Friday, April 13, 2007

Let them (not) eat cake

My sweetie and I have agreed that we don't want a cake at the wedding. Neither of us especially likes cake; I especially don't like wedding cake, because fondant is gross and in my experience, the prettier a cake is, the drier and nastier it tastes.

Instead, I want to have Beard Papa cream puffs. Beard Papa is a Japanese chain that sells gigantic delicious cream puffs; they opened several store in NYC in the last few years, and I think now have stores in California, as well. Here I am in front of a mother ship store in Shinjuku, Tokyo:


See the line? They're good cream puffs!

My sweetie wants cannolis from Ferrara. I'm fine with that. Cream puffs and cannolis, and you chocolate lovers can go elsewhere!

Still, a part of me does feel the pull of the traditional cake. This month's Martha Stewart Weddings features several plastic-looking cakes which leave me cold, and this one:

It's hardly iced at all--just a thin layer of fondant on the top of each tier, covered by a layer of passionfruit curd. The layers are also separated by curd. Each layer is tinted with some food coloring, and the edges are cut and exposed; my mouth is watering just looking at it. I still think we will not be having cake at our wedding (for one thing, delicious though it looks, it strikes me as impractical: I'd think the edges would dry out, even if one didn't cut and expose the edges until right before the wedding began), but I might try my hand at making this cake one day. It looks too fun and delicious to pass up!

(Yes: I read Martha Stewart Weddings: getting married is the perfect excuse to buy into Martha's perfect world. I can unequivocally state it's the loveliest wedding mag out there, and the only one where I've bought more than one issue. The ideas are interesting, the pictures are gorgeous, and while I could never maintain the level of perfection found in the pages of Living in real life, it's nice to dream that I could do it for one day :-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cream puffs and cannolli! I love it!!! You should totally NOT have a cake. Theres lots of cool ideas that people do at weddings with cupcakes. You could do something similar with the pastries. I'm sure Martha has some ideas on this. :-)
--Cass