Wedding Cakes Extravaganza

When thinking about a wedding, the first thing that comes to mind is the wedding dress. White, flowery, lacy, satiny, traditional, outrageous, it’s all about the dress for the bride. But in fact, the other big star of the wedding is the wedding cake. History has it that the tradition started back in medieval times when the guests were supposed to bring each a small cake that would be stacked on the table on layers. If the bride and the groom managed to kiss each other over the pile of cakes, it was said to bring good luck. If they fell on top of it, errrr, it made for a good show. Other traditions that developed, faded away or survived the years include the bride serving the cake to the groom’s family as a symbol of passing her household labor from her family to her new family, the newlyweds stuffing each other’s face with the first bite of cake, or keeping the top tier of the cake to be eaten at the first year anniversary or the christening of the first child. The current tradition requires, as we all girls know, that the bride and groom perform together the first cut of the cake.

Making the perfect wedding cake is an exhausting and thorough task, but there are a few masters out there who have turned this job into an art and their cakes are precious, unique jewels that deserve to be frozen in time, not in the fridge.

Probably the most renowned cake artist is Colette Peters whose name was on all my interviewees’ lips and who’s been commissioned for many creative projects since she started in this field, such as decorating the White House for the winter holidays. Colette came to New York to get her MA in painting at Pratt Institute dreaming to become an artist and ended up working for Tiffany’s as a china and jewelry designer for eight years. Little did she know what was in store for her. Having made cakes for her colleagues throughout her stint at the upscale store, she was asked to contribute to The Tiffany Wedding book by design director John Loring, which led to a contract of her own. She quit her work then, because as she puts it, "I didn’t have time to work full time and write a book." Besides, she had stopped painting too because of her busy schedule and a venture in baking gave her the chance to express herself more creatively than ever. She help the popularizing of the fondant icing in America and made name for herself in the industry by designing flamboyant topsy-turvy crooked cakes and witty trompe l’oeil creations.

I went to pay Colette a visit in her West Village kitchen, as they call it, which looks more like an artist studio, if it were not for the humming of the assistants doing various tasks ranging from painting the sugar flowers to making sure that their ingredients supply arrives in full. The place is bright, colorful and almost as whimsical as the model cakes used for photo sessions and stacks of drawings that surround us. Colette is a jovial woman, but she strikes me as shy and modest despite her many achievements. She explains to me, since I never had to organize a wedding before, how the process of choosing a cake works. As I suspected, the bride comes with or without the groom, with or without her mother in tow and looks at the cake maker’s book (the portfolio of former designs) and decides which direction she wants to go. The designer guides herself by the bride’s personality, tastes and even wedding decorations. One of the cakes she points to me is a virginal white in about 5 tiers that is loosely hugged by a crawling plum flower in two shades: purple and lilac. "The bride designed the invitation herself and I made the cake to match the invitation because it was so pretty," Colette says. Being a purple person, I immediately fall for it. There’s little you can’t fall for actually, as all the cakes around me look like they have been scooped from a fairy tale. A huge cake in the far corner that looks like slabs of meat layered with bones and other slabs of meat makes me smile. I definitely wouldn’t choose that for a weeding. Maybe if I wanted to play a prank on a foodie friend I’d get that for the bachelorette party.

I press further for details about celebrities that commissioned cakes with her, but I don’t get anywhere. However, she tells me that the most difficult cake she had to make was an asymmetrical one that had a teapot on top pouring icing. I look at the picture and it looks like her cake defeated the laws of physics for just one time. But she reveals that the groom is British and he chose the design, so the teapot on top makes more sense now. (No offense, my British friends, but you very well know that even your student habits were dominated by the four o’clock, five o’clock or midnight o’clock tea. Alice and Natascha, please email me!). The pair, dressed in Swinging Twenties clothes, look very happy cutting the cake in the picture Colette shows me.

While I am chomping on a piece of delicious Bourbon-infused chocolate cake, the baking maven shows me some drawings of the cakes she made. "I am thinking of offering the drawing of the cake when they pick up the order sometime in the future," she muses. Her sketches are so good, that I feel bad she channeled most of her creative energy in an artwork that will be completely eaten, but she doesn’t seem saddened by this fact. "They may look good, but they are cakes after all," I get. So, talking about the cake itself and not the design, I find out to my delight that at least 75% order some sort of chocolate in their cake, but then I am surprised by the fact that most people are very traditional when it comes to choosing a flavor sticking mostly to chocolate, vanilla or lemon.

As I leave, Colette tells me she’ll go on a five-day vacation. Of course I imagine she is going to go to some exotic location to get some more inspiration, but she blows my bubble immediately when she announces that she’s going to attend a course in New Jersey. This woman is unstoppable and I finally understand that you have to be willing to perfect yourself continually to be the best.

My next victim is also a very popular cake master due to her architecturally impressive cakes that look like sumptuous European palaces. Like she readily admits it, Margaret Braun is "not into flowery stuff, I like architectural models." You can easily see that in her book, "Cakewalk" a very "personal, authentic book for which she had a lot of freedom from her editor" where she presents some of her best cakes with recipes, tips and directions and stories to illustrate the history of a particular model. I can tell from her intonation that she is very proud of her book and very much liked working on it and although she doesn’t claim to be an art historian, she likes to back up her imagination with historical facts. For example, she invented the Afternoon with Frederick after a visit to Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam, Germany and she made a Gaudi cake inspired by her trip to Barcelona and commissioned by Food & Wine magazine.

