Lille Allen/Eater
Baking my wedding cake helped me save money — and be really present as a bride
Everything about my wedding fell into place, which was the only way I could have ever considered having one. We chose the venue because a friend was its beverage director and offered his help in setting it up. The day we got the wedding license, we met another friend for dinner and he let us know that he had officiated a friend’s wedding, so we asked if he’d oversee ours. I sent a photographer whose work I love an Instagram DM asking for her suggestions for someone who might want the gig, and to my great surprise, she offered to do it herself for a wildly under-market rate. The guest list was kept to 30 people because we only wanted our close family and dearest friends in attendance (and were footing the bill ourselves).
I’d never been one to dream of flowers, fluffy white dresses, or bridesmaids. What I did dream about was cake. Before I had a fiance or even the inkling of a wedding in my future, I knew I’d bake my wedding cake. In the early 2010s, I’d run my own vegan microbakery on the side of my editorial day job; after its 2013 closure, I continued to bake birthday cakes, write recipes, and even made a friend’s wedding cake. Baking my own was a way to save money, but first and foremost, it was a way for me to be really present in the role of bride — a role, I knew, that I’d be uncomfortable performing without an actual job to do. All that attention, all those photos? In order to keep myself from breaking out in hives, I gave myself a task.
Among bakers, this isn’t a strange choice. Given baking’s reputation as an exacting, scientific artform, it shouldn’t be a surprise that its most dedicated practitioners enjoy control, creative and otherwise. “Not even God could have convinced me to not make my wedding cake,” Teresa Finney, the owner-operator of Atlanta’s At Heart Panaderia, says of her recent foray into the bride-baker role. She made a two-tier cake inspired by a 1971 edition of The Wilton Book of Wedding Cakes with an oil-based vanilla bean cake with a vanilla bean Swiss meringue buttercream for the bottom half-sheet layer and a hibiscus Swiss meringue buttercream for the adorable heart-shaped tier placed atop the sheet.
Wedding planners are accustomed to clients who want to bring a DIY flair to their affairs. “I feel like there’s always some sort of element that somebody wants to do themselves, just because it feels special and a little bit more hands-on,” says Monica O’Connor, the co-founder of New York’s Arch Events.
Sometimes, bride-bakers don’t stop at just the cake. While Alejandra Ramos, the host of The Great American Recipe on PBS, made hers in the almond flavor of an Italian rainbow cookie, filled with guava jam and frosted in chocolate ganache, she also had her wedding’s caterers make a menu of her own recipes and bake cookies for a full dessert spread.
“When I announced that I got engaged, I said, ‘I already know I’m making the cake,’” Ramos says of her 2011 wedding. “Food has always been so central to my life, and I love entertaining. This is a party that I’m throwing for my friends and family and loved ones, so I want to be able to cook for them. So I did.”
In this way, a wedding becomes an even more intimate expression of the couple — touched not just by their taste, but by their hands. My own wedding cake was three layers of chocolate olive oil cake filled with chocolate ganache, frosted with a spiced tahini buttercream, and garnished with a half-ring of candied carambola, or starfruit, that I lugged from San Juan to New York. The flavors reflected my husband’s preference for chocolate and my love for tahini in desserts, while the carambola connected our big day in my native New York to his home in Puerto Rico.
Hannah Mandel, the owner-operator of Forsythia Forsythia in Athens, New York, similarly used her wedding cake to reflect her and her new husband’s origins. “The inspiration was tri-state area Jewish deli flavors, with the aesthetics of a Cal Earth building,” Mandel says. “I’m from New York and my husband is from California, so there were a bunch of nods to bicoastal things, like marzipan apples and citrus, which I had a lot of fun making. I also made some abstract marzipan shapes. The cake was a malted black sesame and almond marble cake, with pickled berry jam and tahini buttercream. Our ceramic cake topper, which was made by the artist Janie Korn, was one of the most special parts of our wedding.”
Ramos, Finney, Mandel, and I are all seasoned bakers. We each have a sense of strategy and kitchen muscle memory that kicks in to ensure that everything is done on time: that the cake layers are baked, tightly wrapped, and in the freezer weeks or days prior, and that there are quart containers of frosting and any other garnishes in the fridge.
Even then, there can be slight snafus. “My main annoyance day-of was time management, but that was my bad,” says Finney. “I gave myself plenty of time to deal with the cake, but virtually none to get myself ready. So, my nails weren’t done for the reception dinner, which I do regret! But I told some friends at the dinner that as long as the cake tasted and looked good, I was happy. And I meant it.”
O’Connor, the wedding planner, advises any DIY brides and grooms to-be to keep time management top of mind. “Making your own wedding cake is extraordinarily special and gives you this very hands-on, made-with-love moment for your wedding guests and for your spouse, so that’s very sweet, but are you going to be doing that the night before your wedding?” she asks. “You’ll probably be having guests in town, or doing a rehearsal dinner or a welcome party. There are a lot of other things that happen the night before your wedding.” She advises scheduling ample time to accommodate the assembly and frosting that need to be done in the immediate run-up to the wedding.
Baking my own wedding cake gave me the perfect extremely personal task to focus on in anticipation of what is a big, nerve-wracking day, even when it’s a small event. Putting on a grand dress and a full face of makeup felt unnatural; having my mom taste my tahini buttercream to make sure it was good felt totally right. I will only ever be a bride once, but I’ll always be a baker.
Alicia Kennedy is the author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating and the forthcoming On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites. She writes a weekly newsletter called From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.
