Sunday, July 10, 2011

The tragedy of the wedding cake

For anyone who knows Laura and me, you know that we love to cook. It's one of our favourite things to do. Most of our wedding presents were things for the kitchen. Laura got me a really cool cookbook for my birthday. Well, before the wedding I was feeling enthusiastic and confident enough to try my hand at a very daring project: The wedding cake.

But I love to cook. I wasn't going to make an edible version of styrofoam. No, this cake had to be delicious. To that end we decided to use one of our favourite cake recipes: America's Test Kitchen's flourless-chocolate cake (a fatal mistake as you will soon see).

It is a delicious cake. Extremely rich. But I couldn't just leave it at that. Between the five layers of said cake would be rich chocolate ganache and bavarian cream.

This was quite an undertaking. I started making the cake layers days in advance. Then it all had to come together the day before the wedding. Of course I was working right up until our wedding day, so I didn't get off work until quite late. By about ten o'clock on Tuesday night I started.

Everything looked like it would work. The cream and the ganache were ready. The first few layers had been successfully transferred to the frosted glass cake stand that my mom had let us borrow. Then disaster struck...

My mom and I stood there in horror as the third of five layers split in half right down the middle. The rest of the layers soon collapsed. In the course of a few seconds I was left with $40 worth of delicious chocolate blob. My mom asked what we could do. Nothing. It was dead. Cake making had failed. It didn't help that it was about two in the morning by this point. I kind of crammed it all together in the hopes of making something at least cake-like and went to bed.

This is what we had to work with on the day of the wedding. Unfortunately, the generous layer of icing didn't quite hide the disaster of the previous night.


This is where I want to thank my mom. She, on the day of the wedding and with only a few hours to spare, went out and bought a beautiful chocolate wedding cake from Magelby's.

The only thing left to do was tell Laura...

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