December 13, 2013 Advent with SusieJ

Rose Levy Berenbaum: The Cake Bible

In 2011, having committed to baking Shawn and Steve their wedding cake, it was time for the second best part of making a wedding cake &emdash; researching the design and flavor possibilites. Out came all the professional books and the standards of enthusiastic home bakers. I remembered that Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible had, in addition to a variety of scalable recipes for any size cake, gorgeous pictures of wedding cakes she'd baked over the years. For those featured cakes, she has recipes that start off not with a list of ingredients, but with a list of recipes to make (X batches of this icing, Y batches of this filling, Z batches of fondant, plus extra fillings and icings and oh yes the cake) and directions for assembling them into one giant confectionery skyscraper.

It was like opening the directions from that new super-cool Lego set (for young singles, substitute Ikea here) and finding that it's just the directions for how to ready the other seven booklets of directions. (That's an exaggeration; the big Lego sets have only seven pages of directions on how to read the directions and properly assemble the Legos, an important step of which is to throw out all your shag carpeting before you lose all the tiny pieces deep in the pile.)

In the middle of the usual wedding cake anxiety, I started to have cookbook anxiety. Clearly, the solution was to bake as much as I could from the book.

The first discovery was a new favorite icing, "mousseline" buttercream, as super-easy sugar-syrup-based buttercream. I've made the original plain, chocolate and with liqueur. The genoise and buttercream cakes are nice, straight-forward, yummy, versatile cakes. The white-chocolate whipped cream works, as long as you are very serious about chilling everything until chilled.

Math nerd that I am, I love the measurements in metric weights. And, as a woman who believes in emergency cake, I love the hints on how long each cake can be stored and prepared ahead.

In addition to the large section on cake batters and icings for any cake size from six to sixteen inches, Berenbaum covers decorations: piping, modeling chocolate, marzipan, chocolate cigarettes and ruffles. She has three recipes for making your own fondant (confession: I buy mine)

The result is a volume that can get you through almost any wedding cake, with many other recipes for easy, everyday cakes through intricate special-occasion cakes. It is justly considered a must-have for anyone with a more than moderate interest in baking cakes.