You Call That A Wedding Cake?!

On the eve of Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal wedding, speculation and rumors abound about every detail, especially the cake. A few details have already been released: it will be a very traditional fruit cake covered in marzipan and royal icing. The colors will be white and cream and the flowers will consist of the English Tudor Rose, the Welsh Daffodil, the Scotish Thistle, and the Irish Shamrock.

Being the traditional type of British wedding cake, Princess Diana had the same. As far as the flowers, Kate is being rather preferential towards the home countries; Queen Elizabeth II's own wedding dress was embroidered with the national flower of each country over which she reigns.

Some of you non bakers and wedding cake decoraters might be puzzled as to why the British cover an unpopular Christmas cake in marzipan and royal icing and serve it at thier weddings. Its origins were practical and several hundred years later it is tradition. An even older tradition is a tall stack of cakes and as any cake decorator will tell you, cakes don't naturally want to stay ontop of eachother, they sink into eachother. The solution: sturdy building materials, i.e. fruit cake, which is just about the sturdiest cake around. The dense cake provides a solid base that will not be crushed by the tower of cake it supports.

Ever hear of the tradition of the newly weds keeping the top tier for thier first anniversary? Well, originally, they kept it for thier first child's christening. Either way, anniversary or christening, without refrigeration you can't keep a cake past the honeymoon. Enter the fruit cake, which we all know will be the cockroach's only food supply after a nuclear halocaust, as the anti-fruit cake joke goes...

While America's distaste for fruit cake is still prevelant, many are getting into the act, by serving it at parties while watching the wedding on telvision. Personally, I have always been a big fan of the dense cake laced with alcohol and spotted with dried fruit gems.

The future King and Queen of a quarter of the world's population, otherwise known as the Commonwealth Realm may be having a very traditional fruit cake, which might still boggle your mind, but consider some other traditional baked goods served at weddings around the world and fruit cake may not seem so out of place or even out of season. In fact, many of the cakes served at weddings are the same cakes served at all special occasions, especially Christmas.

Centuries old rivals and often times subjects to the English crown, the French have thier own traditional wedding cake. It is called a croquembouch, meaning crack in the mouth. It consists of profiteroles, or cream puffs dipped in caramel and stacked into a tall cone and wrapped in spun sugar.

The tall cone shape is continued by the northernly Scandanavians and the Danes with the kransekake, or ring cake. It consists of consentrict circles of an almond sponge cake stacked on top of each other and held together with icing. It is another all purpose special occaision cake, particularly Christmas.

Throughout Central Europe, many countries have a variation of a cake that is baked, more or less on a spit or in a rotissery type oven. The Germans call it Baumkuchen, or "tree cake" because when you cut it open it looks like the rings of a tree. The Baltic country of Lithuania has, I think, the most striking version which they also refer to as a tree cake or Šakotis whichy means "branchy."

A plain Šakotis.

A Šakotis decorated as a modern wedding cake with sugar roses and swans.

A traditional Šakotis rotissery oven.

In the Slavic countries of Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine the traditional wedding treat is an oranamental bread called korovai.  Though it has no specific design and varies by region, it is heavily deocrated with birds, periwinkles and other flowers, the moon, and wheat sheaths all to symbolize love, prosperity, purity, and the happiness of the couple.

Western style sweets of all kinds, including wedding cakes have been creeping into Asian cultures for many years now. However, traditional Asian "sweets" are rarely sweet. They mostly consist of red bean paste, rice, and sometimes a sugar cane juice similar to molasses. Here is a short video of making traditional Chinese wedding rice cakes.

In comparison, a wedding fruit cake doesn't seem so different after all, does it?

UPDATE: 4/29/11
Here is the actual fruit cake that William &Kate served at thier reception.

Eggcellent Eggs

I know, I've really slacked off on the blogging thing. I have six half finished, incoherent, rambling posts saved in my draft box and I figured it was time to reduce that number to five. This post has remained unfinished for over a month because the subject is so vast, it seemed impossible to comprehensively cover. This subject is: The Egg.
In "On Food and Cooking," Harold Magee dedicated the second chapter to eggs in no less than 50 pages; I'll try to be more brief. Yet I cannot deny that as a pastry chef and baker, eggs are an invaluable ingredient. The number of ways an egg can be transformed are innumerable: they are the building blocks of cakes and cookies, as well as make a rich, dense custard, or an airy, smooth meringue of whites whipped with sugar, and even provide that beautiful brown glossy crust on anything baked.

Traditional chef head gear: the toque is supossed to have 100 folds to represent the 100 different ways to cook an egg.

