I joined Number One Son and Nose in a Book (a quasi-adopted child who cheerfully spends much of her time at houses other than her own) in doing math homework. Bless her heart, Rose, the high priestess of cakes, provides me with tables for figuring things like scaling recipes and numerical factors for baking powder (which counter intuitively decreases as the cake grows). I fill a page in my notebook, resizing my original recipe to yield three separate tiers of wedding cake: 6”, 9”, and 12” (Rose tells me you can’t make a génoise larger than 12”, since it lacks the structure to stay together).
I decided that we’d start with the smallest layer, the six-incher. Pretty straightforward, still small enough to make by hand in a bowl. Yup, I make this delicate cake by hand (I do use a hand mixer to whip the egg whites); the food processor isn’t gentle enough for my purposes. I use up the last of my cake flour, and have to cut little parchment circles to fit the bottom of the pans. I make a note to see if I can find alternate sources for these: alas, restaurant suppliers don’t have this size circle (and I don’t want a 100-pack of any size), and I can find no source for organic cake flour. The batter fills the pans to 2/3—a perfect fit! Tucked into the oven, they are not done as soon as Rose says they should be, so I give them a wee bit more time to reach their golden state, and they reward me by cresting perfectly level with the top of the pan.
I note that Rick’s heavier pans create a firmer crust than my light springform. I’ll have to watch this as I move to the larger circumferences, since this crust helps the cake layer hold its shape for the day that passes between baking and assembly, but the crustless bottom of the cake shrinks a bit, leaving me with a slightly inverted trapezoidal sectional view. I end up trimming the very crispy edges and using the frosting to even things out the rest of the way. Still, topheavy is not stable.
It is good that I am doing a test run, as Rose’s icing guidelines prove completely off. She tells me that I need two cups of icing for a two-layer 6” tier. That means one cup of cream, half of it heated with cornstarch and saffron then cooled. The cream does double when whipped, but two cups is nowhere near enough – I run out of icing halfway around the cake, and end up scraping it thinly to eke out a crumb coat. The cake looks rather naked and guests are coming in an hour – not enough time to infuse and cool more cream. I take the remaining cream from the pint carton (minus the tablespoon or so that already went into some salad dressing), and whip it with some uncooked cornstarch, rose water and powdered sugar. Its texture is chalky when I taste it, but by the time we eat the cake, the starch has softened and not noticeable.
We take two slices over to the neighbors afterwards, leaving Darling Husband with one large slice for midnight perambulations (we’ll call it two servings for the purpose of this test). Which means that Rosie underestimated what happens to good cake: she tells me that this layer should serve 20 people, but we got only 15 servings out of it. My neighbor, licking cream from the corner of her mouth, suggests we might want to make an extra layer for the kitchen, since there’s no way a cake this tasty will serve 100 people.
