Wedding Cake

This is it--the cake that my blog is named after. When my eldest son and his then fiance, now wife, decided to marry, they had three things that they wanted at their wedding in terms of food. My macaroni and cheese, my husband's brisket, and the lemon cake of my best baking friend ever, Ivy. Here is how the third request turned out. Ivy and I have been baking together for decades. Ironically, when we lived together we were more parallel cooks--she made the desserts and my spouse and I made the appetizers. That was the stuff of our big parties, because at the time we lived in very small spaces that were not conducive to large sit down dinners. So we served food that you could stand and eat instead. In some ways, Ivy's willingness to bake for any and every occasion became a dependency for me. She was invariably invited to meals at our house, and she always brought dessert. I stopped planning dessert after a very short while, and assumed she would bring it. Then came the clincher. When Ivy couldn't come to dinner, she would drop off a dessert for me to serve. She was always experimenting with new things and always looking for taste testers to give her feedback, and we were there for her. In a big way. I was an above average baker before I knew her. I didn't fear the dessert end of a meal. I learned to cook in college when I lived in a large cooperative house. It is true that once I developed a team that I regularly cooked with, I was not responsible for the dessert much of the time, but I had some very reliable dessert options in my repertoire. With Ivy in town, that became completely unnecessary, and worse still, I really could not compete with her. She made things that were more beautiful, more varied, and better tasting than anything I could prepare. That is still true--the good news is that in the years since we have lived apart, we have continued to bake together. One of the highlights of the preparation leading up to Jake and Alice's wedding was the week we spent doing the desserts. Over the next several weeks I will post recipes from that baking extravaganza, but the prettiest thing we produced was this cake.