CRUMBY CAKE

I’ve been asked several times about the ill-fated Humpty-Dumpty post of several months ago, and if I were the real maker-of-the-scene. And though I DID make quite a few of the eggs over the years, plus perhaps a dozen of the little Humpty Dumpty scenes, I was not the maker of THAT birthday cake. The story was told to Mother at her beauty salon, by the actual baker, with lots of hand gestures and appalled expressions amongst the “He just dug HOLES in my CAKE!” “You should have SEEEN the mess.”

However, I DID stand aghast at a Saturday-morning luncheon setup for a wedding, as the bride's aunt made a shambles of a beautiful wedding cake. I’d made the cake---a classically simple white three-tier, stacked in the old-fashioned manner with no columns, something like this, but without all the scrollwork:



INTERNET PHOTOS

The bride’s mother had given me a picture of the cake her daughter wanted--- tall graceful layers and just the palest most modest shell borders at tier-bottom and top edge. She’d saved the picture from the Memphis Commercial Appeal Sunday Magazine, and the cake in the picture bore a graceful swag of pale roses, draped smoothly across the front and around the side onto the plate, something like this, but with fresh roses, blooms and buds, set onto an invisible net frame.

And if the Mom said “That dewwww-y look” once, she said it a dozen times, referring to the fresh roses, of a pale, chaste peach shade.

I looked at that picture a LOT, for several weeks before making that perfectly-plain cake; I loved the idea of having NO decorations attached, no royal icing or swans or pearl beads or those tooth-killing silver dragees, no matter how popular and pretty. The roses on the cake were on a form made of thin mesh, and easily removed for the cake-cutting---I liked that, too, for it would leave the entire cake in pristine form, without making an unsightly area early in the cutting.

But the bride had an AUNT. From Memphis, so of COURSE with WAY better taste than any of us down-home folks. She would “do” the roses for the cake. I would deliver it, set it down, and go on with getting the food ready in the kitchen.

So I did and did, and in the hustlebustle of the morning’s work, it did not register that the roses had been delivered by the florist, who set down the centerpieces, set up the lattice backdrop at the bride’s table, and left to finish decorating the church. The roses were delivered IN BUCKETS. And I should have KNOWN.

I’d set the cake in the usual manner---on the Bride’s Table, ready for any decoration to be set neatly upon or around it, but I hadn’t counted on the wet roses OR the Aunt. I asked about the form and was waved airily away---sorta dismissed, as it were, and so I went back to the kitchen.

She began her work, clipping and cutting stems, eyeing the layers, trying a length-of-stem for size against the fourteen-inch tier, the ten inch, the six. And then it hit me---she hadn’t paid a bit of attention to that swag in the picture. She hadn’t made a mesh or wire or fabric swag to put the roses into---she was going to stick those roses directly into that cake.

And she did, starting at the bottom right, poking the larger roses into the soft tiers, positioning them and driving them home with a heavy hand. Occasionally one would strike her as wrong, somehow, and she’d pull it out and move it a little bit up or down, right or left, leaving a gaping hole in the frosting. She went all the way up that beautiful cake, making a six-inch swag of flowers which dipped and swayed their way up the icing, with crumbs falling from the pulled-out stems, and tiny areas collapsing from the damage as they withdrew.

I SO hoped that the petals of the succeeding flowers would somehow camouflage all the damage, but it was painfully evident from a lot of angles, with a few teensy clumps of cake fallen to the tray and more and more of the flowers sagging floorward as the weight-to-hole ratio grew. I feared a full-on tumble before the reception even started, and after about the third pass through the reception hall, a quick peek to assess the carnage, and a pang in my heart for all that beautiful work wasted, I kept to the kitchen until it was time to set up the buffet.

What CAN you say to a relative whose taste and expertise has been held in such esteem by family, has been trusted to know how and to do it right, and whose clumsy attempts just maimed something beautiful? Imagine that plain white cake above, just standing there, the product of many hours of work and certainly worthy of a nice affair.

Now poke it with a stick at random, with abandon, in several dozen places, up and down the tiers. Try covering the booboos with flowers while the cake crumbles and litters the tray.

That’s how it felt, and that’s all I remember of that sweet girl’s wedding. I know the food was good, the party was wonderful, the marriage solid and still going strong, but I’ve wondered what they think now of that all-knowing AUNT.

And I still think of “that dewww-y look” as “that crumm-by look.”