making my wedding cake

two cakes inspired by swan pies from centuries ago

photo by robert marcillas

i intended to send this post out shortly after our wedding four months ago, but it kept getting put off for other things that felt more timely, now that we are on honeymoon it feels like the perfect time to reminisce.

making wedding cakes is such a treat - it is always such an honor to collaborate with a couple on such an important piece of their big day. it was no different at my own wedding, it was one of my favorite parts of the whole affair. 

as i have written about before (see savory pies and vegetables), much of our wedding dinner was inspired by the art we saw on the day we got engaged. that day, i saw a dish that i had never noticed before, a swan pie, in peter paul rubens and jan brueghel the elder’s the sense of taste, 1618. 

i was immediately enchanted by these swan pies, and quickly became obsessed. for the rest of the trip, i felt like they had a magnetic pull on me. i was finding them everywhere, even in paintings i had seen before.

i quickly knew i wanted to ‘wedding-cake-ify’ the swan pie, but figuring out how to do that was a project. i was constantly coming up with an idea, sitting with it for a while, and then realizing it wouldn’t work for x, y, or z reasons. 

i won’t bore you with telling you ‘how the sausage is made’–so to speak–but i ended up needing the help of my father. we went to home depot together and he kindly made a base that could support the swan’s neck and wings. 

i then made an underlying structure which i covered in rice crispy treats - they’re super light weight, sculptable, hold together well, and are sturdy enough. for decoration of the swan neck and wings, i knew i couldn’t use standard cake decorating tools as i am terrible with piping, gum paste, and fondant. i had to find another way of making the swan’s feathers. after thinking about it for a couple of days, rose petals came to mind - it felt romantic and would be a sweet little reference to the rose petals from the flower girls. to my surprise (and luck), the test worked. 

when the day came to apply the rose petals to the swan’s head and wings, théo helped sort the petals by size, while my aunt and i glued them on one-by-one with melted marshmallows. we then carefully packaged them up and kept them in a dark box for a few days until the wedding.

as for the cake flavors themselves, théo and i had a long back-and-forth, and ultimately, we didn’t come up with anything original. we went with our favorite flavors i bake; one was a chocolate cake with a chocolate cookie crust, and vanilla french meringue buttercream sandwiching chocolate crémeux. the other was my banana cake with spiced cookie crunch, and vanilla french meringue buttercream sandwiching soft banana caramel. 

in the final days leading up to the wedding i baked the cakes and made the fillings on the first day, stacked and filled them on the second, and frosted on the third, then they needed to be walked up 8 flights of stairs, delivered to the venue, placed in chest freezers until the big day. on the day of the wedding when we had to remove them from the chest freezers they were so heavy we almost could not get them out, but my father came to the rescue yet again. my piping idol–and friend–@thegeminibake did some final delicate decorating onto the tiers to complete the cakes.

photos by robert marcillas

i am so grateful to everyone who helped turn my 17th-century-swan-pie-vision to a wedding cake reality. i so loved how they turned out, and it would not have been possible without my expert collaborators: my father, my aunt, sam, and, of course, théo.

two weeks after the wedding i was visiting art galleries in nyc, and i walked into the cecily brown show at paula cooper. as has happened so many times before, my eyes zeroed in. there it was, the swan pie from the sense of taste, the same work that inspired me to make the cakes. finding it there made me reflect on the whole process, and thus write this piece: seeing the original work a year and a half ago, making my own version, and then seeing how it also inspired one of my favorite artists. it was a lovely bookend to the whole wedding cake chapter.