Let Them Make Cake Every Experienced Decorator Tells Stories Of Wedding Cake Perfection, As Well As Disaster

On April 15, while most of us were worrying about our income tax returns, Annie Chiantaretto was wrestling with a different type of last-minute problem.

The Tensed, Idaho woman had ordered a wedding cake that she planned to pick up on the way to her daughter Holly’s wedding at Long Lake. The store cake, however, was the worst she had ever seen.

“It was ruined,” says Chiantaretto. “The name was all messed up and the icing was just a thick glob. It looked like a child put it together.

“It was a couple of hours before the wedding, and I had no cake.”

Albertson’s at Southgate was Chiantaretto’s first stop in Spokane. Bakery hostess Patty Helgoe remembers the day well.

“We keep backup cakes. We had quarter-sheets in the freezer,” says Helgoe, who quickly decorated three of them with the couple’s names. “It turned out really nice.”

Cake decorators laugh when you ask about wedding cake stories. They’ve heard them all.

There’s the cake that went right off the table, thanks to vibrations from the music cranked up by a DJ doing a sound check.

There’s the bride who happened to look over at her cake during a rambunctious reception and saw an inebriated guest eating the very top layer - traditionally saved by the bride and groom.

Then there’s the cake that goes to the wrong reception hall.

That’s what happened to Penney Woelk, wedding caterer and owner of PJ’s Parties in Spokane, at her own wedding 15 years ago.

“They delivered it to the wrong church,” says Woelk. “I got hysterical and came unglued. Part of the family went and retrieved the cake. As you well know, brides are not the most functional person on their wedding day.”

Mother Nature isn’t always too even-tempered, either.

Jean McMillan of Jean’s Cakes in Cheney, who has been making wedding cakes for 40 years, vividly remembers the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980.

“I was catering an outdoor wedding on May 18th,” McMillan says. “Everybody just left when it got dark (from the falling ash); we had to take everything down using three sets of headlights. It was a disaster.”

Hot summer weather also leaves cake decorators leery.

In 1976, Bill Steele was working as an apprentice pastry chef in Sun Valley, Idaho. He helped create a wedding cake for Muffit Hemingway, older sister of the family’s more famous Margot and Mariel.

“She wanted fruitcake and marzipan and all this heavy stuff,” says Steele, owner of Pastry and More in Coeur d’Alene.

“It was 95 degrees. That cake just totally disintegrated on us, right in front of everybody from the international press, Ernest Hemingway’s son and his wife, all the famous people there.”

Hemingway took it in stride, Steele says. She sympathized with the chefs, threw her wrist bouquet on the cake and went for a bottle of champagne.

Laurie Brainard of Laurie’s Special Cakes in Spokane was once flown to Hawaii, all expenses paid, to decorate a cake.

She created the wedding cake for Spokane Mayor Jack Geraghty’s daughter last year. The “Sheila Cake,” draped in strands of pearls with whipped cream frosting and gourmet layers including white Irish creme, chocolate Kahlua and carrot, served more than 500 people.

Brainard has used ladders to decorate 10- and 12-tiered cakes. She’s worked with a 100-year-old cake top that originally came by covered wagon.

But one of her most memorable jobs was the time she got a call at 4:30 a.m. for a wedding cake that same day.

“It was just for a small wedding,” says Brainard. “It was a two-tiered cake, for about 50 servings.” She made the cake, topped it with fresh flowers and made one bride very happy.

The fancier the cake, the greater the risks on the way to the reception.

Five years ago, decorator Paula Muto-Strom had a mishap with one of her very first cakes. She and her husband, Dennis Strom, were loading a four-tiered poppy seed cake into their car when she tripped on a gate post in the ground. Out slipped the second tier.

“It fell top side down into the gravel,” says Muto-Strom. “(The cake) was designed with flowers that would swirl, going both directions, so we had to have it.”

Fortunately, another decorator in town had a spare cake in her freezer - a heart-shaped chocolate cake. Working furiously, Muto-Strom decorated it to match the other cakes.

She then learned a lesson in putting flowers on a frozen cake.

“The flowers started falling off the side,” says Muto-Strom. “I had to wait for the cake to thaw.”

The finished product was picture perfect, as photographs show. “It looked pretty good,” she says proudly.

But just getting the cake into the car isn’t the end of the challenge. Muto-Strom is well aware of every pothole in the city.

“One of the hardest things with a wedding cake is the delivery,” she says. “If you’ve never had a cake in the back of your car, you have no idea what the streets of Spokane, Washington, are like.”

Cake decorators are often perfectionists, taking great pride in their work.

Carmen Quinones-Skrien, owner of Cakes by Carmen in Spokane, occasionally loses sleep over her elaborate European-style cake designs.

Her most recent masterpiece was a five-tiered, 125-pound Edwardian cake based on the ornate ceiling ornamentation in a New York City mansion. It was featured at the Davenport Hotel reception for Spokane-born former figure skater Toyka Raol on May 26.

“That’s what I do - the more unusual, the better,” says Quinones-Skrien, who’s been decorating cakes as a hobby for the past 2 1/2 years.

“The cake is the centerpiece of a reception. I want to do the type of cake that, when you walk in, it really stands out and people say, ‘Wow!”’

While wedding cakes are probably best left to the professionals, here are a couple of basic cake recipes to try at home - a vanilla version from Quinones-Skrien, and a chocolate alternative.

Vanilla Cake

From Carmen Quinones-Skrien of Cakes by Carmen in Spokane

4 1/2 cups cake flour

3 cups sugar

5 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 cups vegetable oil

2 cups whole milk

6 large eggs

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (preferably Caribbean)

1 teaspoon almond extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put all ingredients in mixer and beat 5 minutes, until well blended. Pour into 4 greased, 9-inch round pans. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, inserting a toothpick in middle of cake to check for doneness.

Remove from oven. Cool 10 minutes; turn out of pans and cool completely on wire racks. Decorate with your favorite frosting.

Yield: 4 round 9-inch cakes.

Chocolate Genoise

From “A Passion for Chocolate” (William Morrow and Company)

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

6 large eggs

3/4 cup superfine sugar

1 tablespoon honey, optional

1 1/2 cups sifted cake flower

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, lightly spooned

Grease one 8- by 8- by 2-inch square pan, line bottom with parchment or wax paper, then grease again and flour.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter and add the vanilla. Set aside to keep warm.

In a large mixing bowl set over a pan of simmering water, heat the eggs, sugar, and honey (if used) until just lukewarm, stirring constantly to prevent curdling. Using the whisk attachment of an electric mixer, beat the mixture on high speed for 5 minutes or until tripled in volume. (A hand beater may be used, but beat for at least 10 minutes.

While the eggs are beating, sift together the flour and cocoa.

Remove 1 cup of the egg mixture and thoroughly whisk it into the warm melted butter.

Sift half the flour mixture over the remaining egg mixture and fold it in gently but rapidly with a large balloon whisk, slotted skimmer or rubber spatula until almost all the flour has disappeared.

Repeat with the remaining flour, folding just until the flour has disappeared completely. Fold in the butter mixture until just incorporated.

Pour immediately into the prepared pan and bake 25 to 30 minutes or until the cake has started to shrink slightly from the sides of the pan (no need for a cake tester; once the sides shrink, the cake is done). Avoid opening the oven door before the minimum time, or the cake could fall.

Loosen the sides of the cake with a small metal spatula, and unmold at once onto a lightly greased rack. Reinvert to cool.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings.