How to make your own wedding cake and eat it too

Start early, say at twelve, with Chris O’Donnell sword-fighting on the screen and your heart beating as you think, So this is a man. This is when you start making the design of your wedding cake, made up of the first illusion of love and everything that it implies. You think about the layers, the flavour, the filling, the icing, and the decorations. Five layers seem too tall and ominous, and three is for a girl’s quinceañera, the big 15th birthday ball that every Mexican girl dreams of. You can always go for five on an expanded array, like your aunt Cora’s, but you already have this image of three roses climbing up over the layers of the cake, so you go for a respectable four layers and add a sparkle of sugar pearls. Not too many, otherwise it would look tacky and people would ooh at you and whisper how distasteful you are behind your back. Maybe thirty-three, one for each one of the traits you wish for in your future husband. Vanilla is the reasonable flavour, because it’s white and neutral; the filling: strawberries and cream, to add a touch of red inside and tartness to the sweet.

Then you find that imagining the cake is much easier that finding the ingredients. Every boy you like turns away from you, even those that tell you how pretty you are or what a great friend you are. Confusion arises in high-school, when your best friend keeps going to your house to do his homework and watch basketball games with you, then is caught around the corner from school kissing your best girlfriend. The betrayal makes you wonder if maybe there’s something wrong in what you wished. There is deep contemplation and a self-reflective video-diary that you record over two weeks of nightly monologues. Everything seems to be right regarding what you want in a man, and you make the shopping list to start baking the cake. However, the book you’re reading at the time makes you forget for a moment your self-compassion and you fall, engrossed, to the adventures of The Three Musketeers. Imagine your puzzlement when you find that the hero that moves all kinds of feelings in you is not, as you imagined, D’Artagnan, but the great and deep Athos. After months of intense inner-battle with this revelation that tastes in men tend to change over time, you decide that you have the more reason to find the man of your life now as you start university, so you go and get the ingredients for your cake and put them in the baggage that you’ll take to Italy where you’ll do a degree on art restoration. Seemed like the most suitable course, considering all the restoration you have to do to your soul after the past eleven (give or take) rejections.

You’re eighteen when you begin your BA. You think big things are around the corner. Yet you’re not the only one hoping to utterly excel in the course and the competition between you and your classmates gets severe. This means that you have no real time for a love-life. The ingredients sit in a shelf in your dorm room, waiting patiently. One night you remember your list and you turn to the young man who sits beside you on the bench outside the lab. Lucio is cute and charming, and he is in the middle of telling you the story of how his family came to live in Florence from Milan, when you put a hand on his wrist. He takes the hint and leans over to kiss you. You start measuring the ingredients and are ready to mix them, but the mixer does not work. There is no power. There were no fireworks.

Needless to say that Lucio is not your first boyfriend. You have to wait for the power to come back and by that time Karlo has entered into your life. He is not in your program, but he knows enough about art and philosophy to have good conversations with him. He’s also a good dancer and an incredible skater. And even though you’ve had nothing to compare it with, you simply know that the sex is great. There’s enough power to blend all of the ingredients, and sooner than you know you’ve got the first layer. But your three years of university are over, and you’ve not been able to get a job and stay in Florence. It’s too early in the relationship to get married. The oven was too slow and the other layers weren’t baked in time.

You go back home, and simply put the second layer in your oven, hoping that the action will call your Mr Right, but a year’s passed and the layer’s baked and there’s been no knock on the door or ring of the phone. You’ve been busy, however, working in an art gallery and having virtually no time for anything besides your work. One Friday as you get home you’re in the middle of deciding if you should put the next layer in or if to wait this time, when the phone rings and that client who bought the Pollock last week asks you for a date. You put the layer in and prepare to fall in love. Joe is rich and decadent; you’ve never seen someone so beautiful nor had anyone spoil you so much. The years go by and gifts pile. The bed squeaks and you subconsciously compare. The only problem is that he only has about two or three nights a week, being the busy businessman that he is. The fourth layer is about to come out of the oven and you decide to start the icing while the bread cools down. He proposes to you on Valentine’s Day, with a side of champagne and chocolate cake. You say yes and soar to the sky only to make your fall more vertiginous when you find out that he’s been cheating on you with his ex, his secretary and the messenger from the deli below his office.

Now you’ve got four iced layers and the ingredients for the sugar roses, plus a pan of leftover dough and the remains of the icing… oh, and the bag of thirty-three sugar pearls. You take them out and count them, listing the qualities you want in the man of your dreams. Everything seems just right with that list, so you can’t understand why it just doesn’t work out. After you’ve finished the leftover icing and put the dough in the fridge, you decide to put yourself out there. At age twenty-five you start going on dates and measuring up the guys you meet with your precious list. Interesting, fun, intelligent, artistic, philosophical, honest, loyal, maybe even good in bed… they all have something good, or a combination of many of the traits you look for, but none all at the same time. What’s more, some are alcoholics, players or gamblers, or sometimes things even worse. You can’t understand what’s going wrong, but your spirits go lower and lower with each candidate. You’re a few years into your thirties and you begin to realise that maybe that man of your dreams doesn’t really exist. You remember you’ve got enough dough for one more layer of cake, and you wonder if making that fifth unplanned layer could make things move again for you. The annoying dates you go on make you keep putting it off, however. One night you take the dough out from the fridge, but instead of putting it in the oven, you put it in your mouth, morsel by morsel, as fast as you can. That night you can’t sleep, partly because of the utter disappointment you feel about your hopes and dreams, partly because your stomach is turning around at a faster pace than you are in bed.

You’ve hit rock bottom. A week passes. Two weeks. Three weeks. They call you from the art gallery, asking you if you’ve got over your flu and if you can come in and see a new client. You get dressed and go, vowing not to get involved with another client again, no matter how attractive he might be. But the new client doesn’t seem at all like the previous Pollock buyer; he seems natural and relaxed, and probably even honest. That night, as you cook dinner, the bag of ingredients for the sugar roses falls on the counter. It hits you: you’re an artistic type, use your art as a way out. And you start making the sugar roses, slowly, meticulously. It takes you as long as it takes James to woo you. When the roses are done, you stand back and admire your work. Then you remember something’s missing: the pearls. You place them on the cake as you list all the qualities you’ve noticed in James. Thirty-three. Each exactly the same as you’d wished for. When he asks you to marry him, you say that only if you can use your wedding cake.

~*~

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