Royal cake walk

By the time you read this it might be too late for you to make a dash to your nearest boulangerie, bakery, or bread and cake shop and tuck into a piece of wedding cake.
For as everyone in our electronically connected global village knows it’s the great day for the Windsor-Middletons, or Will and Kate, as commentators of the more vulgar press delight in calling the couple.
In case you haven’t received a monogrammed invitation to the any of the tea-parties that are said to follow the nuptials, do not despair. For as an American housewife remarked to no one in particular, “What’s a wedding without a wedding cake, I’m going to bake my own!” We will take you on a virtual wedding cake walk through the best cake shops in the city and give you some hot tips on how to bake your own Will and Kate masterpiece.
On the one hand, there’s the real thing. Prince William and Kate both designed their own cake and from all accounts on the Internet, it’s a multi-layered fruit cake, drenched in white royal icing and decorated with different emblems. There are roses for England, thistles for Scotland, daffodils for Wales and shamrock for Ireland, besides, lily of the valley, acorns and ivy-leaves, all of which have special meanings for the bride and bridegroom. All of these items have been created in icing sugar by someone called Fiona Cairn, who is all a-twitter with excitement at having been chosen as baker for the big day.
By our local standards of cake-making, this sounds not just predictable, but downright disappointing. Think of all the models of confectionery produced by the Nilgiris store during their Christmas exhibitions. They would surely have been able to recommend a Buckingham Palace-shaped cake, a cathedral or two with stained glass windows made with real lights inside and even a Tower of London in miniature to remind the wedding guests that Kate is reputed to be distantly related to Anne Boleyn, who lost her head at the Tower, after her short-lived marriage to Henry VIII.
If Ecstasy, the glorious pastry shop, had been consulted, they would have produced a golden horse-driven carriage in chocolate with spray-on gold leaf. Cakewalk, that is famous for its Barbie cakes, would have made a wedding doll cake with a replica of Barbie as Kate at the centre of the dome and a billowing white wedding dress in marzipan and a diaphanous veil of spun sugar. The older bakeries, McRennetts and Bosottos would have produced vintage-style cakes with the British flag in red, blue and white on cashew-nut paste slabs and messages such as ‘God Save our Rani’, while not to be outdone, the famous mithaiwalas would twist and mould their sweetmeats into love knots and monograms such as W and M, making them look vaguely like poses from the Kama Sutra and knock out sandesh in moulds designed to look like crowns and crosses. Never mind, even if none of these options are available to you, there’s one trick you can pull out of the shopping bag. It’s called the Prince William cake and it’s so easy to make; all you need is a packet of McVitie’s biscuits crushed by hand and layered in a ring cake pan with a gorgeous gooey mix of melted chocolate, sugar and butter, over a double boiler with an egg beaten into it and left in the fridge for three hours. When it’s set, remove from the ring cake pan, place over a beautiful glass dish, drench with more melted chocolate, dark and Belgian if you can afford it. Sit back and think of England, while you sink your teeth into it. Sublime!