Perfect

July is racing to a close, and I am pedalling furiously to keep up. The culminating Marrowstone in the City concert for Number One Son is this evening, Little One has a sleepover, and tomorrow is that yearly debauchery otherwise known as the Microsoft Picnic. Sunday we “relax” by going clamming, and we might even be able to do nothing that evening by watching The Two Gentlemen of Verona in the park. I don’t think we’ll be able to squeeze in a leisurely stroll through the Bellevue Arts Fair or kick back and watch the hydro races, though. We might catch the brides one more time before they fly back to Switzerland, but even if we don’t, we’ll have some sweet memories.

For it was the absolutely most perfect wedding I have ever been to. No pretenses, only pure, unbridled joy. There were oodles of children, resplendent in summer dresses, clip-on ties, and keens. The brides’ two daughters and two nieces created a path of rose petals, a string trio played the Wedding March, and, after toasts were made with champagne and the cake was cut, they danced a slow waltz together. Hopeless romantics dabbed their eyes.

But it wasn’t a wedding. Because legally, the brides, who have been together nearly as long as me and my Darling Husband and who have grown their family in parallel, were not getting married. Rather, they were celebrating the civil union that they registered in Switzerland on Valentine’s Day of this year. There were numerous mentions of the irony of an American lawyer having to go overseas to marry, but the fact remains that this was a great wedding party: the brides, still very much in love, weren’t twenty and had had plenty of time to think about what they wanted in a wedding. And what they decided was that family came first, both their own and those of their friends. No one needed to hire a sitter to come to this event, we all brought them with—and they nearly outnumbered us. There were buttered noodles in the buffet (along with more adult roasted potatoes and asparagus, broiled salmon and a tasty organic greens salad put together by Tuxedos and Tennis Shoes), an entire room was set aside for kids with coloring, hula hoops and games, and an ice cream truck stopped by just when nerves were getting ragged. With meltdowns averted, at least for now, parents packed up their sticky children and headed home. We returned home thoroughly content at how things turned out.

The Saturday before the wedding was a different story altogether. With some of the muggiest weather I’ve ever sweated through, I had set to baking on Friday afternoon, turning out a handsome enough pair of 9” layers. As they cooled, though, the middle of one layer collapsed. No matter, I said to myself, I can bake a new one tomorrow. With the kids in bed, I tucked a 12” cake into the oven. It came out heavy, refusing to rise more than a quarter inch. Not good.

Saturday was supposed to be an easy day: I only had to bake the little 6” topper (in génoise, the brides’ first choice) and an extra 12” (for the kitchen, a bit of slight-of-hand that magically produces plates of cut cake within minutes of the ceremonial cutting). The big layers did a repeat non-performance, barely budging upwards. But the little six-inch cake, destined for the aptly-named bridal suite at the Salish Lodge, puffed up perfectly, and made me wonder just what I was doing wrong with the supposedly easier butter cake. I reviewed Rose’s prose, checked my math, and tried the big butter cake again, this time using a bit more batter. Still domed, still dense and just plain heavy. Not at all what I had in mind.

By this time, my family had been relegated to eating at the little kids table in the corner, as our normal table was covered with an expanding collection of failed layers, not to mention having to tiptoe around an increasingly edgy chef. Darling Husband earned years of brownie points by not only washing up after each failure, but not complaining about it at all. But I clearly needed some perspective. So, I curled up and read, not a cookbook, but Hunting and Gathering, a novel I’d been sipping all week. There’s an intense scene where the protagnist sits at her easel and begins a pastel nude. She picks up the blue pastel, but after a few strokes she stops and changes to red: the subject demanded it. I tuck in my bookmark and head back to the store for more eggs and cream (to assuage the nightmares about not having enough cream to cover the cake).

And so I do what the brides wanted all along. I bake three more cakes, all génoise this time, enough for a beautiful three-tiered wedding cake—for all the little girls to dream and wonder about—and one more 12” cake for the inevitable second helpings.

The day of the wedding—sorry, the celebration—dawned even muggier, and I changed my worrying to the cream. If I felt like I needed a shower after the effort of getting dressed, how must the cake feel, having to stand there, smiling and looking pretty for three hours? As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about, for it was, as I mentioned before, a perfect wedding.

(photo by Cory Parris)

And no, there were no leftovers—unless you count the four butter cakes in my fridge, covered in all that extra cream.