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The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
July 28, 2004 Wednesday Final Edition
The wedding cake race: New pastry grad Denise Roig learns that in
addition to fondant and sugar decorations, wedding cakes are made
with long hours, phone calls, coffee, artistry and love
Freelance
DENISE ROIG
"Heat's on, girls," Rita Djerrahian says cheerily, shepherding us
into La Gaterie, her Dollard des Ormeaux cake shop, where we'll spend
the week working 11-hour days.
Welcome to wedding season. As new pastry grads from the Pearson
School of Culinary Arts in LaSalle, classmate Trina Rehel and I are
here as stagiaires. We'll help, learn, keep the fondant rolling.
Tuesday
It's 7:45 a.m. and Djerrahian has beaten us by an hour. "You two need
coffee," Djerrahian says, leading us from her showroom with its
show-stopper cakes into a 15- by 30-foot space that functions as
commercial kitchen, cake-supply store, classroom and cozy
congregating spot for friends, family and customers. Cake pans of
every persuasion hang from the ceiling. Plastic tubs of rolled
fondant stand person-high.
Sheathing her cakes in seamless sheets of fondant, Djerrahian then
adorns them with flowers so startlingly real you have to taste one to
believe it's not. The flowers are made of sugar - white, moldable,
edible. Learning to make these flowers in pastry school nearly put me
over the edge, but here we are rolling, shaping and sculpting
stephanotis buds and flax blossoms. "Yes, like that," says
Djerrahian, whose business card aptly reads "Sugar Artistry."
She fills us in on the week. Three wedding cakes are to be made for
Saturday. The first, a three-tiered white cake, is for a couple from
Nigeria. They don't have a huge budget - $200 - so Djerrahian has
promised something pretty, but not too elaborate.
The second is for a French-Canadian couple. The groom's a pianist, so
Djerrahian will top their three-layered chocolate ganache with a
crown of sugar treble clefs.
Then there's the couple from Hong Kong: three ovals of white cake
adorned with sugar calla lilies. Djerrahian shows us the magazine
photocopy the bride brought in on her first visit six months ago. The
cake looks complicated, with lilies coming out the top layer and
stems showing between the first and second layers. It will involve
building a special stand. Price tag: $700.
The day flies as we fashion flowers, treble clefs, calla stems. The
Nigerian groom brings in his family to show off the model of his cake
and pay the balance. There are some tense calls from the Hong Kong
couple's wedding planner. Apparently they don't want to pay
Djerrahian's downtown parking when she delivers the cake Saturday.
"How much longer are you staying?" Trina asks when we leave at 6:30
p.m. "Oh, another five hours," Djerrahian says.
Wednesday
More flowers. And coffee and bagels and Armenian music on the CD
player. "You go crazy otherwise," says Djerrahian, who, eight years
into this biz, has come up with other sanity strategies. "There is a
psychology of directing people. When Martha Stewart comes up with
some new look, everyone wants that. When it's impractical, I feel
like killing them and her. So you take couples' photos, but you add
your input. I want to make something that also gives me pleasure. I
want there to be love in there."
By 2:30, it's cake time. We shave off the tops of all nine layers to
make them equal in height. I try hard to keep my hand steady as I
guide the serrated knife. Try to keep my mind steady, too. Who's
getting the chocolate cake and what kind of butter cream goes inside?
Friday
"I did not receive the cheque yet and you didn't call me back about
the parking facility." Djerrahian's on the phone with the Chinese
wedding planner. She's calm but firm. "The cheque," she repeats. The
balance should have arrived two weeks ago. "I need to think about my
car. I need to think about my cake."
When she gets off the phone, Djerrahian looks more tired than she has
all week. She rolls a giant circle of fondant on a thick piece of
plastic, then lifts it carefully up and over the waiting cake - the
bottom layer of the Nigerian couple's - peeling off the plastic when
it's in the just-right position, because once that baby's down,
there's no moving it. She strokes the fondant smooth over the top and
sides. She has tried to keep the costs down on this cake by limiting
the flowers, but it's a beauty even so.
Her husband, Levon, comes by to cut the Plexiglas platform for the
calla lily cake. "Now I can breathe," she says. Between more calls
from the Chinese wedding planner (asking about the refrigeration
requirements of the cake), she's redoing the treble crown for the
musical cake. "The couple and I had so many discussions over it, I
forgot what our final decision was," she says, unsticking the little
royal icing roses Trina and I had attached and substituting large
fondant roses.
Saturday
The nuptial hour is upon us. Overnight, Djerrahian has draped the
lily cake with pale avocado-green drapes; the musical cake with regal
white ones. "I worked until 2 in the morning, then came back at 6,"
she says. "I'm so tired I don't know if I'm speaking English or
Armenian."
Trina and I fit the lily stems onto the Plexiglas stand, brush gold
dust on the white drapes, pearl on the green.
