The summer season is nearly upon us and at pastry shops across the Kingdom, brides are trying to answer that sweetest question — how to decorate the wedding cake?

“We have albums of photographs and brides spend hours flipping through the different cake styles,” said Oussama Turk, in charge at Le Gourmet, Alkhobar. “Over the years we’ve made thousands of wedding cakes and it can be difficult for a bride to decide which one will be perfect for her party. Once in a while, after a bride sees all the beautiful cakes, she still isn’t satisfied. That’s when we bring in our artist and ask her to describe the cake of her dreams. He draws it, we bake it and decorate it, and then we add one more photo to our album.”

Le Gourmet or “Al Zawwak” opened in Riyadh in 1978 as a pioneer in Saudi Arabia in deli foods and confectioneries. Over the years, different sections of gourmet items and confectionery creations were added. There are now 5 Le Gourmet branches in the Kingdom’s major cities and as the wedding season approaches, they begin placing orders with suppliers around the world for all the delicacies needed to make enormous picture perfect edible masterpieces.

“In the Kingdom, people like everything to be big,” said Turk. “Take for example our chocolates. The large ones sell better than the small ones. Our croissants are bigger than what is normal in Europe. Wedding cakes are the same too. We made a wedding cake in the shape of a castle for a party in Riyadh. The cake was so huge that we had to take it to the wedding location in sections and assemble it there.”

Turk explained that very tall wedding cakes are actually construction projects. First, Le Gourmet’s French Master Chef Philippe Segond makes the design plan for the architecture of the cake. Then, from wood, a carpenter cuts the required internal supports, foundation and even sometimes arches and columns.

While the cake bakes, Segond’s assistants get busy rolling and cutting the decorations. The cooled cake has to be sliced in the correct shapes and thicknesses, and then filled, built and frosted before it is festooned with miniature works of art.

Most wedding cakes take Segond’s team one day to make. However, a new design concept is to have edible portraits of the bride and groom created to adorn the cake. The portraits are hand-painted so the artist may need to work for up to a week creating those decorations before Segond begins baking the cake.

“Chef Philippe is our treasure,” commented Turk. “He has been awarded the title of ‘Meilleur Ouvrier de France.’ This means that his peers in France have judged him to be the best at his craft. His pastry and confections are in a class alone. In order for him to work with us we have had to agree to provide him with the exact ingredients he believes are best. This means bringing butter from France made from very rich milk. He only uses extra large eggs for cakes because the proportion of yolk to white is ideal. Somehow we must find mountains of perfect strawberries and chestnuts, when they aren’t in season anywhere in the region. You can imagine what a procurement challenge this is. We have a network of contacts mainly in France, Italy, Switzerland and Canada, who send us all the fresh foodstuffs we require weekly by air freight.”

The motto of Le Gourmet is that it is an “educational institution in the art of tasting.” Turk said that people have forgotten that food is supposed to taste good, not simply look good. He asserted that this should be true even with a confection as complicated as a wedding cake.

According to Turk, 99 percent of wedding cakes in the Kingdom are made of vanilla sponge. If the cake isn’t sprayed with syrup and layered with a moist filling, it will be dry. Some confectioners go a bit overboard though and add so much sugar to the filling and frosting that the cake is sickly sweet.

“The trick to an excellent tasting cake is to moderate the sweetness,” explained Turk. “Too sweet is cloying and unpleasant. Unusual filling like minced chestnut stuffing also can add variety to the vanilla sponge cake. We keep the cake light by using cake flour and creating a foamy batter. And never overcook the cake. A few minutes too long in the oven is the difference between tender, moist sponge and brittle cardboard.”

Finished taking notes, my opportunity finally came to try my hand at wedding confections. As I suspected, making those little roses and garlands is just as complicated as it looks. Chef Philippe’s assistants can turn out a flower in minutes. Mine, well, I ate them to hide my lack of talent. I also made a terrible discovery while loitering in Le Gourmet’s kitchen. Low fat, low calorie really is low flavor. In the past, Chef Philippe did his best to create confections that were low in sugar and fat, but very few people chose them over their calorie-laden cousins. It seems that in Saudi Arabia we all have taken inspiration from Marie Antoinette, “Oh please, just let us eat cake!”

Arab News Features 15 May 2003