A wedding cake must not only look fabulous, it must existentially be fabulous.
It must taste like love, rich yet light, charming, surprising, and made with
enough butter to be considered naughty. This is not easily achieved. Many
wedding cakes are all style, all royal icing curlicues and Swiss dots and
decorative plastic doves and no substance. I wanted a cake. Javier agreed; the
love of good pastry is one of the things that unites us.
So we were surprised on a recent visit to my parents that my mother hustled us
to the So Neat Café and Bakery in backwater, backwoods Tilghman Island on
Maryland’s mosquito-ridden Eastern Shore. The bakery—owned by Lesbian
anesthesiologists and named after a horse—was decorated with crops, bridles, and
saddles. The décor did not inspire confidence. Neither did the platter of
lopsided cupcakes or the dollops of frostings and fillings beside them. But, my
God, we stayed all afternoon.
We sampled pound cake with apricot glaze, fruit cake, white cake, yellow cake,
and the owner’s signature orange burst cake with chocolate ganache. We picked at
the crumbs and looked longingly toward the kitchen where she stood barefoot,
talking on the phone to another customer. “Yeah,” we overheard her saying. “I
can do a key lime mousse. When do you want it? Uh-hunh. Sure thing.” It was hard
not to be in love with her.
Because we couldn’t decide, we went with two cakes, a Southern tradition. The
groom’s cake is orange burst covered in the darkest chocolate ganache. My cake,
the wedding cake, is three tiers of white almond cake filled with fresh
raspberries, frosted with vanilla butter cream and decorated with bees made out
of sliced almonds. “Most women do not like insects,” Javier said.
“Well, most Latin men can dance.” “Touché,” he said. “You have a point.”
Now that I have chosen a cake, it’s official. I am getting married. Wow. I
thought “getting married” only happened to other women, the ones in the back
pages of the Smith College Alumnae Magazine.
The Dress
Filene’s Basement is a discount department store headquartered in downtown Boston. I went there yesterday. It was hell.
To begin, I should explain that I am not much of a shopper. I take after my father. He is affectionately known as “The Spoiler.” He has spoiled many a quick run to the mall. That he must pick something out or help someone else pick something out of the rows and rows and stacks and stacks and shelves and shelves of stuff is beyond him. He imagines a shopping experience wherein clothes that are beautiful and fit perfectly are simply brought to the house.
Elizabeth Miller Bastos, a displaced Pittsburgher, currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Javier and an assortment of fish and plants. She daylights as a mid-level fundraising executive and moonlights as a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Appalachian Mountain Club Magazine, JewishHistory.com, Poetism.com and in Inkwell Magazine. She can be reached at seapup_3@juno.com.
