It was just another order for a wedding cake with no particular specifications except that it had to be ‘different’. The baker, Lakshmi Sreedhar, mulled over it and came up with the suggestion—a cake fit for the bride, a cake as tall as her. A five-foot plus wedding cake!
“I wanted to create something different, something that would match the outfit,” says Lakshmi, two days after she delivered the cake to the reception. The cake weighed more than a hundred kilos, transportation of which was the bigger challenge than the making of it.
“Loading it on to the vehicle gave me a heart attack and the unloading too. I could hear my heart beat and my employees, when they were unloading at The Gateway Hotel, were pale with apprehension,” she says.
The process, which started with a life-size print of a girl, cutting the shape out on a thermocol board and carving it out of cake, was painstaking. She baked several cakes of varying sizes (round and rectangular) and stacked one on top of the other and then carved it to get the desired shape. “I measured the cut-out at several points for accuracy while carving the cake.”
The cake is all cake down to the level of the ‘thigh’. Any lower would have been a waste. Lakshmi has been baking cakes on orders for the last two years from her home. What started out as a hobby has extended today to a shop, Baker’s Walk, on the Kaloor-Kathrikadavu Road. She is a self-taught baker.
A cake-designing course from Bengaluru taught her cake designing and the rest she learnt online. “There are so many videos and tutorials online from where one can learn everything about baking.”
At the time she took on the baking she didn’t realise how tough it would turn out to be or as she puts it the “gravity of the risk”.
Although she is not new to baking, this was the first time Lakshmi had embarked on a cake of these dimensions. She guesses that this might have been the biggest wedding cake in the country. She and her assistants, Krishnadas and Siju Abraham, toiled for close to 75 hours, at times without sleep, getting the cake ready.
“There were times when I’d start panicking but both of them would encourage me and tell me that we could do it. Also the support my family extended to me was invaluable. My son and my husband especially were extremely accommodative.” The cake and cream together weighed around 80-85 kilos and the decoration (fondant) around 30 kilos. The icing of the cake matched the bride’s dress, only it was “more dressy with more layers of the gown. Otherwise the cake wouldn’t have been festive enough.”
The anxiety, sleeplessness and tiredness vanished, she says, when she saw the look on the bride Bhavana and her parents Dr. Neelakantan and Dr. Bhuvaneshwari faces. “It was worth it seeing their reaction. As a professional it made me very happy. And it was their confidence in me which drove me.”
