Tiers of joy

Erika Bruce is getting married in two weeks. But before the 35-year-old pastry chef and baker walks down the aisle and exchanges rings in a wedding ceremony, she'll have put the finishing touches on the cake she baked for the occasion. She will have soaked an almond paste genoise cake in amaretto liqueur, filled the layers with apricot jam, frosted it with vanilla buttercream, and finished it with a layer of marzipan for a stylish, polished look.

The almond-apricot cake has become the signature item at Le Beau Gateau, a wedding cake business Bruce started six months ago. Others may think that the pressure of organizing a wedding and its hundreds of details is plenty for any bride to handle. But not Bruce. "A lot of people have warned me that I'm crazy to make my own cake," she says. "But for me, it's my way of escaping."

This month, thousands of brides and grooms will feed each other slices of the cake they picked out months ago with the help of bakers and designers like Bruce. Choosing the grand, multi-layered confection is one of dozens of decisions couples face after announcing the engagement. While many have a distinct idea of the style of a cake they want, others are happy to leave the details to experts.

All wedding cake bakers are in high gear this month, not just putting the confections together, but transporting them to the sites. Hot weather, bridezillas, and unfamiliar locations are all part of the life. Linda Hein came to the wedding cake business after a career as paralegal in bankruptcy court (she's now a consultant). Hein says the minor difference between her jobs is that with wedding cakes, "the stress goes away."

She started The Chocolate Tarte in 2004, after deciding that she had eaten too many subpar cakes at weddings and events. "I hate going to weddings and having bad cake," she says. "If that's your dessert for people, it should be worth the calories."

And worth the cost, too. Brides may think that the big ticket items at a wedding are the dress and a band, but cakes like Hein's and Bruce's can run close to $800 for three tiers and a custom design. As Hein says, "You get what you pay for." She limits her production to one wedding cake per weekend and makes everything from scratch, from the lemon curd she spreads between the layers to the French-style buttercream she uses to frost the cake.

In Amesbury, Jenny's Cakes start at $800 for a towering dessert for 160 people (that's $5 per person). Owner and baker Jenny Williamson says that add-ons, like the sugar flowers she makes by hand (these include dogwood, cherry blossoms, peonies, and orchids) raise the price. Like Hein, Williamson never freezes her cakes and limits her output. "I don't want to get into high production," she says. "I want to keep it small so we can keep a handle on the quality. The small size is part of the appeal. People know they can meet me, and I'll be the one designing, finishing, and delivering the cake. People respond to that."

A mother of two young children, Williamson, 40, does all of her baking in a second kitchen off of her Amesbury home, where three refrigerators are filled with cakes at different stages of production. Since she went into business 10 years ago, she has refined her list of ingredients. Eggs come from a farm in Stratton, N.H., and she uses high-fat European butter and top-quality chocolate.

Williamson entered the wedding industry after working as a dental assistant and catering parties for friends in her free time. She always knew she'd do something in either food or art, and that baking wedding cakes is a blend of both that suits her. The precision required for pastry, wedding cakes in particular, appeals to her.

Because of their size, structure, and the level of expectation attached to them, wedding cakes require close attention to detail. Until she started Le Beau Gateau, Bruce worked as a test cook and editor at the Brookline-based Cook's Illustrated for over four years, developing hundreds of recipes in the magazine's signature methodical style. The job taught Bruce a lot, she says. "But if I was going to be working that hard, I wanted to be working for myself."

For Hein, 45, professional baking began as "an escape from the adversarial world of bankruptcy court," she says. "I tend to be an anal-retentive detail person, and baking was made for anal-retentive detail people," says Hein, who makes her cakes -- as well as truffles and other desserts -- in a Weymouth catering kitchen.

Between difficult brides and melting buttercream, baking wedding cakes for a living offers a high potential for workplace horror stories. "I've only had one bad bride," says Williamson. And the baker has dropped only one cake. That one was for a shower, not a wedding. "Transporting the cake is by far the most stressful experience," Bruce says, and Hein agrees, going as far as to assemble her cakes at the reception site to avoid accidents in transit.

Of the three, Bruce is the only one who has cooked professionally, though Bruce and Hein both attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and their outlooks are similar. All say they enjoy the challenges of self-employment, and they are gratified by creating a product that makes other people so happy.

Two have something else in common: Williamson also baked her own wedding cake when she married nine years ago. And she, too, did it to calm down.

Jenny's Cakes, 978-388-7579 or jencakes.com; Le Beau Gateau, 617-233-7459 or lebeaugateau .com; The Chocolate Tarte; 617-628-2462 or thechocolatetarte .com.