Wedding Cake

Having just returned from a weekend wedding event, I am still in the midst of the recovery process, leading me to reflect on the excesses of weddings today. I mean to tell you, there is so much money wasted on fancy hors d'oeurves and decadent cocktails, you could just about finance a college education off what amounts to be a giant dinner party where half the guests are relatives you're trying to avoid and the other half are friends helping you get your money out of the open bar. Where I come from you're lucky to get a few meatballs from the frozen section of the discount-mart with a couple cans of beer, which must be saved to tie to the muffler of the shaving-cream covered pick-up truck as the happy couple drives off to the Super 8 Motel.

These days, and especially up here with these Yankees, folks plan wedding receptions with the idea that more is more, and proceed to spiral themselves into debt for three hours worth of photographic memories that they will probably never take the time to put into an album.

Nothing, however, is as distressing to me as the evolution of the wedding cake. Used to be, wedding cake was always a white pound cake, just a little stale, with icing made of nothing more than sugar and lard that's so hard it can just about stand up by itself. It was in fact the main reason I attended weddings. Now you get these monstrosities filled with ganache and covered in some sort of whipped foam. I don't know how you can consider yourself married with a chocolate wedding cake, it's just not right. It really turns my stomach, and it's often not until my second slice that I can even determine if it's worth eating.

With all the money these folks are throwing around to have shrimp cocktail for 200 people, you'd think they'd want to save a few dollars wherever they can. Hell, by the time they get around to cutting the cake, most folks have either lost interest and gone home or are too drunk to notice. Since no one (except for me) is gonna eat it anyway, someone should tell the bride and groom that Piggy Wiggly makes a real nice white cake and if you by three or more layers, they thrown in the plastic figurines for free.