Yes, I know it's been a while, but rather than try to account for where I've been, I'm just going to launch right into the reason this blog is coming out of semi-retirement: my dad got married yesterday! It was about the most perfect wedding ever: my dad, his (now) wife, their five daughters and two sons-in-law, their three brothers and a sister-in-law, a close friend and her daughter, and the couple who introduced the bride and groom. The ceremony was outdoors at a nature center on the edge of a cliff overlooking a gorgeous expanse, and after some champagne-drinking and photo-taking, we made our way to the private room of a fabulous restaurant.
The ceremony was perfect (once we all found the location and the minister got through some horrendous traffic), as was the reception, and I'm delighted to have a new stepmother and two new stepsisters (one of whom is also named Emily!). But the real reason we go to weddings, of course, is because they are an excuse to eat cake. We don't admit it, of course, unless we are twelve years old, as is my youngest sister, Maya (she reminded me of this when I handed her a glass of champagne for the toast after the ceremony). I can't remember now whether Maya began to talk about the cake on the way to the ceremony or only on the way to the reception, but of course she only voiced what everyone else was thinking. Maybe I should only speak for myself, here, but I was certainly thinking about cake and, when we arrived at the restaurant, it was the first thing everyone checked out. The food was delicious -- Italian wedding soup, a salad with roasted beets and feta, and a main course of salmon/chicken/filet mignon/osso buco -- but at some point well before the cake was cut, all attention turned to it.
At my end of the table, we began speculating about how the cake gets cut. Not what the bride and groom do when they feed each other cake and everyone takes pictures, but how the cake then gets turned into the slices we all eat. We realized that none of us had actually seen this process occur -- usually (probably always) at a wedding, after the bride and groom do their thing, the cake disappears and only slices return. Several theories were put forth: perhaps there is some cake-slicing genius who can't be let out of the kitchen because, while a prodigy at pastry carving, he is a complete failure as a human being; maybe there is some kind of machine, similar to the industrial dishwasher, that closes down over the cake and does the work automatically; or perhaps it isn't cake at all, but rather a cardboard box shaped like a cake that has the pre-sliced stuff inside. As theories circulated and proliferated, we all became more and more curious.
Sure enough, after the bride and groom cut the first slice, the waitstaff swooped in to take the cake away. But my dad stopped them and asked if they could cut the cake out there, as his daughters were curious to see how it was done. The waitstaff were a bit thrown by the request -- obviously, nobody had ever questioned the process before -- but they played along, returned the cake to its table, and brought out a stack of empty plates. And then they realized they had no clue what they were doing. So they went to the kitchen and came back with...the cake-slicing genius -- evidence in favor of Theory #1. But apparently he can't do his work in public. After circling the cake for a few seconds, he consulted with my dad, convincing him that everyone would get a better slice (whatever that means) if they cut it in the kitchen. So the cake disappeared, offering evidence in favor of Theory #2. While the cake was gone, my sister Sophie (between halves, steps, and near-steps, I now have six sisters!) went down to the bathroom, which is right next to the kitchen. She poked her head inside and saw a woman with her hands in the cake being reprimanded by the man we had thought was the cake-slicing genius, telling her to be careful because, "It's a wedding cake, dips**t!" I'm not quite sure which theory that proves.
When the slices appeared, we were all momentarily absorbed by eating it (it was a delicious cake, as Sophie and Maya already knew because they had helped to audition the bakers), but then David began to do some cake accounting. Even when additional slices showed up boxed for all of the guests to take home for the next day and the top layer was reserved for the first anniversary (or for the next day!), there was no way all the cake was there. It appeared that everything right under the top layer (as opposed to the part of the bottom layer that stuck out from it) was missing. Perhaps the kitchen staff had simply thrown it away, or perhaps it was evidence of some kind of collusion in the wedding-industrial complex between wedding-cake bakers and wedding-reception servers to ensure on the one hand that marrying couples buy way more cake than they actually need to feed their guests and on the other hand that the servers get to partake in what is undoubtedly everyone's favorite part of a wedding.
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