Wedding Cakes: a Slice of Life

Wedding cakes: A slice of life Cultures around the world prepare special delicacies for the special day By Liza Zimmerman Wedding cakes can be as innocuous as a sliver of dried out yellow stuff topped by a toothache-inducing icing or as sumptuous as a Martha Stewart creation, complete with real flowers. They're a matter of personal taste and cultural traditions, a fitting piece de resistance on the wedding day that should be as pretty as the bride and taste as good as it looks. Since melting pot is the Garden State's middle name, New Jersey, with its numerous and vibrant ethnic communities, has many distinctive ways to celebrate with cake. The fruits of these culinary legacies can be seen in some of the nuptial traditions of five New Jersey ethnic communities. Wedding sweets and rituals - in Newark's Portuguese community, Hoboken's Italian neighborhood, Jersey City's Philippine enclave, Kearny's Scottish highlands and Edison's Indian area - offer a sociological and archaeological glimpse into the gastronomic life and traditions of these communities. Many a culture also prefers to celebrate its festive moments with sweets, those sometimes delectable - sometimes unctuous - goodies such as marzipan, rice cakes or teeny-tiny pastries. Portuguese wedding cakes, for example, tend to be fairly simple. "Pao de lo, a sponge cake, is the base of most Portuguese wedding cakes," explained Joaquin Santos Jr., a Portuguese-American owner of Newark's Portuguese Pavilion restaurant. "It's like an angel food cake, but a lot more yellow and it has got a spongy texture. It's made of eggs, milk and sugar and comes out with a nice brown crust," added Helena Coutinho, a Portuguese-American pharmacist who was married in 1993. The icing may be a glaze made of egg whites and caramelized sugar, according to Clara Marques Albuquerque, a teacher from Viseu in northern Portugal. This thin layer of icing, made by heating white sugar until it melts, is hard and very sugary, explained Helena Nunes, the Portuguese-American owner of the Casa de Presentes Portuguese gift shop in Newark. It is also so delicate that it can only be made the day before the wedding. Provided the cake survives the night, the decorations are likely to be quite simple, "no ornaments, just flowers," said Santos. "And no fountains." For Portuguese, however, there are many other ways to celebrate a marriage. "Rice pudding with cinnamon on top is something that is served at every Portuguese wedding, and mine was no exception," said Coutinho. Her mother, Maria, is the owner of Coutinho's bakery in Newark. Another popular version of this pudding, called letria, is "more lemony than rice pudding and is made with angel hair pasta instead of rice," explained Joaquin Santos Jr. Another uniquely Portuguese passion is ovos moles, roughly translated as egg strings, which are "yolks cooked in sugared water so they come out in strings," explained Albuquerque. This unusual dessert - made from a mix of rice, egg yolks and sugar - is used to make a variety of sweets and fill and decorate wedding cakes. Its flexibility allows it to be made into strings, left as a sheet or served in individual portions. "We had ovos moles tarts as miniature pastries at our wedding," said Coutinho. The ovos moles strings are also formed into fanciful and unusual shapes. One of the most famous shapes used for ovos moles at weddings and parties is that of a lamprey, an eel-shaped fish considered a delicacy in parts of Portugal. This ornate sculpted fish, rich in details made from ovos moles strings, is "considered a top-of-the-line dessert because you probably need 50 egg yolks and it's very expensive," said Albuquerque. Ovos moles are often shaped like seafood because the northern Portuguese region where they were created has always had abundant seafood. At Italian weddings in Hoboken, miniature pastries are often the highlight of the dessert table. One of the most popular is the traditional sfogliatella, a shell-shaped pastry with a ridged flaky exterior and cheese filling on the inside, explained Mary Valastro, the owner of Carlo's bakery in Hoboken. And pasticciotto, "a tart filled with vanilla custard cream or ricotta," is another wedding-banquet essential, added Valastro. Angelica Cerrone, the Italian-American owner of Ristorante Gerrino in Hoboken, noted that certain nuptial sweets are seasonal, like zeppole, a pastry she compared to a French cruller stuffed with vanilla custard or cannoli cream, which are served in March in honor of Saint Joseph. "You always have zeppole for good luck if you get married in March," she explained. Another culinary tradition that has weathered the years and the transatlantic trip is the giving of colorful candy-covered almonds called confetti. Modern-day Italian