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The following is an excerpt from Gesine Bullock-Prado's new book about life as a master baker in Montpelier, Vermont.

By Gesine Bullock-Prado

The second my morning duties end, my mind turns to my big baking projects of the week: two anniversaries, a baby shower, and a 30th birthday cake. And then there are the commitment ceremonies and weddings. Wedding cakes are as much engineering feats as they are pastry. The bigger they get, the more architectural support they need. Each individual tier has to be exact, perfectly plumb, before you can stack the next. Many bakers make nothing but wedding cakes. Some bakers refuse to make them at all.

The stress that accompanies making a single wedding cake occupies weeks of a baker's life. I once read an article entitled "Tips for Your Budget Wedding" wherein the wedding "expert" insisted that brides-to-be shouldn't tell the baker they're ordering a wedding cake. Instead, they should just say it's for a large party, because bakers inflate the prices for wedding cakes. Excuse me? This may jive for the poseur who keeps a fake tiered cake in the backroom and shoves a Duncan Hines cupcake on top so there's something to slice into, while the caterers serve up Crisco-infused blobs from a nasty sheet cake for the guests. But it won't fly for the baker who painstakingly bakes and assembles each tier, delivers them in pieces, and then builds the real deal on location.

If someone lied to me and told me the day before the event that the cake I was making was now a tiered colossus that I'd have to deliver and assemble on-site, I'd tell them to screw themselves and get a Carvel Cookiepuss. But for all the agita that comes with making a wedding cake, like the paranoid bride with the L. L. Bean tote bag full of tearsheets from Martha Stewart Weddings, or an ingredient nitpicking mother of the bride with a deadly peanut allergy, nothing can rattle me after the disaster that was my very first wedding cake.

The summer of 2005 our shop was finished, with all the bells and whistles. But we couldn't have our grand opening until my sister got married in late July because I was making her four-tiered wedding cake. And I'd never tiered anything in my life, certainly not cake.

I blacked out the months before on the calendar and did nothing but make practice wedding cakes. I stacked tiers, piped beaded borders, and then asked random strangers who passed by our shuttered shop if they by chance were in need of a wedding cake on the fly. I just happened to have a few extra sitting around.

We flew to LA a week before the big day. I had a master schedule planned out. I'd bake the layers for the large cake and groom's cake, fill them with buttercream, give them a smooth topcoat, and let them firm up in the fridge. The actually assembly, stacking the tiers and decorative piping, would take place on-site. That was day one. Then I'd move on to the 200 individual cakes Sandy wanted for all the guests. The big cake was for cutting and general plunder. The individual cakes were for dessert. That was day two. The third day I would devote to the wedding favors: little bags containing five different-flavored macaroons each. The rest of the week was for final touches. And on the day before the big day, we'd drive the two hours to the wedding site, where I'd assemble the cake right away. This would give me the morning of the wedding to decorate myself for maid-of-honor duties.

When we got to my sister's house, Ray put away our bags and I cranked up the oven. Not a peep, and it was on full convection mode. I thought, "That's what you get when you can pay out the nose for quality." The fan was pumping away inside, but you'd never know it. "Hmmm, maybe it's too quiet." I opened the oven door. The fan wasn't moving.  It wasn't getting warm. I tried turning it on again.

Nothing.

I called every repair company in the phone book and no one was available. Not until midweek. I stared at the ovens for two days. When the repairman showed up, I was wild-eyed and waiting with pans filled with cake batter. I had one day. One freakin' day to do everything. The morning we had to leave, Ray got the van ready. We loaded the cakes into the back, leaving the van running and the air conditioning blasting while we ran back inside to get our luggage. We had to be quick about it. The van was on the street and outside the security zone of the garage. And the paparazzi were lurking about the neighborhood. We couldn't have them follow us to the wedding site. When we got back, the van was locked. The keys were inside the van, the cakes were inside the van, but we weren't. We called AAA and waited. The sun was barely out and it was already dripping hot outside. But the cakes looked cool and collected, hanging out in the idling air-conditioned box.

Once we were rescued, we noticed a tidy queue of SUVs full of paparazzi waiting for us to leave so they could neatly pursue. We delicately turned onto Sunset Boulevard with a block-long vehicular escort. And as we approached the on-ramp to the highway, the van careened off toward the emergency lane, the back tire "THWAP THWAP THWAPing" and throwing off shredded bits into traffic as we rolled to a stop. We lost the paparazzi but we lost precious time as well.

At the wedding site, our little refrigerated van sat alone overnight in a field. I got there first thing on the wedding day to find it still waiting in the white-hot sunshine and 100-degree heat. We borrowed a table from catering, which had taken up the entirety of the kitchen and left no space for me. We set up a makeshift workstation inside the car. A young woman from catering was assigned to be my helper, and we got to work in the tiny walk-in fridge on wheels. Seven hours later and I still wasn't done. The ceremony was in an hour. My hands were shaking and I was scared to ask whether the cake was really drifting off to one side or was I just loopy from leaning over a three-foot tall cake with a pastry bag and piping beads of frosting the size of poppy seeds along the edges. I was working in romantic mood lighting, the dome light on the ceiling of the cabin revealing just enough for me to make out the general outline of the cake. Every few minutes, I'd kick open the door and let the natural light crash in to get a better look. That's when I noticed that the cake was lopsided. When Ray came to check on me, I stared at him for a minute, my sticky hands wrapped tightly around a piping bag oozing melting buttercream from multiple tears in the plastic. The minute I figured out the right angle to avoid squirting frosting from an errant hole in the bag, I'd spring a new leak. My tank top was taking one for the team; all the extra icing found a home in the cotton ridges. A little found its way into my hair.

"Time's up."

So there it was. The cake had to be finished now and I had a half hour to look presentable. I wrapped my globby paws around the trick pastry bag and planted my feet resolutely. "Screw it. I'll just hide the ugly bits with flowers." Coiffed, scrubbed of stray bits of frosting, and zipped into my dress, I made a break for the catering tent and found my cake. Sitting upright. A florist gently placing fresh flowers along the bottom edge turned to me, not knowing I was the baker, and gestured to the cake.

"Isn't it beautiful?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it really is." God I was relieved, but I just had to ask, "Does it seem, though, that it may be leaning just a little to the right?"

This Saturday, I have no bridesmaid's duties to attend to, no paparazzi to outrun. But I feel the same amount of obligation, the same desire to create the perfect dream for this stranger bride as I did years ago for my sister. But please, God, go a little easy on the theatrics this time.

Reprinted from CONFECTIONS OF A CLOSET MASTER BAKER: One Woman's Sweet Journey from Unhappy Hollywood Executive to Contented Country Baker Copyright © 2009 by Gesine Bullock-Prado. Published by Broadway, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.