Wedding Traditions #4- The Cake

The bride is supposed to be the showstopper at a wedding right? I've begun to wonder if the popularity of the bride isn't being overtaken by the cake. There are cake shows out there by the dozen. You just gotta love Duff on Ace of Cakes and Buddy Valastro and crew on Cake Boss (and as much as I hate to say it, Martha Stewart). Wedding cakes are crazy nowadays. The decorations are out of this world, absolutely breathtaking, but then again so are the price tags attached to them. It always reminds me of the sticker shock Steve Martin got in Father of the Bride when he saw the $3000 pricetag for Annie's cake ("A cake is flour and sugar and water, isn't it?").

But despite the insanity that today's wedding cakes exude, they actually have a very humble beginning. In Ancient Rome, loaves of wheat bread would be baked as part of the wedding planning. The largest loaf would be crumbled over the tops of the bride's and groom's heads and the more crumbs that fell to the floor, the luckier and happier the couple would be in their married life. The smaller loaves would be broken into pieces by the couple and given to their guests, the idea of "breaking bread."

By the Middle Ages, the wheat bread loaves have morphed into sweeter confections. Makes sense, people ate wheat bread all the time. Sugar was hard to come by and if you have a sweet cake at your wedding, it makes the whole thing more festive and special for everyone in attendance. All the guests would get a slice of wedding cake but young, unmarried women wouldn't eat theirs. According to legend, if you took that piece of wedding cake home with you and slept with it under your pillow, you would dream of the man you were going to marry. I may be taking this a little too literally, but that's sort of gross. I would have cake and frosting and everything else in my hair and rather than having sweet dreams of my future groom, I would be spending a very pissed off night washing my hair and changing the sheets on my bed.

A more modern tradition concerning wedding cakes has the bride and groom feeding each other pieces of cake. This actually has two points of significance. First, it is the opportunity to show their committment to each other; they are actually completing their first joint task as a married couple. And it also shows that they trust each other. Historically, it meant that they trusted that the food wasn't poisoned but now it's that each trusts the other not to smash the ooey gooey frosting all over their face. I have often wondered if this actually turned into the couple's first marital squabble. It would if I were the one getting frosting smeared all over my face. It might be the quickest divorce in history!