 As a consumer of food, I cannot deny that eggs are orgasmic. (when prepared correctly) I like my scrambled eggs and all yolks runny, I like eggs cooked in butter and I especially like them coated in a sauce made from more yolks and butter. I whole heartily support Wylie Dufresne, chef of wd-50 in New York City who is a self proclaimed "egg slut." He is so obsessed with eggs, he revealed his true political leanings when he said "Eggs Benedict is genius. It’s eggs covered in eggs. I mean, come on, that person should be the president.”

My love of egg yolks, runny or other wise, is a complete reversal from my childhood when I only liked egg whites. I ignored the yolks and only occasionally gritted my teeth and chewed through the chalky hard cooked yolk. However, now, I cannot get enough yolk. Literally, I have to crack a few eggs to collect enough yolks. Only occasionaly and always unexpectedly, do I crack open a double yolker. Of course, I let out a cheer of surprise and thanks to a hen for the gift. Everyone gets excited when they open a double yolker.

There is a family farm here in Puebla, Mexico who takes all of that surprise away. They candle all of their eggs after they are collected and separate the double yolkers. The eggs are sold to the woman I buy eggs from at the market who is able to offer, probably the most unique product at the market. (This is the reason I LOVE markets! Commercial egg producers won't take the time and effort to market double yolkers.)

 These eggs are HUGE, I mean bigger than extra large or jumbo eggs in the United States.

 Two kilos, which is usually between 30-32 eggs, costs 33 pesos which at the exchange rate I paid, equals $2.82. We go through them in a week.

My Easter Story: Oma and the Pope

Happy Easter!
I spent all week in Acapulco celebrating my  birthday and spring break with Jonathan's family.  We returned to Puebla in the early morning. So my Easter was pretty low key, Jonathan and I went out for sushi.
I thought I would share a more exciting Easter story: my Easter in Rome with my Oma.
Like I have said before, in the spring of 2009 I spent almost 2 months traveling through Italy and Germany with my 90 year old grandma, whom I call Oma. We landed in Rome at 6:50am on Easter morning with no plans or reservations. It had been a long overnight flight in which Oma picked a fight with every cryying baby, their mothers and the head flight attendant; but that is a separate story.

After we collected our luggage, we were standing in the middle of the terminal, free to explore Italy. Dumbly, I flipped through my copy "Traveling through Italy for Dummies" as if some new tip appeared since I had put it away for landing. My hands began shaking as the realization that I had just traveled across the Atlantic with a mostly deaf, 90 year old woman with no itinerary. In a daze, I put the book away and found a hotel service with Oma and our bags in tow.

 "Do you speak English?" I asked the attractive young woman behind the counter.
"ah, no" she replied. Oma started telling the woman her life story and the reason for our trip, as she was apt to do. In English.
 "Speak Italian," I told Oma and in a blink of an eye, a torrent of Italian was unleashed. After several minutes, the young Italian woman turned to me and said "she reminds me of my nonna. Now, this is the only room I have for you and your nonna. It is very nice, in the center of the city. It is only 190 Euro." (which is double what we were expecting, but when you show up in Rome on Easter, beggers can't be choosers.)
So Oma paid a deposit on the room and our shuttle directly to the hotel.
We had a pleasant drive into the city with a very chatty driver. I discovered that I understood Italian very well without any formal Italian lessons at the time. The driver dropped us off at the hotel door and wished us a happy Easter.
"Buon Giorno e Buona Pasqua," the man behind the desk greeted us. Oma responded by asking when the Pope was giving Easter mass. [That was her only desire all along. Even though she lived in Rome for 13 years prior and during  the war and had a brother studying at the vatican to become a priest, so has already seen more private inner workings of the vatican than most people, she had never been to an Easter mass with the pope.]
The man behind the desk told us that mass would begin in under an hour and we should leave right away. He would take care of our luggage and we could finish checking in when we returned. Personaly, I wanted to at least change out of the jeans and sweater I had been wearing for 24 hours, but Oma had already run out of the hotel onto the street like she knew where she was going. Tha man behind the counter quickly circled the location of the hotel on a tourist map and showed me where the train and bus station was three blocks away. He meantioned something about a bus number as I ran out the door to chase down Oma. I didn't hear it.

