All Intensive Purposes

An ornamental cake is absolutely and totally essential to every wedding and to the years of marriage that follow. Even the modern Japanese have adopted the custom. Their cakes are just like the white three-tiered Anglo-American model, except that they are inedible, made of white wax (with a small zone of real cake to allow for the ceremonial cutting) and can be used again and again by the company from which they are rented.

Jeffrey Steingarten, "Tiers and Laughter," in It Must Have Been Something I Ate 144, 145 (Alfred A. Knopf 2002).