Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | In Need of Input on Wedding Cake

Wow, a wedding cake! That's ambitious.

You could always do a dessert buffet. Unfrosted cakes and brownies freeze quite nicely, so those could be made ahead. I had the usual cake at my wedding (though this was pre-severe-digestive-distress) but I also had mini brownie bites (instead of making them in a pan I made them in mini muffin tins with nice paper liners), mini pecan pies, cheesecake bites, and chocolate eclairs. We had vast amounts of cake left over but the rest of the desserts were all devoured. Anyway, this way you could have a couple IBS-safe things.

I made all of the cream cheese mints for my wedding -- I made them ahead of time and froze them (I did this with all of the food that I made). I can post the recipe if you want to try it with soy cream cheese -- I've never tried it, but the calories from fat is around 20% even w/ soy cream cheese so it would be IBS-safe. The only problem would be if the soy cream cheese was firm enough.

If you want to bake a more traditional wedding cake, I've made "ordinary" IBS-safe cakes lots of times. I got really tired of the dense texture from low-fat cakes made with applesauce, so after experimenting I found you can make a nice light-textured cake by using pudding mix. For a standard size cake (9x13 or two 8-inch rounds), I use about half a box of instant pudding mix and enough soy/rice milk to make it not-quite-thickened -- 3/4 C maybe?? I also use only egg whites and beat them until the soft-peak stage, regardless of what the recipe actually says.

You can also make perfectly safe buttercream-type frosting by using all-vegetable shortening, powdered sugar, and soy/rice milk. I start out with 2 T shortening and just keep adding sugar (2-3 C?) and milk (1/4-1/3 C?) until I end up with enough frosting. Sift in 1/4-1/2 C cocoa powder for chocolate. Calories from fat is usually 15-25% depending on how much frosting you make.

The downside to low-fat is that it goes bad very quickly, so unless you did angel food cake you'd want to bake it ahead of time, freeze it, and then assemble everything on the day of the wedding. The downside to frosting with soy/rice milk is that it needs to be kept refrigerated until ready to serve and sometimes the soy milk will do this strange separation thing and "weep" into the cake. I keep meaning to experiment with different liquids but haven't really gotten around to it. Using just water doesn't cut it.

I recommend baking and eating lots of practice cakes.

let us know what you end up doing!

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jen

"It's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle -- to get one's head cut off." -- LC

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