I caught up to Oma running up the street and she asked me which way to go...  After a few twists and turns we found the buses and were confronted with the ticket system. Fortunatly, there was a british couple at the ticket machine in front of us. Unfortunaly, they were not eager to help me. The wife dryly told me to put money in and push a button as she walked away. I rolled my eyes and fiddled for a minute and finally figured out how to get two tickets. I also happened to see a sign that read "vaticano." We stood in line for a bus. When it arrived, everyone pushed, shoved and packed into it. I made it to third base with half the people on that bus.

Finally it stopped on an empty street and everyone poured out. "This must be it" I thought to myself. I grabbed Oma's arm and we got off the bus. Half the crowd went left and the half went right. I followed the right half around a corner and we walked right into a line leading directly into St. Peter's square.

Oma impatiently ducked, weaved, and cut her way through line leaving me scrambling after her. Through the metal detectors I found my self standing at the very front left corner of St. Peter's square.

Oma and I made our way to the front of the crowd, as close as the general public could get, and I could see the Pope with my own eyes.

The millions of people behind us.

At one point a crowd of Sudtirolers surrounded us and Oma's day was made!

At anotherpoint, I don't know how many hours into the mass it was, an Italian woman grabbed Oma's arms and supported her.( It was my first day on the job, I still didn't know how to take care of a 90 year old woman.) The woman turned out to be a tour guide who brought her group to the mass. She talked with Oma and held her arm the whole time. At one point Oma joined the Pope in singing the mass and the woman looked at me agast and asked "Your grandmother speaks Latin?!" "yeah, she studied it in university" I replied.
People came and went, but Oma and I stood through the entire mass and blessings afterward. St. Peter's square emptied in a second when it was all over.

After mass the Pope went out on his balcony and blessed the crowd.

Oma and I followed the crowd walking along the Tiber River until we found a little cafe that
 did not look packed. We each had a simple panini and a bottle of water. Then we walked back to St. Peter's to go inside the cathedral. The square had again filled with a rediculous line coiled around the square. I scanned the scene thinking that there was no way Oma could wait in this line, and just as I turned to ask her what she thought we should do, she collapsed face down.

I immeadiatly picked her up but she doubled over again grabbing her left leg. A vatican guard came running over to check on us. I tried to convince Oma that we should just go to the hotel, but she refused to leave. She massaged her cramped leg until she could stand on it again and the guard walked us to the front of the line. (Sometimes traveling with a 90 year old woman pays off.) We walked around and Oma told me stories of her brother and some history of the Catholic church.

Walking up to St. Peter's

Standing directly under neath the Pope's balcony.

Oma inside St. Peter's.

When we left St. Peter's I was more than ready to go back to the hotel but Oma insisted on walking to the Piazza del Poppolo like she used to with her brother. I was getting worn out and confused. My brian stopped functioning and I just hopped on the first bus, luckily, it was going to the station. However, my luck ended there. When we got to the station I realized that we ran out of the hotel so fast I didn't even catch the name. All I had was a circle on a map which I couldn't make heads or tails of. We stumbled around in circles knowing that we were close the the hotel but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name. Finally I started walking in hotels asking for help to figure out which hotel was mine. After a few indignant desk clerks, we figured out in which hotel we were staying.
I asked for a cab, cause I knew I would screw it up. Oma and I took a cab one block around the corner to our hotel: Hotel Virgili.

There was a different man at the desk, but he knew who we were. We needed to pay for the other half of our hotel room, which I knew, but Oma thought she paid for in full at the airport. I tried to convince her, but she refused to believe me. In my tiredness, I could not find the reciept, which only comfirmed to Oma that she paid in full. I was too tired to fight so I threw my ccredit card down to cover the rest of the room.

Oma started screaming bloody murder in the lobby. "You can't trust Italians! You don't know them! They lie! They cheat! They steal! They'll rob you blind! Italians are the dirtiest, cheatiest people in Europe!" Her tirade continued as I marched up the stairs. By the time we reached our room on the fifth floor she had worn out, but as soon as I opened the door, she got a second wind.

Our room was a very handsome room with green and gold wallpaper, tall ceilings, a double bed, a desk,chair and our own comfortable bathroom. Unfortunatly it was all squeezed into a tiny room so that you actually could not walk in the room. You had to crawl over the desk in the narrow hallway to get to the bed which had part of our luggage sitting on it because there was not enough floor space. Oma complained and lamented how I let us get cheated and taken advantage of, but I didn't care. I laid down on the bed in my clothes and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow. The last thing I saw was the tiny mint on my pillow.

I awoke in the middle of the night overwhelmed by the obnoxious scent of mint and all I could think was "Oma do you have to eat that now?!"  I rolled over to see Oma applying mint Bengay to her legs. I became very familiar with that smell over a month and a half.