At one, Djerrahian dons a clean chef's jacket, packs up her cake
repair kit - a jar of royal icing, white cotton gloves, extra
flowers, X-acto knife, floral tape - and we're off to the Dorval
church where the Nigerian couple will soon exchange vows. My job is
to sit in the back of the van and make sure the cake doesn't go
anywhere.
The church basement is alive with African music as we add extra tiny
pink flowers at the cake's base. Then it's back to the shop to finish
the other cakes. No one's joking now and no one thinks to turn the
radio on. We dust the lilies - yellow inside, green at the base;
Djerrahian twists them into sinuous bouquets. Then we load the cakes
onto bread racks and ease them into the van. The sky is clouding up
as we head down St. John's.
The banquet room in the Helene de Champlain restaurant is decorated
like a music conservatory, the tables with name cards reading
Vivaldi, Chopin. The treble clefs on Djerrahian's three-tiered,
$600-creation bob rhythmically as she settles it on a table.
A few blocks from Centre Mont Royal, it begins to rain. Where are we
going to park? It was never settled. Djerrahian gives it her best
guess and somehow we end up in an underground loading zone, find a
cart to load the lily cakes on, find the right banquet room, the
right display table.
But it's only when Djerrahian steps back and looks at her cake that
I'm reminded what this is all for. It has been easy to forget in the
whirl of the week. She steps back and then she steps in and removes
one of the lily bouquets. She's right. In this case, less is more
beautiful. There's love in that gesture.
La Gaterie is at 4228D St. John's Blvd. in Dollard des Ormeaux. Call
(514) 626-1412 or visit www.LaGaterie.com
Online extra: Martha Stewart changed the way we think about wedding
cakes. Read the story on The Gazette's revamped Web site,
www.montrealgazette.com
Wedding Cake Etiquette
Before you get to the butter cream, a few suggestions for making your
wedding-cake experience a sweet one:
Confer with each other before you visit your wedding-cake maker. Be
on the same side.
Bring ideas and pictures, but also be open to what your cake maker
suggests.
Pay when specified on your contract.
Deal ahead of time with parking, refrigeration and any other special
arrangements.
Send a photo afterward.
GRAPHIC: Color Photo: JOHN KENNEY, GAZETTE; Denise Roig (right)
learns the ropes in Rita Djerrahian's cake shop, even sculpting sugar
flowers, a task that almost pushed her over the edge in pastry
school.
July 28, 2004 Wednesday Final Edition
The wedding cake race: New pastry grad Denise Roig learns that in
addition to fondant and sugar decorations, wedding cakes are made
with long hours, phone calls, coffee, artistry and love
Freelance
DENISE ROIG
"Heat's on, girls," Rita Djerrahian says cheerily, shepherding us
into La Gaterie, her Dollard des Ormeaux cake shop, where we'll spend
the week working 11-hour days.
Welcome to wedding season. As new pastry grads from the Pearson
School of Culinary Arts in LaSalle, classmate Trina Rehel and I are
here as stagiaires. We'll help, learn, keep the fondant rolling.
Tuesday
It's 7:45 a.m. and Djerrahian has beaten us by an hour. "You two need
coffee," Djerrahian says, leading us from her showroom with its
show-stopper cakes into a 15- by 30-foot space that functions as
commercial kitchen, cake-supply store, classroom and cozy
congregating spot for friends, family and customers. Cake pans of
every persuasion hang from the ceiling. Plastic tubs of rolled
fondant stand person-high.
Sheathing her cakes in seamless sheets of fondant, Djerrahian then
adorns them with flowers so startlingly real you have to taste one to
believe it's not. The flowers are made of sugar - white, moldable,
edible. Learning to make these flowers in pastry school nearly put me
over the edge, but here we are rolling, shaping and sculpting
stephanotis buds and flax blossoms. "Yes, like that," says
Djerrahian, whose business card aptly reads "Sugar Artistry."
She fills us in on the week. Three wedding cakes are to be made for
Saturday. The first, a three-tiered white cake, is for a couple from
Nigeria. They don't have a huge budget - $200 - so Djerrahian has
promised something pretty, but not too elaborate.
The second is for a French-Canadian couple. The groom's a pianist, so
Djerrahian will top their three-layered chocolate ganache with a
crown of sugar treble clefs.
Then there's the couple from Hong Kong: three ovals of white cake
adorned with sugar calla lilies. Djerrahian shows us the magazine
photocopy the bride brought in on her first visit six months ago. The
cake looks complicated, with lilies coming out the top layer and
stems showing between the first and second layers. It will involve
building a special stand. Price tag: $700.
The day flies as we fashion flowers, treble clefs, calla stems. The
Nigerian groom brings in his family to show off the model of his cake
and pay the balance. There are some tense calls from the Hong Kong
couple's wedding planner. Apparently they don't want to pay
Djerrahian's downtown parking when she delivers the cake Saturday.
