The Essential Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings (76 page)

Where will the cake be set up? Indoors or out? (Hint: unless botulism is going to be a theme for your wedding, you want to stay away from ingredients that don't travel well, or those that will melt, squish, or topple from being outside in the sun for too long.)

What does the room or surrounding area look like? What is the ceiling height of the room? Snap a few pictures and e-mail them to the bakery to make sure everything is in sync. (Pictures on a cell phone are just too small for this purpose.)

A celestial view of the wedding cake is that it represents the beginning of a relationship. The couples break bread by feeding each other the first bite, a mystical union of earth (flours from grains and sweetness from fruits), fire (it's baked in an oven), air (the lightness whipped into the frosting), and water (life's essence). This symbolic act parallels the union of the couple: ingredients that were once separate parts are combined in a new way to make something whole.

If the above description speaks to your world-view, you might be looking into an alternative cake for your alternative lifestyle. Jane Lockhart of Sweet Lady Jane in Los Angeles, California, created the vegan cake for Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi's wedding. Jane explained that it was a process of experimenting with new ingredients and balancing the taste: “The cream cheese frosting had a tofu base, and margarine replaced butter. We even found a substitute for the eggs.” But this took a lot of tasting trial and error. The DeGeneres-de Rossis opted for a red velvet cake, a traditional Southern favorite that's becoming more mainstream. Jane worked with combinations of cocoa and flour to create the right color and textures. It sounds less like baking and more like advanced chemistry.

All bakers agree that the red flag warning is to realize that simply switching a few ingredients in a recipe around—say, substituting a half cup of agave for a half cup of sugar—will probably result in culinary chaos. Depending on your individual eating beliefs and requirements, look for an organic bakery or chain store, such as Whole Foods, and see what they have already mastered. You don't want an inexperienced baker using organic or alternative ingredients for the first time for your wedding. Avoid being anyone's wedding-cake guinea pig.

Even a real health nut will indulge on an occasion as special as your wedding is certain to be—especially if organic flours and natural sweeteners and dairy products are used in making the cake. However, if your crew is diet conscious and you're afraid they'll admire but not eat your wedding cake, consider having fresh fruit on hand as well.

Bakers Beware

I
F YOUR COUSIN
who bakes great Toll House cookies offers to bake you a wedding cake, remember that those tiered numbers aren't just three little cakes piled on a couple of pillars and then frosted. Wedding cakes are an engineering feat, not to be left to the inexperienced or the faint of heart.

How will this marvelous creation make it to the wedding in one piece? You can't simply send your little sister in her Volkswagen Beetle to fetch the cake and hope for the best, so part of your initial consultation should deal with the question of delivering and setting up the cake. Some couples want the wedding cake displayed throughout the reception. Others choose to play the moment for its utmost dramatic effect, and have the cake wheeled in, complete with musical fanfare.

Boutique bakeries will often figure in a delivery and setup cost to their prices; others may tack on the delivery fee. This practical detail needs to be worked out in advance so your vision is fully realized and the cake travels properly, not teetering back and forth and sliding to the floor. You really don't want to end up on a reality show like “Gay Weddings' Wackiest Moments.”

However, if the cake isn't all that complicated and it
can
fit in the back of your little sister's VW, that just might be the best plan.

“Very nice, very unusual, a wedding between two people of the same actual sex,” your cousin Bernice will murmur. “But just one question, smarty-pants: where in the world are you going to get a wedding-cake top with two men on it?”

Oh, shut up, Bernice.

In olden days, like, well, in the mid-1990s, our gay forefathers and foremothers would wear disguises, change their voices, and slink into their local bakery supply stores to purchase two sets of traditional plastic cake toppers. Then each figure was torn apart from its counterpart and hot-glue-gunned to a base that held a canopy, wishing well, or an arch with wedding bells. Somewhere in a parallel universe there lies a pile of single plastic brides and grooms in search of their mates. Well, hallelujah, it's now a whole new world. Many bakery supply stores actually stock same-sex cake toppers in a cavalcade of poses and settings. Another great resource is
www.twogrooms.com
and their sister website,
www.twobrides.com
. Both carry the plastic statues in a variety of ethnicities and attire. And then if you want further customizing, you can still get out that glue gun and dress up your brides or grooms with little top hats, veils, and other accessories available for the well-dressed little plastic figurine. Malibu Barbie and Dream Date Ken, eat your hearts out!

Actually, the plastic toppers are no longer the first or most stylish choice to adorn your finished wedding cake. In fact, some of the more upscale patisseries just plain
don't use them anymore. According to the owner of Sweet Lady Jane bakery in Los Angeles, “We don't put brides and grooms on our cakes because traditionally they're plastic, and it just kind of goes against the whole look of an elegant cake. Sometimes people do bring us an heirloom piece—maybe it was the cake top that the bride's parents had on top of their cake.” If both sets of your parents have saved their cake tops, you can then extract one appropriate-gendered figure from each and put them together. (Won't your parents be pleased?)

Online auction sites such as eBay have literally thousands of cake toppers. Some are wonderful porcelain cake toppers from the thirties, forties, and fifties, but you will have to coordinate your purchase with an opposite same-sex couple who are also planning a wedding (“We'll keep the two grooms; you'll keep the two brides”).

Bakeries might be able to put you in touch with artisans who can sculpt figurines in your own image, so if you ever wanted a representation of you and your lover captured in papier-mâché, this is your chance. If you have an enormously creative friend, see if this could be a potential wedding gift. If not, check out
magicmud.com
gayweddings.com
, or
gayrites.com
for nifty personalized toppers made out of polymer clay and hand-painted resin.