How To Make A Wedding Cake

There are three ways to make a wedding cake.

The first way is to hire a professional baker, one who has all the right tools and tricks and flavors and decorative flare. You order the cake, they make it, they drop it off, you eat it. Maybe you even freeze a slice for next year.

The second way is to have 5 different people from your office each make a layer without consulting one other on flavor, density or size. Someone also has to cut a bunch of 4-inch lengths of 1-inch thick dowel and a stack of cardboard circles. Someone else should bring a glue gun. First, you decide which cake should go on the bottom, then you shimmy it onto a cardboard circle. Next, shove three dowels into the cake, in a triangulated pattern. Then, squeeze dabs of hot glue on the top of the three dowels, and put the next cardboard circle on top. Be careful to clean up any floating glue strands.

Now, do it all over; the next cake, the next three dowels, the next set of hot glue dabs, and over and over until you've run out of layers. If your cake looks like it might topple, grab some string. Tie it onto a few of the dowels, then pull the ends taut and affix them to the edge of the table with binder clips. If things are still iffy, find a few Extra Fine Point Sharpies, and cram them between the layers of cardboard. Then, tiptoe away and cross your fingers that it stays standing until the speeches are over.

And the third way? Well, I'm not quite sure. But it couldn't possibly be as good as the first or the second.