Her advice saves the (wedding) day

I was up to my elbows in chocolate, in a Texas kitchen that had no mixing bowls larger than 2 quarts, and I was trying to bake a wedding cake for 80 that would be served in a matter of hours. The only thing that kept me sane was this thought: What would Julia do?

She would stay calm, that's what. She would make do with what she had, and she would have a good laugh about it all.

"Cooking is not a particularly difficult art," Julia Child and coauthors Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck wrote in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," the 1961 classic. "The most important ingredient you can bring to it is love of cooking for its own sake."

Thankfully, I had that ingredient in spades. I forged ahead. I had chosen Julia's Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba cake), a meltingly moist chocolate-almond confection that had never failed to wow guests. It appeared in "Mastering," but I had first made it out of her 1989 "The Way to Cook," the volume that guided me as a new college graduate through the joys of French techniques decades after "Mastering" had done the same for a previous generation.

By the time some dear friends announced their engagement in 2002, I had baked this cake so many times that the recipe was a mere reminder, and the technique rote. The fact that I would multiply it by 10 -- and would attempt it in a small, hot kitchen with neither stand mixer nor large bowls -- merely served to make the familiar fresh again. So there I was with an amateur's tools putting Julia's advice to the test. I pulled out a calculator to divide the recipe into quantities that would match the sizes of the large stockpots I would use to mix the batter. I whipped egg whites in batches. I ground almonds in a blender (don't try this at home). I spread melted chocolate onto sheets of wax paper and stacked them like sandwiches in a cramped refrigerator.

My biggest departure from Julia's recipe was in the assembly: Her single-layer cake would become three tiers. Since the pans were of such different sizes, that meant the baking times would be all over the place, and I had to rely on toothpick testing rather than a timer. Later, I used little plastic straws set into the cake near the center to keep the tiers from sinking into one another. I let the free-form leaves of solid chocolate hang over the sides of each tier, adding drama. And, keeping in mind the warmth and humidity of a May day in San Antonio, I gave the cake a last-minute stint in the freezer before I carried it out to the rustic barn where guests were dancing.

The band took a break; I cut the first slice. When the bride and groom exchanged their tastes and broke into grins, I silently thanked Julia. She might have been laughing while she was cooking, but I had to wait until later.