved it.
For Keeva and me, it was wonderful to be part of our son’s wedding. And the entire kitchen committee had great fun.
Best of all, there’s still some cake in the freezer.