There are just some things you never tell a bride-to-be and her groom. Especially if you’re responsible for making their wedding cake and it’s not finished yet even though you’re just four hours away from the start of the ceremony. Oh, and to top it off, you’re lost in the middle of a major metropolitan city 45 miles away from said nuptial confection. Give or take a few miles.

It was literally hours before my friends Marvin and Sarah would be married in a beautiful ceremony overlooking the San Pedro Harbor, and I was somewhere near Slauson and Crenshaw in the slums of Los Angeles, looking for a Mr. Wisdom and his wheatgrass farm.

“Hello,” my frantic voice screamed into my cell phone. “Mr. Wisdom? I can’t find you. Are you sure you’re down here?”

“I am on Slauson near West,” he answered slowly. “In a pink house.” Looking around, I saw dogs running rampant on the sidewalks and the thick layer of trash that lined the gutters, but no pink house. I began to wonder if it really was “wheatgrass” I was buying, and not the other kind of “grass” that might be awesome at first but could possibly result in my arrest. (I promised myself that upon my arrest, my one and only phone call from jail would be to a bakery for a new wedding cake.)

I drove around some more and finally, a bright pink house emerged from the dilapidated rows of buildings. He exists! I parked in a red zone, stepped over some homeless people lining the sidewalk and pushed my way through a creaky screen door. After weaving my way through bedrooms and hallways (and feeling weird about walking through a complete stranger’s home), I found an older, distinguished man in a white linen suit. Dazed, he looked up from his newspaper and smiled slowly. Oh my God, I thought. I really did commit to buying a massive quantity of weed.

“Are you Mr. Wisdom?” I asked tentatively.
He smiled even wider. “I am he.”
“Great! I’m Cynthia, here to pick up the wheatgrass I ordered.” Please don’t hand me the contents of a Ziploc bag.

Mr. Wisdom took me behind his house to a shed surrounded by another batch of homeless people. “You know, I’ve been growing wheatgrass for more than 25 years,” he said, ignoring all of them. One of them looked at me, nodding his head knowingly as if he was listening to some internal lecture and needed to convey his understanding.

“I will help you carry,” he said to me. I nodded back.

Mr. Wisdom opened the rickety shed to reveal his pride and joy – rows and rows grass flats, tall, in bright shades of emerald green. Some glittered under the sunlight that managed to make its way through cracks in the roof.

I grabbed a flat and started walking toward my car with Orlando, the bobble-headed homeless man. After I thanked him and handed him some cash, he admitted to me that he had a drinking problem.

“Do not,” I instructed while pointing to the cash, “buy booze or drugs with this.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he promised. He swore to his God that he wouldn’t, and as I got in my car, he rambled on about the bible.

Orlando was interesting and I kind of wished I had more time to listen to his stories, but I had to leave. I now had three hours, including drive time, to get home, finish the cake, pack everything into the car and drive to the wedding location, which was about an hour and two freeways away without traffic.

But, at least I had the wheatgrass. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

The next few hours was a blur of activity – last minute frosting, setting up the stand (which my handy boyfriend Devin made), driving to San Pedro with the A/C blasting while praying that the cake wouldn’t melt in this sudden heat wave we were having. It didn’t, and luckily, I did manage to take a few photos to prove it.

ABOUT THE CAKE
Marvin and Sarah wanted a cake to match their purple and white eco-friendly theme. While perusing cake photos online, I came across this one from New Jersey’s PinkCakeBox bakery that we would use for inspiration. There were 107 chocolate cupcakes with white chocolate frosting and 107 vanilla cupcakes with lemon curd and cream cheese frosting. (I had made quite a few extra just in case some didn’t survive the car ride.)

THANKS
Mr. Wisdom and Orlando weren’t the only people who deserve thanks for making this cake possible. There was also Bob, the lead man at a downtown L.A. purveyor, who agreed to sell me a specific brand of high-ratio shortening that I needed for the cake recipe. (Apparently, you can’t just walk into a store and buy this stuff.) Bob never sells to the public but after a few pleading phone calls, he relented. I now had a 38-pound tub of fat (pictured below for your viewing pleasure), the same tub that I tripped over when there was a fire in my closet.

My boyfriend built the cupcake stand out of masonite and PVC, with an intricate metal tubing system running through the center PVC pipes. He covered the masonite with contact paper, and together we glued purple ribbon along the edges. When it was done, it stood proud over four feet tall.

The cake recipe comes from Chef Simpson of Orange Coast College, where I went to culinary school. It was a recipe I fell in love with while I was taking the beginning baking class.

And Joe, my former partner in said culinary school, spent one night filling 100 vanilla cupcakes with lemon curd. I’m sure his hands ached for days afterward.

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a small army to make a wedding cake. Thank you guys so, so much, and thank you, dear readers, for reading.

– Cynthia Furey

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under At the table. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.