Long Cake, or How to Get Out of a Long Stupor

My first wedding cake and my most recent

There are things that can’t be done in a home kitchen.

Or, perhaps I should say, there are things that I won’t do in my home kitchen now that I know what it’s like on the other side.

This past Saturday, I made a 5-foot-long wedding cake, serving 200 people. I’d wanted to make one of these colossal cakes after seeing so many of them on my social media feed. So when a new client asked for one, I jumped.

They’re a big trend right now — a cake that stretches horizontally rather than vertically. It reminds me how much I love playing with scale: making food either obnoxiously small or so large it become a hazard. The tiny cakes remind me that one doesn’t need an occasion to enjoy something so celebratory. The ginormous one filled me with pride thinking about all the things I had to learn over the last 3 years to allow me to pull this off.

The Day of the Long Cake was reminiscent of The Day of My First Wedding Cake two years ago. The cake was for Koby, a friend and owner of Baby’s Bagels, and his now-wife Nikki. I made them a tiered-cake and two sheet cakes. Still operating the business out of my apartment, I’ll put this into home-kitchen terms: the cake layers alone required about 7 batches of the recipe you’d use to make a single birthday cake. Obviously, that ingredient quantity would overwhelm my small mixer, so I made the cake batter in multiple rounds. And, obviously, all of that cake would congest my oven if baked at once, so I had the oven on all day, pulling one batch out and immediately putting another one in. But also, I did not yet own enough cake pans to make 6 layers of sheet cake at a time. So after the first sheets came out, I’d wait for them to cool, flip them out of the pans, wash said pans in the sink, refill, then finally bake again.

Albeit inefficient, it was my only option. On the afternoon of wedding day, after I finished decorating the cakes, I called my mom in tears. I feared Koby and Nikki weren’t going to like them. It took me 2 hours to put the tiered cake together, and when you’re staring at something for that long, it’s hard to see it objectively. And given that it was the first tiered cake I’d ever made, I didn’t yet know the decorating principles I know now, like how florals like to be placed in order to flow, how to make a large cake look cohesive, and how essential it is to take breaks from looking at it.

So the inevitable weepy cry to my mother released the pressure I’d been holding in all day — the pressure of making the most important cake for the most important day of someone’s life! And they asked me to do it! And I’m a fraud! What if the design doesn’t match their vision at all? I didn’t triple check my notes, what if they hate purple and want something classic and refined? I’ve never done this before, how do I know the cake won’t come tumbling down during delivery?

It sounds ridiculous, but those were real spirals.

Another thing I’ve learned since then? There are few greater highs in this life than the exhilaration of having just delivered a wedding cake. In the minutes after, walking out of the venue with the fate of the cake no longer in your hands, those initial spirals are replaced by a manic euphoria.

Unfortunately, this thrill is short lived. The bliss is soon interrupted by a new batch of concerns: what if the cake collapses or the custard filling is grainy? What if it’s unsliceable? Picturing 120 people eating the cake I made, at least one person is going to hate it. What if it’s bad and I have to refund it all and then everyone I’ve ever known is mad at me?!

These worries, though nonsensical, didn’t completely ease until I heard from Koby days later. Having gotten married on April Fools Day, the couple teased their guests, sealing their marriage with a fake blood oath using a Samurai sword. Koby sent me a photo of the cake, hacked into pieces with that same sword. I guess that meant it was a success.

Since that day, I’ve made and transported many wedding cakes. I now work in a commercial kitchen, so it’s not a big lift for me to bake that much cake. I still get nerves when decorating a wedding cake, but I have more of a process now so I can get through the intrusive thoughts. This includes putting on noise-canceling headphones and pressing play on “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” radio on Spotify. It’s a great playlist and for the past 3 years Celine Dion has subsequently topped my Spotify Wrapped. The second I hear that piano overture I am locked in.

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In March of this year, something shifted in my motivation at work. I’ve got a big project in the works but it’s slow moving and a long while away. I’m in a bit of limbo. Things are stable over here at Lady Flour – I have a regular work schedule, cake orders are coming in consistently, I have multiple retail customers around the city allowing me to essentially be in multiple places at once.

But I’m bored. My work feels predictable, and while that is a great feeling on so many levels, I’m starting to feel like that kid who acts out in class because they already know the material. I should be grateful for the ease right now, but I miss feeling like I’m working on something creative.

Enter The Long Sheet Cake, the perfect thing to wake me from my long stupor.

When Faith, a new client, reached out to me with her vision, it was so easy for me to say yes. I adore a challenge, it’s the entire reason this business exists – I take things too far and say yes to things without being sure I can pull them off. So I was excited to do something I’d never done before. Plus, unlike when I made the Samurai Cakes, I now have enough experience to know that I actually could do this without disrupting my regular schedule. I have an oven large enough to bake efficiently. I know how to make a massive volume of Italian meringue buttercream. I’m an expert in using the temperature-stable sugar cement to construct strong cakes and pipe intricate details. I’ve transported enough cakes to know that it’s actually not that scary.

And yet, Long Cake Day felt the exact same as Wedding Cake Cut With Samurai Sword Day. All of the anxieties crept back in, and what was worse was that I had to wait until the evening to start assembling it. Once I’d begin putting it together, the cake would be too large to go back in the walk-in fridge. So instead of getting it out the way first thing in the morning like I normally would, this giant cake was looming over me all day. By the time I was frosting, my nerves were absolutely shot. But it’s crazy how quickly the intro of Celine Dion’s orchestral ballad calms me down.

I often look back in disbelief at the quantity of cake I produced in my small apartment. I can’t believe how many batches of a single batter I was willing to make for one cake. Or how I’d be in my kitchen from 7am to 11pm preparing for a pop-up event. Having now worked in two different commercial kitchens, I’m in awe of anyone who still does this kind of scale from home because you couldn’t pay me to do that again. I’ve grown used to a certain level of efficiency – having a bigger kitchen allows me to produce at a volume large enough to cover the kitchen rental and pay myself a livable wage. I loathe making small batches of anything at work because it feels like a waste of time, even though I know that can’t actually be true. Ironically, baking at a higher volume has given me back so many hours in my day.

But the Long Cake brought me right back to those early Lady Flour days, when everything was novel and I was constantly wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I needed that little shake up. I’m a girl who needs a project and just enough anxiety to wonder if it’s going to work out.