More Than A
Pretty Cake
ii
F
veryone assumes wedding
cakes are great to look at
but not great to eat," says
Rose Levy Beranbaum, a
professional baker and cookbook
author. Beranbaum's latest book, The
Cake Bible, which devotes an entire
chapter to wedding cakes, goes far
towards dispelling that myth.
For 11 years, Beranbaum ran a
cooking school from the kitchen of
her Manhattan apartment. In addition,
she wrote articles for food magazines
and baked the cakes that were
photographed for their covers. She
also baked special-order cakes for
special occasions.
Two years ago, after deciding to
devote herself full-time to writing, her
first book, Romantic and Classic Cakes,
was published. The Cake Bible, her sec-
ond, was eagerly awaited by dessert
makers, and had an unprecedented
first printing of 100,000 copies.
Beranbaum has baked numerous
wedding cakes — both for "show" (to
be photographed in, for example,
Martha Stewart's 1c/dings book) and
for "real" (to be eaten at an actual
wedding, including the one she made
for her brother's wedding).
In her days as a professional
baker, she made over 100 special-
order wedding cakes, each of which
took at least two full days to bake ("not
to mention transportation to the
Photo by Craig Terkowitz.
wedding site") and cost about $1,000.
"The cheapest cake I ever made was
an $800 cake for 150 guests," she
recalls, "and it was decorated simply."
Occasionally, when someone would
balk at the price, she would simply tell
them "people spend a lot of money
on the wedding gown. Well, this is a
designer cake."
The most popular flavors for
wedding cakes are, first, yellow;
second, white; third, chocolate.
"People often ask for chocolate
wedding cake but only one in 100 is
willing to have chocolate icing,"
Beranbaum says. "People want white
or, at least, golden icing."
Besides these three flavors, there
Rose Beranbaum
is an occasional request for carrot
wedding cake. The so-called "groom's
cake," usually a fruitcake flavor, "must
be a Southern tradition. People never
ask for it in the New York-New Jersey
area," she says.
For those willing to go beyond the
standard flavors, Beranbaum suggests
a cheesecake wedding cake. "I did it
for the Martha Stewart book, and I
made it for my niece's wedding. But
I took a risk," she says. "And the risk
was, can you transport it to the
wedding site? Can you keep it from
collapsing because it has a custard
base?"
Any flavor cake will go with any
wedding meal. "It's not like a dinner
party, where if you serve a spicy meal,
you want a strong-flavored cake,"
Beranbaum says. Besides, she adds,
wedding menus are usually designed
to suit almost all tastes, so you can use
basically anything."
For kosher weddings — "and I
had one myself," Beranbaum
comments — she would select a dairy
meal, for two reasons. First, the trend
in wedding menus is less meat, more
fish and/or dairy anyway. Second, with
a dairy meal, you could use any of the
wedding cake recipes in her book.
But whatever your menu, kosher
cooks will know how to make the cake
recipes pareve. However, Beranbaum
has a proviso. "For the pareve option,
you have to make cakes that don't use
butter. I don't like substituting
margarine for butter because then you
lose the taste of the cake. For
example, in the chocolate genoise
cake, you could substitute walnut or
almond oil for clarified butter — the
instructions are in the book."
The exterior of the cake is as
important as the interior. There are
various decorative possibilities, from
flowers to bride and groom figures.
While nowadays she finds that couples
want to "personalize" their wedding
cakes, the trend — which she initiated
— is to simpler cakes.
"Wedding cakes have gotten less
elaborate," she says. "The Dotted
Swiss Dream wedding cake I did for
Bon Appetit seemed to start a trend
away from the baroque decorations
like columns and wedding bells: (The
recipe for this cake is in her book.)
Then, there are flowers, made of
gum paste or real. Either way, flowers
are a problem. "If they're gum paste
— which is supposedly edible, but
isn't really — people save the flowers
as mementoes, so you have to take
them off before slicing. If they're real,
you have to denude the cake of flowers
before eating," she says.
As for miniature bride and groom
figures on top, Beranbaum has little
to say. "You still see them sometimes,"
THE JEWISH NEWS 11