Looking at ‘Contemporary Wedding Cakes’ makes me realize how much wedding cake design has changed in the last two decades.  This book was very useful when I started (it was the first book about wedding cakes that I bought), but now I look at it and think…did I get anything useful from it?  hmmmmm…..

This book was published when the trend in wedding cakes started to change; most cooks used fruitcake or other heavy, stable base cake with buttercream icing and sugar flowers.  There are some good techniques in here, and some practical information – stencils, how to measure things, and so on – but only ideas that work with solid foundation – fruitcake, carrot cake, layer cake.  And some of the designs are a bit goofy, IMHO…

what's grey and sings? elephantzgerald

However – nowadays mousse cake is most popular, giving a wedding cake lighter weight, with a wide range of possible flavors and features.  As mousse is unstable (compared to fruitcake!), I can only work an hour or so at a time, before popping the cake back into the fridge.  Modern cakes may take longer, but yield more delicate, flavorful, interesting results.

I learned how to make snowdrops from this book, and I still use their Royal Icing recipe.  Otherwise this book is mainly an artifact from an earlier era in wedding cake design, and shouldn’t be mistaken for a current resource.

Tags: Wedding Cake

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm and is filed under On My Bookshelf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.