Western Wedding

From ButterCream To Montana

Wedding cakes have come a long way since the ancient Greeks introduced the tradition, handing each guest a "sesame" a cake made from pounded, roasted sesame seeds mixed with honey to take home as a souvenir and, possibly, a harbinger of love.

Today's western wedding accessory typically conclude with multitiered masterpieces that look too good to eat, festooned with frosting and flowers made from fondant, a thick sugar frosting, and topped with fresh floral bouquets or figurines representing eternal love.

"A wedding cake is a big thing," says Cliff Simon, who spent 16 years as a cake artist in New York and wrote a humorous book, They Ate My Cake, which chronicles his cake-making experiences. "You should always have cake" he says.

But just what kind of western wedding accessory with cake should you have? Traditionally, Europeans serve a fruit cake topped with marzipan, but Americans have expanded the menu to include just about anything, as long as the cake looks good and tastes divine.

Simon has created some pretty heavenly cakes. When Diana Ross married Arnie Ness, she commissioned Simon to create her a cake resembling Mount Everest to honor her husband's achievement of climbing the mountain. Simon concocted a 4-foot-high spiral of walnut torte filled with lemon curd and topped with chocolate frosting. He decorated the cake with white chocolate and candied jellies to look like the jewelry on a Faberge egg.

Simon once baked a gold Faberge egg wedding cake nearly 3 feet high and covered with carefully crafted jewels made from faceted candy jellies and edible gold powder. He's also created sheet cakes displaying reproductions in flavorful frostings of romantic paintings by Chagall and Matisse or portraits of the happy couple.

"There is no specific," Simon says. "People want everything and anything." They're willing to spend almost anything, too. Prices range from $ 5 to $ 15 a slice in New York, according to Simon, who recalls a $ 15,000 wedding cake made by Manhattan's famed cake-maker Sylvia Weinstock.

Thankfully, Santa Fe's cake chefs don't charge quite as much. But the prices vary, depending on how extravagant you want your cake to be. The most popular wedding cake in Santa Fe is the classic four-tiered cake made with chocolate and cappuccino flavors and decorated with ribbons of buttercream frosting and edible fresh flowers, according to Gaston Gothuey, owner of Desert Desserts.

Western Wedding