At the Cloisters on a rainy Saturday in May, preparations for the Snyder-Doss wedding are in full swing. With just an hour to go before the ceremony, the catering crew buzzes through the maze of rooms, hefting tables and chairs, draping powder-blue and white linens, lining up hot trays for the buffet.
Florists dip into buckets filled with white roses, calla lilies and puffy-headed blue hydrangeas, making arrangements for tables and windowsills. A singer practices the wedding song while musicians set up a harp and organ.
But when the centerpiece of the celebration - a towering four-tier wedding cake festooned with buttercream garlands - arrives, the action stops, if only for an instant, so that all may admire it. Baker Stephanie Donner carries the 30-pound cake, which she will adorn with fresh fruit delicately coated in crystallized sugar. The cake is one of 10 she has prepared for weddings this weekend, each a unique statement of a bride and groom's style, each the culmination of a week's work.
It's been a busy week at Donner's Cakes by Stephanie, an affiliate of Deereco Desserts. In Deereco's kitchen in Timonium, Donner has gone through 180 quarts of Italian cream cake batter, the delicious base for most of her wedding cakes, and two 80-quart mixer bowls of French and American buttercreams. Between April and the end of June - the busiest season in the wedding business - she will have created more than 100 cakes.
The process begins every Wednesday, when the week's cakes are baked in a bank of pizza ovens at one end of the work space. These ovens, says Donner, work better for her particular cake recipes than the bakery's convection ovens.
Thursday is assembly day, when the tiers are filled, iced and stacked or placed on columned plates, depending on the cake's design. Cakes without columns are stacked and frosted in complete units, while columned cakes must be assembled on site.
Friday is for decorating. Behind Donner's workstation, below a wall on which bulging clipboards detailing future orders are tacked, is a stainless-steel table piled with variously tipped pastry bags charged with tinted buttercream.
With evenings spent consulting with prospective customers and weekends reserved for setting up anywhere from three to six cakes at wedding sites, Donner easily works 60 hours a week this time of year.
Wedding cakes are construction projects. Each tier of each cake is four layers filled with glossy French buttercream, made with egg yolks, butter and hot sugar syrup, then richly flavored with European fruit pastes or chocolate, according to the client's wishes. On the outside is a layer of American buttercream made with butter, shortening and confectioners' sugar. Donner uses the two icings purposefully.
"The French-whipped buttercream is light, perfect for between the layers, but the American holds up better to heat and moisture," she says from her perch on a flour bin at one end of the bakery's assembly table.
"The trend in wedding cakes is smooth and simple right now," Donner says as she smooths the icing on successive rounds with a dampened spatula. "Everyone wants the look of rolled fondant, but that doesn't taste very good and is very labor-intensive. We do the same look with buttercream."
Finished with the one cake, she immediately sets to work on another. Pastry bag in hand, she pipes an intricate basket-weave pattern onto a three-tiered square cake. It will be finished on-site with fresh flowers. Between wedding cakes, Donner works on an assortment of cakes for birthdays, bar mitzvahs and the like.
It is a grueling pace, and an exacting occupation with little room for error. When asked how difficult it is to recover from mistakes while decorating, Donner replies, "It's just better not to make any." The most nerve-wracking, she says with a grimace, is chocolate tracery on light-colored icing. "There's just no way to recover and you have to start over."
To address rare mishaps during deliveries, she carries a repair kit that includes a bucket of buttercream, pastry bags and tips for piping, and a spatula.
For a less athletic person - Donner is an accomplished equestrian - the physical toll of weeks spent hoisting vats of buttercream and standing for hours to assemble and decorate cakes would be enormous. But that's something Donner relishes.
"I taught third-semester pastry at Baltimore International Culinary College for a year," she says. "I enjoyed it, but I missed all this activity."
Donner has been baking and decorating cakes for 24 years, having acquired the enthusiasm in her 20s during a stint in the bakery at Graul's. "The original Mrs. Graul taught me to decorate," she says.
After getting her degree in pastry at what is now Baltimore International College, she plied her trade at places like the Centre Club, Charles Levine Caterers and the Country Club of York before going out on her own with Cakes by Stephanie in 1994.
Nine months ago, her business booming, she merged with Deereco Desserts. Deereco supplies bread and desserts to the five restaurants of its owner, Country Fare Group, including the Milton Inn and the Brass Elephant, along with numerous wholesale clients.
A tour of Deereco's massive walk-in refrigerator on a Friday reveals the results of the week's labor. "This one is for a Western wedding," Donner says, pointing out the motif of green cactuses and purple rosettes. "Part of this cake will be elevated over a fountain, and we're going to add charms with cowboy boots to each rosette."
Another cake has a deep-blue ribbon circling the second of its three tiers, and a cascade of dark- and light-blue flowers cutting a diagonal swath down the front. A third is crowned with yellow buttercream roses, and a fourth sports an intricate tracery of buttercream vines and grape clusters. The cakes are as individual as the weddings they will grace.
The cost of one of Donner's wedding cakes to serve, say, 100 guests begins at $325. Extras like distinctive flavorings or intensive handwork in the form of sugar-paste decorations, molded chocolate, basket-weave and carnelli-lace patterns, and crystallized fruit and flowers can push the price closer to $450.
On Friday afternoon, it's time to crystallize the fruit for the Snyder-Doss cake. Donner pours egg whites from a half-gallon carton into a stainless-steel bowl. She adds fresh fruit - green pears, purple plums, red and green grapes, orange kumquats - gently tossing. She drains the fruit on a metal grid, then tosses it in small clusters in a bowl of superfine sugar. After a second toss in the sugar and a gentle shake to clear the excess, the fruit is set on clean towels.
"By tomorrow, the sugar will have crystallized and they'll be beautiful," she says, gently covering the fruit with another towel. "You don't want to refrigerate these because the moisture will make the coating disintegrate." Donner uses a similar process for creating crystallized flowers, brushing the petals of violets, nasturtiums and roses with egg white before tossing them in sugar.
On Saturday, Donner brings the cake to the Cloisters. It takes center stage, standing tall and stately on a round, lace-covered table in an octagonal room off the main hall. She works swiftly, clustering groupings of sugared fruit on each tier. "One thing I don't like is symmetry," she says. "I place the fruit randomly, in bunches of threes, fives and sevens." For the final fillip, she strews small assemblies of fruit on the table top.
Donner stops to survey her work, stepping out of the way as the bride's family swoops in to photograph the cake. With a pleased smile, she confides, "This is what I love. This makes you feel so good after all the hard work."
But the glory is momentary: It's time to head off to Aberdeen for yet another delivery.
Stephanie's American Buttercream Icing
Makes a generous 2 cups
8 tablespoons butter
8 tablespoons white shortening
1 pound confectioners' sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 to 4 tablespoons water
Cream the butter and shortening together, then stir in the confectioners' sugar and vanilla. Add water to make a stiff, but spreadable consistency. Smooth onto cake and/or fill piping bags for decorating.