confetti evolved from larger, more elaborately decorated candies which, according to legend, were showered, much like the ancient grain, by young men on their fiancees to bless with them with fertility. These candies are probably the forerunners of the colorful bits of paper Americans today call confetti. Handfuls of different colored confetti, wrapped in pretty doilies or stuffed in ornate boxes, are exchanged as edible keepsakes to mark life's great occasions, like graduations, births and, of course, weddings. "You have to have confetti, they have to be white and they always have to be given in odd numbers," explained Cerrone, echoing an old wives' tale that an odd number will bring fertility upon the couple. Confetti can be given out at the bridal shower, sent to guests in little boxes before the wedding or even passed out at the event itself to welcome the guests. "We gave our confetti out in the beginning. We had huge baskets of them fixed up in hand-knit doilies. We greeted the guests and gave them maybe 10 to each couple as a welcome," said Anna DeSario, a trader at Chase Manhattan Bank, who is from Bari, Italy, of her 1990 wedding. The guests take them home as favors and keep the doilies as a keepsake from the wedding. This custom of giving guests sweets to take home dates to the 1800s, according to "The Wedding Cake Book's" Dede Wilson, and was seen as a way for the bridal couple to share the celebration with their guests. She added that the tradition of giving gifts in ornate boxes may have come from the Victorians. "For the wedding cake, Italians like to use liqueurs like rosolio or Galliano to flavor sponge cake with custard, chocolate or ricotta filling," said Valastro. DeSario remembered that hers was "a rum-flavored sponge cake filled with cannoli cream, chocolate and fresh strawberries." Cerrone, who also serves wedding cakes with raspberry filling, had a traditional rum cake at her wedding "decorated with so many fresh flowers that you couldn't see the cake." Cerrone chose to put whipped cream icing under her flowers, while Valastro said she often uses fondant icing for a smooth look. And both confirmed that the trend is towards simple cakes, "with delicate sugar flowers, like they have always had in Italy," said Valastro. "Tiny homemade rice cakes called puto are very popular at Philippine weddings," said Maria Tanteo, a Manila native and owner of Marra's bakery in Jersey City. "They are made of rice flour, but instead of baking it you steam it and serve it with grated coconut." Alternately, puto can be "wrapped in a banana leaf to aromatize it and served with butter and sugar on top," added Joe Deguzman, the owner of the Manila Sunset restaurant in Jersey City, who is also from Manila. Another traditional dessert is pastillas de leche, made from fresh caramelized caribou milk, which Tanteo said are famous back home. "Here we modify the recipe by using condensed caramelized milk with egg yolks," she added. The finished pastries are "cut into small pieces and wrapped in fancy white tissue paper, which can be used as a centerpiece," she continued. The beautifully designed tissue paper is usually kept by guests as a memento. The wedding cake itself is likely to be mocha-flavored at a Philippine wedding. "It's by far the most popular," said Emma Alcantara, an owner of the Eden Philippine restaurant in Jersey City, who is from the town of Batangas near Manila. "I had it at my wedding," added Deguzman. "It's a very light homemade chiffon cake with mocha filling and whipped cream icing," explained Tanteo. It could be decorated with homemade candied flowers, like dainty roses, or flowers made of hard icing, said Alcantara. Other possibilities might include "vanilla or chocolate sponge cake with a macapuno filling, a preserve made of shredded young coconut in sugar syrup," continued Alcantara, who explained that jars of macapuno are often sent from the Philippines. Another macapuno-filled wedding cake, according to Alcantara, is a bright- purple, food color-tinged sponge cake called the ube, which means purple in Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. Once the cakes are served, the fun really begins at a Philippine wedding. "Wedding cakes often have ribbons around their base," said Tanteo. "There are traditionally 24 of them around the cake, each with a fortune tied to the end and tucked under the cake .... Single ladies and gentlemen are invited to pull the ribbons and the one who gets (the ribbon with) the ring (attached) will be the next to get married," explained Tanteo. Alcantara explained that the fortune- telling tradition was supposed to bring good luck. Some Scottish wedding desserts are even more surprising to behold than a room full of guys in kilts.

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