The Companion 011: I made my friend's wedding cake

On the hottest day of the year.

The wedding cakes before they were decorated with flowers

Good morning from sunny London! I woke up today with that swirly-headed, slightly furry-tongued feeling after a heavy night. The night in question was my friend’s wedding — a sweet, light event with an unruly Ceilidh that made me cackle like I haven’t done in ages, and probably the best maid of honour speech I’ve heard thus far.

At 29, I am suddenly, firmly, in wedding season. I’ve been to eight weddings in the past three years (including my parents’ wedding after 40 years of partnership, which I wrote about here), and have at least three upcoming next year.

This phase is one that, honestly, I wasn’t expecting. I thought that, collectively, our generation would remain unmarried and more wedded to living lives significantly different to those of our parents than wedded to our lovers. But although most of the weddings I’ve been to up to this point have been my partner’s friends and family, the first of my close friends got married this year and one of my best friends recently got engaged.

Things are a-changing.

“I love weddings. I am so thrilled for each and every friend who has decided to take that step”

On a personal level, I have mixed, uncomfortable feelings about marriage. I don’t like some of the connotations that are associated with being husband and wife. I don’t like that growing up I was force-fed marriage by the media and popular culture to be the only thing I should really aspire to. But, generally, I love weddings. I love love. And I am so thrilled for each and every friend who has decided to take that step.

With that in mind, being asked to be involved in a wedding on any level (or, as we’re about to get into, inserting myself lol), feels like an honour, and not one that I take lightly. I gave a reading at one of my friend’s weddings earlier this year and, boy, I was probably more nervous for that reading than I’ve been for any other form of public speaking. The drunken, unplanned speech I made at my parents’ wedding was far easier.

Speaking of drunken, this is also how I ended up making a wedding cake for one of my friends on the hottest day of the year. About a year ago, at a mutual friend’s event, myself and the bride got to chatting — and I think I must have mentioned the fact that I’d spent most of lockdown baking cakes, learning new techniques and giving free cakes away for those in need of a bit of joy. I then, quite boldly, I guess, offered to make their wedding cake.

“This wasn’t about perfection. We are home bakers and the cake we made looked like it had been made by hand, but also with love”

It would be a challenge, I thought, but a fun one. And a way to extend a hand of friendship to two people who, though I hadn’t spent loads of time with, thought were very lovely. In due course, I also roped in my best friend’s boyfriend, who is an excellent baker, and close friends with the couple. They requested a crème brulée cake and we practised different versions of it from around June (a bonding experience in itself!), stressing about different formulations of pastry cream, ratios of egg whites to sugar in the swiss meringue buttercream and how on earth we were going blow torch the top of the cake without the icing melting.

The most useful video we found was the one below from Natasha Pickowicz, who walks through some really simple and delicious techniques for making successful, simple two-tier wedding cakes. “If you get ANYTHING out of this I hope it is to see the possibility of approaching something as canonical and “off limits” as wedding cake as something that YOU can make, yourself, if you want. And that we should all be approaching notions of beauty and creation with curiosity and grace instead of rigidity and judgement,” she wrote in a recent Instagram post.

As the temperature started to climb beyond 30°c and everything in my kitchen became very melty. But echoing Pickowicz, this wasn’t, my fellow baker often reminded me toward the end of the process, about perfection. We are home bakers and the cake we made looked like it had been made by hand, but also with love. With a clever configuration of fridge and freezer use, we managed to hold everything together.

In any case, I am now a massive advocate for making your friend’s wedding cakes. It’s an intimate and loving gesture. Something you made by hand. That is transient but memorable. And the cake we made, if I do say so myself, was a hit. The caterer apparently said it was the best wedding cake they’d ever had. And more importantly, the couple and their friends seemed to enjoy it.

If you’d like the recipe for a two-tier crème brulée-inspired cake, made with a vanilla chiffon cake, creme diplomat filling, burnt sugar and vanilla swiss meringue buttercream and torched sugar top, just let me know!