Gateaux's cake log: Toile!

My husband and I went to Paris for our 10th wedding anniversary. It was our first trip to Europe. When looking for a hotel, I wanted a room that made me realize I was in Paris as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning. While searching endlessly for the perfect accommodations, I was finally grabbed by the Hotel D'Angleterre on Rue St. Jacob. The room entrance was across an inner courtyard of the hotel, and it had a french painted tile bathroom, but what sealed the deal, was that the entire room was wallpapered in toile fabric. Actually fabric...actually where we were going to stay.

I swear, this is going somewhere.

When I met with Misha, she hadn't decided on many details for the wedding yet. We designed some rough sketches for her with the details to be filled in later. A month before the wedding, she arrived for a design session to finalize the cake. She showed me her amazing invitations, complete with a hand-sewn fabric flower that was so three-dimensional, that the invitations had to be mailed in beautiful little slate grey boxes, rather than envelopes.

We looked through her earlier designs, and saw that one of them incorporated horizontal fondant bands, and an oversized fondant flower as the focal point. That being the design that worked best, we messed around with what the fondant bands should look like. We played around with the background texture of the invitation, and were pretty happy with it. It wasn't until we were about to wrap everything up, that she mentioned her reception decor. She had ordered in bolts and bolts of toile upholstery fabric to have runners and napkins sewn for the tables.

Errrrrghhhh. Stop right there. Toile? Gimme.

I had just started messing around with screenprinting in frosting a couple of months prior, so all I could have shown Misha was a frosting Spider Man comic book to illustrate the technique. To avoid giving her pre-wedding nightmares involving super-heroes, I refrained from showing her that particular example. Luckily, she trusted me enough to let me go ahead with the screenprinting without seeing an actual sample. I love this girl. And her cake. Et Paris. Ooh, ooh, and those Nutella and almond filled giant crepes that they sell at every street corner...the view from Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, Musee D'Orsay, Jardin Luxembourg, the fountain at St. Sulpice, St. Germaine des Pres, the bookstalls along the Seine, mimes...wait, not mimes, they can keep the freaky mimes.