Picture the scene: it’s midsummer, a bucolic wedding is mid-flow, the bride is radiant, the groom pristine. They stand above their guests in a doorway while caterers ascend the stone staircase carrying the ceremonial wedding cake. But wait! One of the caterers is wobbling! The cake is slipping! The caterer reaches for it but it falls from his hands and tumbles to the ground: splat. A dog appears from nowhere and begins to eat the crumbs. And all of it, every excruciating moment, is captured on camera.
Is this one of my night terrors? Well, yes, but it was also the wedding of Anna Boden – the eldest daughter of Boden clothing founder Johnnie – to her now husband Oliver last week. Johnnie took to Instagram to post photos of the day including a blow-by-blow pictorial account of the cake catastrophe. As a former wedding caterer and wedding cake maker, when the images popped up on my Instagram feed, my stomach dropped faster than the cake.
Because, of course, a dropped wedding cake is a cakemaker’s worst nightmare. Wedding cakes are no ordinary cakes: a lot more rides on them than a Colin the Caterpillar. I have spent many hours baking, decorating, erecting, moving, and slicing wedding cakes – but I’ve spent even longer worrying about them. The logistics of stacking and moving a wedding cake are complex, not to mention leaving it unattended around party-goers for a prolonged period of time. Will it melt? Will it slide? Will it get knocked? In the days that followed Johnnie’s Instagram post, I thought about the Boden cake – and those poor caterers – a lot.
