Guest Leigh Michaels: Historical Wedding Cakes

Linda Banche here. Today I welcome Leigh Michaels and her latest fun-filled Regency historical, The Wedding Affair. Since The Wedding Affair takes place in the context of a wedding, Leigh talks about wedding cakes through the ages.

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And the winners Leigh selected are KarenH and Kitchen Witch! Congratulations. I've sent you both emails. Thanks to all for coming.

Welcome Leigh!

Leigh Michaels:

Since The Wedding Affair is (surprise!) sort of about a wedding, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the bride’s cake and its role in weddings for the last 300 years – since well before the Regency period where this book takes place.

Wedding pastries have been around pretty much forever, in one form or another. In the Roman Empire, a loaf of wheat or barley bread would be baked especially for the wedding, and the groom would eat part of it, then break the rest over the bride’s head to symbolize the dominance he was to have over her in their marriage. The guests would eat the crumbs as a wish for good luck.

Sweet cakes are a fairly recent development. In medieval times, cakes were bread-like with no sweetening, and in France, they were sometimes created from a pile of sweet rolls – rather like the new trend of stacking cupcakes into a tower. Sometimes a bride’s pie was featured – it might be made of fruit or meat, but it always including a hidden ring. The person who found the ring in their portion was thought to be the next to marry. (The tradition of sleeping with a piece of cake underneath one’s pillow, in the hope of dreaming about one’s future spouse, dates as far back as the 1600s.)

For many years the traditional wedding cake in England was a dark, rich fruitcake. That helps to explain the tradition of keeping a slice for the first anniversary, since fruitcake would last that long and still be edible.

But the truly fun story about weddings and cakes is that the many-tiered, tower-like cake that brides and grooms cut today isn’t actually a wedding cake at all. Its proper title is bride’s cake. And not because the groom often gets his own version in chocolate these days, either.

It’s been known as a bride’s cake since shortly after the Great London Fire of 1666, when much of the city burned and Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral and dozens of churches which had been lost to the fire. One of them was St. Bride’s, located on Fleet Street in the city of London and featuring a fanciful four-tiered spire, octagonal in shape and reaching more than 225 feet above street level. The shape of this tower is said to have inspired the modern, multi-tiered, grand spectacle of a wedding cake.

In the 1800s a white cake with white icing would have been a statement of wealth, since the highly-refined sugar needed to produce a white pastry was very expensive. And a tiered cake made before the invention of pillars to help support the weight was mostly created for looks -- the upper layers were made of lightweight spun sugar rather than actual cake (which would have been heavy enough to collapse into the bottom layers).

The sugary icings and fondants used to decorate modern cakes weren’t invented until late in the Victorian era, and pillars didn’t appear till after 1900. Wedding toppers – the small figures of bride and groom – became popular only in the 1950s.

Oh, and what I said at the beginning about the book being “sort of” about a wedding?… the three romances in The Wedding Affair are prompted by the wedding, but they aren’t directly connected. In fact, the wedding itself is mostly in the background. It’s what Alfred Hitchcock called “the McGuffin” – the thing which in his case caused the chase or the murder or the thrill ride, and in my case causes the romance. My three heroes and three heroines are much more interested in the affairs they’re having than they are in the wedding!

So what about you? Did you keep a piece of your wedding cake for a later anniversary? Do you still have a slice in your freezer? Tell us about it – maybe how long you kept it, how many times you moved it from house to house or state to state, and how you celebrated with it!

THE WEDDING AFFAIR BY LEIGH MICHAELS – IN STORES SEPTEMBER 2011
You’re invited to the wedding of the year!
The Duke of Somervale, whose sister’s wedding is the event of the ton, is fighting off debutantes and desperately needs help from beautiful, stubborn Olivia Reyne. But she is engrossed with problems engulfing her dearest friends and family. The last thing Olivia needs is to be embroiled with a duke whose dark gaze makes her forget herself entirely...

Discover a new side of a beloved author as Leigh Michaels draws you into the glittering, glitzy world of Regency England and an affair you’ll never forget.

About the Author
Leigh Michaels is the author of nearly 100 books, including 80 contemporary novels, more than a dozen non-fiction books and three Regency romances from Sourcebooks Casablanca: The Mistress’ House, Just One Season in London and The Wedding Affair. More than 35 million copies of her romance novels have been published by Harlequin. A 6 time RITA finalist, she has also received two Reviewer's Choice awards from RT Book Reviews, and was the 2003 recipient of the Johnson Brigham Award. Leigh also teaches romance writing on the Internet at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Ottumwa, Iowa. For more information, please visit www.leighmichaels.com.