Amazing as it may sound, Margaret doesn’t have any formal training. She started working in a bakery to support herself through art school and she realized she was good at that and that sugar was a medium she liked working with. However, she claims chirpily that, "if I wasn’t doing it in sugar, I would have done it in something else." Thank God she discovered her talent early and now makes gorgeous cakes for newlyweds. About her clients Margaret says they are "very smart, with really good taste," and cakes always turn out the way they envisioned. She also made a cake that matched the wedding invitation that had an Indian pattern which she found particularly endearing, but in general she only tries to get a feel of the bride’s personality and taste from the decorations, location and invitation. When I ask what’s the most difficult cake she has ever done, she has the answer very clearly formed in her head since it was quite a memorable feat. She was hired at some point to make 2,000, 3-tiered individual cakes in peacock colors like purple, teal, amber and indigo with a sugar crisp chalice on top and with almond, fig and chocolate flavors for a royal family wedding in the Middle East. She sounds exhilarated when she tells me that the 3-week turnover was the "greatest, most demanding and fulfilling work because it should not have been possible." Because the cakes were almost like little pieces of art and the volume was huge, she had to hire guilders and artists around the clock until the work was done.

This time I hit the nail on the head when I ask her about her own wedding cake, which apparently she made herself. If you care to know, it had lots of fruits and had a chalice on top like one of her designs in "Cakewalk" and she made sugar sculptures for each table instead of doing a flower arrangement. I can see that she’s been blessed with a talent and she was lucky to discover it on time and make it work.

For those of you who like more understated, elegant shapes, it would be a good idea to go to newcomer April Reed who started her business a bit more than a year ago. She’s young and has a solid education in this field as she went to the Culinary Institute of America where she says "you get as much baking education as a culinary one." However, April informs me that her firm is "a design company that happens to work in cakes" as she makes up to four drawings of a potential wedding cake. That’s quite a lot of sketches for one cake, but she wants to make sure she has captured her clients’ spirit correctly. Besides, being modest, she says that most of the people who commission her work in creative fields like design, fashion or advertising and they design the cake using her as an instrument.

Now it’s time to take out my heavy artillery and I ask her about the most unusual cake she had to make, which turns out to be a building on stilts for an architect’s wedding. The cake-building was a perfect 12-inch square on four poles on either corner, and April found the project challenging because she is not the ‘4-tier, cascade of flowers’ type of designers. I’ll say. As usual, my assumption that most people use chocolate as at least one type of filing is confirmed, but this designer/baker had some more quirky requests too. She once had to make a litchi cake for an Asian client and while it does not seem like a difficult task, it was, as the fruit has high water content and she wanted to make the fruit puree herself, which meant many hours of labor over the extraction of the flavor. As she cheerfully admits it "I have a backing background and I cannot let the cake not taste good." She is so serious about her business that I don’t want to press further about such trivial issues as diet and eating so much cake being bad for your figure. As long as I am safe – can’t gain weight from eating words – it’s all good.

There is so much to be said about choosing a wedding cake. Regardless of the price, you have to go to the artist who has a style closer to your own. Another wizard in the kitchen is Andrew Shotts, whose extensive experience spans across more than fifteen years and two continents. Our wonderful cover is starring one of his gorgeous cakes, which fits into the ‘very elegant, very classical yet modern, very bonbon’ category. If you want to know what very bonbon means, you’ll just have to taste one of his cakes and witness your senses getting restless. Most of his cakes feature a couple on the top layer or tier, whether it is a stylized, expressionist pair in shades of pink or a couple of entwining pink birds. His cakes are glamorous enough to make you feel you’re at the Ball of the Century, yet classic enough to convey you the feeling that that’s the cake you’ve always dreamed of when you thought about your wedding (although to be honest, you thought about the dress the most). You also get to secretly rejoice the fact that your wedding cake spoiled the diet of all your female friends and cousins.

Andrew Shotts has started his career in Italy right out of culinary school, where he worked for free for a year, but from where he got his passion for pure ingredients and chocolate. He returned to Europe only for short periods of time after he went back to the States, as he tried to bring the standard of excellence of the Old Continent chocolate to his very own creations at La Côte Basque and the Russian Tea Room in New York and at San Francisco-based Guittard Chocolate Company, where he helped formulate the E. Guittard line of high-end couverture chocolate. In 2001 he and his wife Tina Wright opened Garrison Confections which had headquarters in New York, but which they relocated in Providence, Rhode Island in July 2003. So you’ll have to go all the way to Rhode Island if you want him to make your cake, but you’ll know for sure it will be a show-stopper when it’s all said and done.

To finish up in style, I’d like to add a French touch to this article and bring you forth the Fauchon wedding cakes, or as they call it in the company’s native country "Le gateau de marriage." Their cakes just take your breath away whether they are traditionally white and tiered, fruity, enrobed in twirls of dark chocolate or seeping of caramel. The Executive Pastry Chef, Ludovic Augendre, will make sure that you get exactly what you wanted but more than you have ever imagined. You simply cannot be indifferent to their perfection. My favorite and apparently the traditional French wedding cake is Croquembouche which means "crunch in the mouth" that refers to the caramel that coats delicate puffs of pâte à choux filled with vanilla cream and that has this golden, vicious look. The top tier rests on a nougatine base made out of caramel and crushed almonds. I know this betrays my loyalty and adoration for chocolate, but Fauchon has something that fulfills any chocoholic’s dream too. Named after a ski resort in Switzerland, Megève resembles a mountain covered in chocolate swirls underneath which you can find disks of vanilla meringue layered with chocolate mousse. Mouth watering.

Now all I need is a wedding because I am ready for that cake.