Having committed to baking Shawn and Steve their wedding cake, it was time for the second best part of making a wedding cake &emdash; researching the design and flavor possibilites. Out came all the professional books and the standards of enthusiastic home bakers. I remembered that Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible had, in addition to a variety of scalable recipes for any size cake, gorgeous pictures of wedding cakes she'd baked over the years. For those featured cakes, she has recipes that start off not with a list of ingredients, but with a list of recipes to make (X batches of this icing, Y batches of this filling, Z batches of fondant, plus extra fillings and icings and oh yes the cake) and directions for assembling them into one giant confectionery skyscraper.

It was like opening the directions from that new super-cool Lego set (for young singles, substitute Ikea here) and finding that it's just the directions for how to ready the other seven booklets of directions. (That's an exaggeration; the big Lego sets have only seven pages of directions on how to read the directions and properly assemble the Legos, an important step of which is to throw out all your shag carpeting before you lose all the tiny pieces deep in the pile.)

Am I out of my depth here? Paging through the Cake Bible, I became convinced I was, although I'd made wedding cakes before.

Clearly, the answer is to bake more, if not absolutely everything in the Cake Bible before September. Also, I need to decorate more. The first step of which was to commit to six dozen Star Wars themed cupcakes for my son's sixth birthday, Dorie Greenspan's celebration cake (with Swiss meringue icing) for a friend's birthday, and Berenbaum's golden genoise for the hell of it and to use up the yolks left from the Greenspan cake.

So that's where I am in the wedding cake project: a freezer full of vegan cupcakes and a slice of breakfast cake every day this week.

(The best part of the wedding cake is eating the experiments.)