wedding-cake-tasting

when i was younger, my mother used to buy my grandmother's birthday cake at konditor meister. their cakes were these enormous, wonderful confections - a dark, dark chocolate cake filled with whipped cream and cherries, with a bit of rum. on top, they were decorated with huge chocolate-covered strawberries. in keeping with the times, we weren't allowed to eat the frosting (buttercream). i'll have you know that i gleefully eat frosting now, although my mother's ploy worked to a degree - my tolerance for frosting is still pretty low and i can't stand supermarket frosting, where you can still taste the grit of the sugar. there are certain occasions when the grit of sugar is an acceptable texture, for example, whipped cream. frosting is not one of those occasions.

i have no idea how my mother found konditor meister, but we went there for a cake tasting yesterday for nora and charles' wedding. the cake-tasting room is behind the retail bakery (there are separate entrances - the cake-tasting room has the nice one). it looks like someone's parlor - it's a dead ringer for a wedding-related place, with its faux-victorian wood-and-velveteen chairs, polished wood tables, and silver cake platters up the wazoo. the only giveaway that you're not in a wedding wonderland is that you look out the window and see...the rest of braintree.

however, the cake makes up for it. they were pretty busy when we got there, but soon enough brought over a bunch of cakes to try. nora and charles had pretty much decided on a chocolate cake rather than the traditional "gold" (see, there's the whole branding thing going on again...gold cake = yellow cake, but if you were the typical american and had a choice between "gold" and "yellow," what would you pick?), but we tried a bunch of yellow cakes anyway. there were a couple of fruity cakes that were good - mango and lemon - but they aren't particularly wedding-y, in my opinion. the ideal wedding cake is decadent but not heavy, elaborate but not tacky. anyway, nora and charles chose a chocolate cake with raspberry mousse (a good choice because the chocolate mousses were all gritty, which was a disappointment), with a buttercream frosting. the icing design is quite pretty, and on the modern side - it looks like um...a cross between fans and seashells (in a line-drawing, japanese wood-print kind of way) piped all over the cake. the cake will also have buttercream roses on it, just on the top.

anyway, if you've ever gone either to a wedding cake tasting or the chocolate bar at the meridien hotel, the experience you get of having eaten too many rich things in not enough time is the same at each place. you look at these slices of cake and think, "oh, i could definitely finish that." but then you factor in that it's 11am, and that there are now eight slices of cake on the table - the fact that the table is small makes it look like there is even more cake than there is - and you realize your eyes, once again, are much bigger than your stomach. despite the ease with which one becomes sated while eating cake, i told nora that if people don't eat their slices of wedding cake, i will eat all of the leftovers, because it would really be a shame if this cake went unloved like that.

what you see in the photo above is the box of patisserie that they sent us home with. we joked about them being gone by the time we got back to their house, but in reality, we each knew that we were kidding ourselves if we thought that was actually going to happen. the two front rows are chocolate-covered strawberries, and the last row contains a cream puff, two little mousse cups (one chocolate, one raspberry, with really remarkably good chocolate cups), and a mini eclair. maybe i'm just jaded, or have seen too many chocolate mice/penguins, but these tuxedoed strawberries are much cuter than burdick's chocolate mice and penguins.