It’s wedding season! And we’re kicking off the party with these sweet and stunning wedding-themed cookies. This particular batch was made for a Shabbat Kallah, but they’re also perfect for a bridal shower or sheva brachot.
This was the first time I’d made wedding cake-shaped cookies and it got me thinking. Occasionally, before someone orders a cake, he or she asks for a sketch of the finished product. It may be a new design that I don’t already have a photograph of, or something particularly complex that the customer can’t imagine for himself. Of course this is a perfectly reasonable request. One problem: I can’t draw. Here is the one image I can recreate perfectly every time. My best friend in elementary school taught me and I have never forgotten how to do it.
But that’s it. So when I’m called upon to draw a three dimensional object with intricate designs, I find myself in a bit of a quandary.
But now I’ve finally hit upon a solution. It may be slightly time consuming and outrageously inefficient, but by George! Bake a batch of cookies in the required shape. Experiment with different decorating styles on each one until you’re happy with the results. Next, send a photo to the customer, have her choose a favourite and voila!
In this case, I designed fifteen or twenty different (yet admittedly simple) wedding cakes. I did want them all to share a colour scheme and be thematically cohesive. Since I hadn’t thought of it yet, there was no ulterior motive in the decorating choices. But had I been experimenting with potential three-tier cake designs, there could have been wildly different models.
Stage set designers use this method all the time. They build miniatures of the set in order to discuss options with the director and the construction team. The miniatures also serve as models to use as reference when building and painting. Why not adapt the same theory for cake design?
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