Where to Even Begin.

As it turns out, the most challenging thing about being at your own wedding is eating. I didn't know that. So many brides who had gone before me offered the same advice -- make sure you eat. You're paying a lot of money for that food. Eat it.

Which I did, eventually, out of a paper takeout box the next day, surrounded by wrapping paper and boxes of wedding presents that we left at my parents' house in Virginia. As someone who cares quite a lot about food, I feel this was a major failing on my part. We thought so carefully about the menu, even offering the bacon for the shrimp and grits on the side for our pescetarian friends, and making sure the ginger lemonade was fizzy and served with paper straws. But not one sip of that fizzy ginger lemonade crossed my lips. And the local cheeses and fruits we requested for the cocktail hour, all of which I heard was superb? I never saw any of it. We were too busy taking pictures and trying to figure out how to bustle my dress. When I look back on our wedding day, my one regret, other than snapping at my dad -- so briefly, and only once, but I'll never, ever forgive myself, although I know he has -- was not eating.

But maybe I should start from the beginning. And in the beginning, there was cake.

There were so many things about this wedding that were ours alone, and I will write about it all soon. But what I want to write about the most, other than our ceremony, was the sugar explosion known as our cake table.

all photos here taken by my brilliant cousin McLean

The cake decision was not taken lightly, and in the end, we didn't have to decide much at all. We had started off thinking that we'd keep the cake situation simple. Ha! O, what naive and foolish youngsters we were. From now on, when anyone says to me that they're keeping their wedding simple, I will hide my knowing smile behind my wedding ring and nod sympathetically. Simple is good, I will say. And then I will buy them a drink.

For as much as we want things in life to be simple, a wedding is the antithesis of that. And it should be. It's the combining of two lives and families into something entirely new, and that one act is difficult to navigate. Our day was the stew made of our own hopes and dreams, and our families' love for us, and the immeasurable contributions made by our friends that we will never fully know about. The complications of our wedding held much greater import than who sits next to whom. They were about long-ago rivalries and the wobbly wheels that make up a family, and old friends making new friends, and the obligations and pleasures of being surrounded by those we love so much. So we didn't keep it simple, and that was what made it our wedding.

But back to the cakes. My aunt Gail is a trained pastry chef, and as soon as we decided to have a wedding, we asked her to bake our cake. Notice I said cake, singular. We were keeping it small, we thought, and one really delicious cake with a gooey filling and fluffy buttercream would do. But what about pies instead? Just a few pies, our favorites, like peach and chess. Or maybe we should just supplement the one cake with some cheesecakes from Junior's, minus that awful cherry pie filling on top. Or maybe we should have the cake, and a couple of cheesecakes, and ship down some black-and-white cookies and rugelach from Zabar's. It would be so easy.

My brilliant mother squelched a lot of this shipping-cookies talk, knowing what the best decision was. And that turned out to be eight cakes -- yes, eight -- instead of the original one: seven regular-sized cakes using seven different recipes, and then a gloriously dark chocolate two-tiered cake with cream cheese icing and a white chocolate ganache, which we would cut. We went back and forth about which cakes we wanted, and in late March, my mom and Gail huddled in my parents' kitchen and churned them out, layer by layer. They wrapped them carefully and stashed them in freezers across town. And on the morning of our wedding, my aunts transported them in a big white cooler to Ash Lawn, and then ran off to get dressed for the ceremony.

I am not sure I can ever do justice to what people did for us that day. Our friends have sent us pictures from that morning of our crew trimming the flowers for the tables and perched precariously on 10-foot-tall ladders, hanging paper lanterns and twinkle lights from the rafters -- all of this while I was galavanting about Charlottesville, getting my nails done and worrying about the rainclouds in the sky. My mom woke up at 5:30 on Saturday morning to hem the skirt of my wedding dress. My dad and brother hustled for four days solid. My bridesmaids took control of the welcome boxes, specifically my ambition of baking cookies for them, and drove me to Food Lion instead. Cookies, they correctly pointed out, are cookies. And then they plied me with Champagne.

The only thing we could rightly pay them back with was cake, and lots of it (and truth be told, I didn't even have a hand in that.) So this is what we ate:

dark chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and white chocolate ganache
caramel cake
The Lee Bros.' red velvet cake
carrot cake
pound cake with apricot glaze and fresh fruit
chocolate doberge cake
Frances Parkinson Keyes's rose cream cake
and coconut cake with lemon curd filling.

I'm going to post recipes for each one of these as soon as I pry them out of my mother's hands. But for now, let's start with our "wedding cake," the fudgy, velvety, dark brown bear of a chocolate cake that we cut and, ever so gently, fed to each other. It was a good way to start off a life together. My aunt fussed that the white frosting couldn't cover up the rich brown of the cake, but I liked it like that. I mean, we ate it all.

Celestial Chocolate Cake
Adapted from Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott

This recipe is for one 9-inch, 3-layer cake. To make the cake pictured, double the recipe.

For the cake:
2 cups boiling water
1 cup cocoa
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs

Combine the boiling water and cocoa and set aside. Whisk the other dry ingredients together in a bowl and set that aside too. With an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar together until smooth, and add the eggs one by one. Add in the vanilla and salt and combine, and then whisk in the cocoa mixture. Fold in the dry ingredients until thoroughly combined and smooth. Divide into three 9-inch round pans that have been buttered and lined with parchment paper, and bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until springy in the middle. Cool on cake racks.

For the frosting, my mom and aunt used a cream cheese recipe that they eyeballed, so I would suggest using the frosting recipe from the red velvet cake recipe I've linked to above -- it's pretty damned good. Whatever you do, wait until the layers are completely cooled before assembling them. Also of note: this cake freezes beautifully, but don't freeze it with the icing on. Serves 10-12 easily, depending on your sweet tooth.