Wedding Cake Story

Wedding Cake Story

Over three decades ago, when my husband and I were married, wedding cakes in our part of the world and in our social circle were pretty standard. Your mother, grandmother, or aunt baked you a three-tiered fruitcake and religiously basted it with rum or brandy. You had it decorated with royal icing. Either you bought a cutsie little plastic bride and groom or a couple of plastic white doves to put on top or you trusted the baker/decorator to wing it with something pretty.

Our wedding cake fit nicely into this description.

Mom baked the cake months before the wedding day and we found a baker who decorated cakes as a sideline for a very reasonable price. As long as the cake had pillars, was decorated with white royal icing and had some icing flowers on the top instead of the plastic bride and groom or the doves, I really didn't care too much about the particulars of the decoration design. (See: The List and prioritizing your list and budget.) When I picked the cake up a few days before the wedding, it was nice. It was simple. It was our wedding cake. I was happy.

Our wedding day arrived. August 2. 103 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. At least. The wedding was fabulous - my mother is an excellent Planner - and to date, our wedding reception is the best party my husband and I have ever attended.

Now, at about 1:30 in the morning as that very fine wedding reception was drawing to a close and we were gathering our things from the reception hall to take back home, the stresses and extreme heat of the day took its toll on my mother, and as she was carrying our cake in the direction of the car, she stumbled and the top tier of the cake went on a little side trip to the floor of the banquet hall.







Well, if you've ever tried to damage royal icing, you know it's pretty much bullet proof. As a matter of fact, when it was time for us to cut the cake at our reception, my husband and I had to pretend that we were cutting it for all the people taking pictures of this wedding event, because the darned icing barrier would not be breached! Nothing short of dynamite would have cracked that sucker open! However, the top, decorative part of the cake was constructed of delicate trails of royal icing peaking over a nest of icing blossoms, and that whole fragile section fell apart on impact with the terrazzo floor of the banquet hall. The top of our wedding cake - the memento of our wedding which I had planned to use as a centrepiece for every anniversary celebration and every future child's christening celebration - was an elaborate mess.

I am nothing if not tenacious and that wedding cake top was cleaned up and mended as best as it could be and lovingly put in the freezer. Our three children don't remember the centrepiece at their christening celebrations, but by golly, that wedding cake was there. It was a little worse for wear by the time our third child was officially introduced to church since the cake had not only survived toppling onto the floor of the Skyline Hotel's banquet hall, but had been frozen and thawed for each anniversary and each of our other offspring's christenings. It had been packed and shipped a few times as well, as we had moved four times by then. By the time our 25th anniversary came along, 2 more moves had occurred and the poor cake looked like something the dog had dragged in after chewing on it for 25 years.

Our 25th wedding celebration was a family affair at my mother's country home and she asked me to assemble a table of wedding memorabilia for our guests to peruse. I thought this was a wonderful idea since there were lots of people coming to this party who had been at our wedding and would enjoy the walk down memory lane, and we had added new friends and family to the mix in 25 years as well, and we wanted these people to enjoy looking through a part of our lives that they had missed.

I had our wedding guest book, our wedding photo album, my headpiece, some congratulatory cards and telegrams (remember telegrams?!), copies of speeches that were delivered on that wonderful day, and yes, the top of our wedding cake, glue-gunned together and spray painted white, was at the centre of the table, not looking much like it did on the day we said, "I do", but close counts!

Yes, there were comments on the state of the top of our wedding cake, but you know, most comments were about how wonderful that day 25 years ago had been for everybody who had attended. Remembrances and stories about our wedding kept popping up all day long. The guests at our 25th anniversary party still remembered with fondness how memorable my parents, the Planners, had made that day for all of us. Folks,THAT is what I wish you for your wedding day.

May your wedding day be everything you want it to be, and may you and your guests be blessed enough to remember it with fondness on every anniversary that follows it.







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