Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Cakes! Cakes! Cakes!

June is here! It's that time when '70s brides traditionally sweated through their layers of white organza as they tried not to drag said organza through the icing while cutting the first slice of wedding cake. In short, that means today we're looking at The Wilton Book of Wedding Cakes (1971). 


One of my grandmas used to sell decorated cakes, so it's also the month my childhood self traditionally watched grandma decorate wedding cakes while she told about the time she was making a cake and ants invaded her kitchen, so she had to draw big rings of dish soap on the table around the cake layers to keep the ants out.

These cakes are a lot like the cakes she used to make. I'm pretty sure she preferred birthday cakes because they were usually more imaginative. (She was quite amused when one customer ordered a birthday cake with a black poodle and purple mushrooms.) Wedding cakes were usually just piping white icing, and piping white icing, and piping white icing-- with maybe just a subtle hint of green or pink somewhere for contrast-- and then filling in the blanks spots with plastic flotsam. You know, like this "Royal Wedding" design.

Fun fact: Whoever owned this book before me apparently sold this cake for $120.15. At least, that's how I'm interpreting the "120.15" handwritten in the book next to the instructions on constructing this thing.

Grandma probably would have been more excited about making Rainbow Duet because at least it had some colorful flowers to stick on.

Fun fact: The big cake is for the wedding, and the "miniature replica" is for the couple "to freeze for the first anniversary." If the happy couple had room in their freezer for a three-layer cake-- even if they deconstructed it!-- in one of those old early 1970s freezers, I would be very impressed.

I found myself more drawn to the oddball cakes, like Something New "For today's bride and groom."

I love the big candle thunked into the top. I'm not sure I'd call it "nouveau art" wedding cake so much as "sweet sixteen cake for a girl who is now yelling at her parents because she hates the cake."

There are cakes for everything wedding-related. The rehearsal dinner is apparently supposed to be accompanied by a cake. 

The cake should look like it's loosely patterned after a wall-hanging your aunt made the family as a gift and only hang up when they know she's coming over to visit.

The silver and gold anniversary cakes are mostly pretty boring, looking rather like the wedding cakes with silver or gold accents in place of the white. The ones for the smaller milestones are much more interesting.

I love the inexplicable curlicues on this one. The heart looks a little like an upside-down cross-section of a Grinch head, and the sad little "Happy 5th" looks like it's being contemplated by a pair of seahorses.

My favorite idea of all, though, is for a bridal shower.

Shower the bride with cookbooks! Top it all off with a cookbook cake. The thought of a table laden with vintage cookbooks is almost enough to make me want to time travel to a '70s bridal shower... and steal all the bride's loot. I guess the upside-down cross section of Grinch from the fifth anniversary cake has made my tiny little heart shrink even smaller. Luckily for the old-timey brides, I can only mentally time travel with books like The Wilton Book of Wedding Cakes.

4 comments:

  1. That first anniversary cake may be just as stale as the marriage after spending a year in the freezer. How would you protect it from freezer burn, especially with 1970s technology? I know that people thought Tupperware could do everything, but we know it has its limits.

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    1. The frosting coating might help... but still. It couldn't have been great.

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  2. Ha! The idea of getting a cake-sized fountain for a parakeet to play in cracks me up! I'd never have thought of that. The price could be for all the plastic stuff the cake would need. However, my grandma owned most of the plastic stuff (fountains, columns, tier supports-- pretty much everything but the toppers, which customers usually wanted to choose and keep) already and just had the customers return it after the wedding so she could reuse it. I don't think she'd worry too much about the cost unless somebody really wanted something she didn't already have.
    I learned to do a little cake decorating as a teenager, but I would never have the patience or skill for a wedding cake either. I could handle a birthday cake with a few roses and daisies or one baked in a shaped pan that just needed to be covered with colored icing from a star tip, like the ones at the top of the page here: https://thevintagetoyadvertiser.org/2018/03/07/1982-wilton-yearbook-of-cake-decorating/

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  3. You don't even necessarily have to freeze them. My grandma would make extra icing flowers and just leave them to dry and store them in the cupboard (well, when she didn't have ants!). And when I was little and didn't mind the thought of just straight-up eating icing, I would sneak a few from time to time.

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