When Margaret Meece began planning her wedding, she knew exactly what kind of cake she wanted: one that tasted like home.
Baking has always been a shared passion for Meece, her mother and her grandmother. So as her big day arrived, she wanted to honor that tradition by making her own wedding cake using her grandma’s beloved Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet Cake recipe.
The recipe, a family favorite for birthdays, graduations and holidays, features an ermine-style frosting made with a flour-and-milk roux, giving it a light, silky texture.
“Being able to use my grandma’s treasured recipe to make my own wedding cake felt like a special way to have a piece of her there with us,” Meece, 26, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
Emily Merrick
Margaret Meece making her wedding cake
Meece and her husband held an intimate backyard ceremony on Wednesday, June 18, followed by a relaxed family celebration. Because the day was intentionally low-key, Meece planned to spend the morning baking and frosting the cake herself — something she had decided on from the very beginning.
When she told her family about her plan, no one was surprised. While she had friends and family offer to help, she wanted to tackle it by herself. “I am extremely type B, so this type of decision is super on brand for me,” the bride says.
For the occasion, Meece scaled up the traditional two-layer nine-inch version of the cake by adding two extra six-inch tiers, ensuring there was plenty to go around and that a sweet piece of family history could be shared with everyone.
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A closeup of the wedding cake
Still, the process wasn’t without its hiccups.
“Unfortunately, I did run into an issue with the frosting,” Meece recalls. “I had baked the cakes the night before the wedding, but when I took them out of the oven at 11 p.m., I decided that I would let them cool overnight and frost it the following morning.”
“I put the frosting in the fridge, and it solidified overnight,” she adds. “I tried to whip it in the morning to fluff it up again, but this didn’t work and unfortunately made the icing separate.”
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Margaret Meece and her husband cutting the wedding cake
In the end, the minor frosting flaw didn’t matter.
“It still tasted the same, so the entire cake was devoured as soon as we cut into it that night,” she says. “I had guests coming up to me raving about how delicious it was all night.”
“I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who has experience making consistently successful cakes,” Meece adds. “If it were a new recipe, I would have been stressing way more. But having a wedding cake with so much more meaning than a traditional bakery cake was one of my favorite parts of the night.”
Looking back at the moment, Emily Merrick says that when she first saw her cousin frosting the cake that morning, she couldn’t help but laugh and decided to take a quick video.
Later, as she rewatched the clips, she realized how different Meece’s approach was from other weddings she’d seen. Everything about it — from how relaxed Meece looked in her white robe to the fact that she was baking in her childhood kitchen — just felt so true to her.
Inspired, Merrick, 26, posted the clip to TikTok. At the time, she didn’t think much of it — she just thought it was a fun, behind-the-scenes wedding moment. But then the video went viral, amassing over 12 million views and more than 4,000 comments.
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Margaret Meece and her husband eating the wedding cake
“It was really funny, I couldn’t keep up and had to turn off my notifications. I never thought it would take off like that,” Merrick says.
“Margaret was definitely surprised, and I don’t know that she fully understood how viral it went until she got back from her honeymoon,” Merrick adds. “But she was a really good sport about it. A lot of people were oddly critical of the frosting (which was not buttercream, for the record), and she just laughed it off.”
“We’ve always been super close, so this experience just gave us something new to laugh about,” she continues. “Her wedding week was really special, and this kind of added a new memory to the mix and made the fun last a little longer.”
Read the original article on People