"How much longer are you staying?" Trina asks when we leave at 6:30
p.m. "Oh, another five hours," Djerrahian says.
Wednesday
More flowers. And coffee and bagels and Armenian music on the CD
player. "You go crazy otherwise," says Djerrahian, who, eight years
into this biz, has come up with other sanity strategies. "There is a
psychology of directing people. When Martha Stewart comes up with
some new look, everyone wants that. When it's impractical, I feel
like killing them and her. So you take couples' photos, but you add
your input. I want to make something that also gives me pleasure. I
want there to be love in there."
By 2:30, it's cake time. We shave off the tops of all nine layers to
make them equal in height. I try hard to keep my hand steady as I
guide the serrated knife. Try to keep my mind steady, too. Who's
getting the chocolate cake and what kind of butter cream goes inside?
Friday
"I did not receive the cheque yet and you didn't call me back about
the parking facility." Djerrahian's on the phone with the Chinese
wedding planner. She's calm but firm. "The cheque," she repeats. The
balance should have arrived two weeks ago. "I need to think about my
car. I need to think about my cake."
When she gets off the phone, Djerrahian looks more tired than she has
all week. She rolls a giant circle of fondant on a thick piece of
plastic, then lifts it carefully up and over the waiting cake - the
bottom layer of the Nigerian couple's - peeling off the plastic when
it's in the just-right position, because once that baby's down,
there's no moving it. She strokes the fondant smooth over the top and
sides. She has tried to keep the costs down on this cake by limiting
the flowers, but it's a beauty even so.
Her husband, Levon, comes by to cut the Plexiglas platform for the
calla lily cake. "Now I can breathe," she says. Between more calls
from the Chinese wedding planner (asking about the refrigeration
requirements of the cake), she's redoing the treble crown for the
musical cake. "The couple and I had so many discussions over it, I
forgot what our final decision was," she says, unsticking the little
royal icing roses Trina and I had attached and substituting large
fondant roses.
Saturday
The nuptial hour is upon us. Overnight, Djerrahian has draped the
lily cake with pale avocado-green drapes; the musical cake with regal
white ones. "I worked until 2 in the morning, then came back at 6,"
she says. "I'm so tired I don't know if I'm speaking English or
Armenian."
Trina and I fit the lily stems onto the Plexiglas stand, brush gold
dust on the white drapes, pearl on the green.
At one, Djerrahian dons a clean chef's jacket, packs up her cake
repair kit - a jar of royal icing, white cotton gloves, extra
flowers, X-acto knife, floral tape - and we're off to the Dorval
church where the Nigerian couple will soon exchange vows. My job is
to sit in the back of the van and make sure the cake doesn't go
anywhere.
The church basement is alive with African music as we add extra tiny
pink flowers at the cake's base. Then it's back to the shop to finish
the other cakes. No one's joking now and no one thinks to turn the
radio on. We dust the lilies - yellow inside, green at the base;
Djerrahian twists them into sinuous bouquets. Then we load the cakes
onto bread racks and ease them into the van. The sky is clouding up
as we head down St. John's.
The banquet room in the Helene de Champlain restaurant is decorated
like a music conservatory, the tables with name cards reading
Vivaldi, Chopin. The treble clefs on Djerrahian's three-tiered,
$600-creation bob rhythmically as she settles it on a table.
A few blocks from Centre Mont Royal, it begins to rain. Where are we
going to park? It was never settled. Djerrahian gives it her best
guess and somehow we end up in an underground loading zone, find a
cart to load the lily cakes on, find the right banquet room, the
right display table.
But it's only when Djerrahian steps back and looks at her cake that
I'm reminded what this is all for. It has been easy to forget in the
whirl of the week. She steps back and then she steps in and removes
one of the lily bouquets. She's right. In this case, less is more
beautiful. There's love in that gesture.
La Gaterie is at 4228D St. John's Blvd. in Dollard des Ormeaux. Call
(514) 626-1412 or visit www.LaGaterie.com
Online extra: Martha Stewart changed the way we think about wedding
cakes. Read the story on The Gazette's revamped Web site,
www.montrealgazette.com
Wedding Cake Etiquette
Before you get to the butter cream, a few suggestions for making your
wedding-cake experience a sweet one:
Confer with each other before you visit your wedding-cake maker. Be
on the same side.
Bring ideas and pictures, but also be open to what your cake maker
suggests.
Pay when specified on your contract.
Deal ahead of time with parking, refrigeration and any other special
arrangements.
Send a photo afterward.
GRAPHIC: Color Photo: JOHN KENNEY, GAZETTE; Denise Roig (right)
learns the ropes in Rita Djerrahian's cake shop, even sculpting sugar
flowers, a task that almost pushed her over the edge in pastry
school.