Bells are ringing, brides are panicking … it’s June, and weddings are in the air.

It’s high season for wedding cakes, the dream confections that defy gravity, make magic with sugar and leave the all-important final gastronomic impression on wedding guests.

Using a baking and decorating process pioneered during the 1920s by the late Guiseppi Termini in southern Italy and, later, at the family’s Philadelphia bakery, Termini creates about 100 wedding cakes each year. Bakers still use some of Termini’s 1940s-era mixers and equipment.

But some things have changed. These days, a Termini isn’t contractually obligated to cut and serve the cake at a wedding reception. To hear family members tell it, Guiseppi was a pretty busy guy when wedding season rolled around.

Here are step-by-step directions for the making of one bride’s dream cake at Termini Bros. bakery. The Victorian-style cake was prepared for a Saturday wedding in April.

Thursday

The Italian cream is born.

Two days before the wedding, the cream is prepared in 15-gallon batches. Third-generation baker brothers Joseph and Vincent Termini learned the art two years ago, and are now responsible for making the famous Termini Italian cream used in wedding cakes and, of course, cannoli.

In a giant, stainless steel vat, heavy cream is mixed with milk and heated until it simmers.

The milk is tempered by the gradual addition of egg yolk until the mixture thickens into a cream.

The mixture is stirred briskly, then poured into three 5-gallon stainless steel basins that are then stored in the refrigerator until cold.

“The smoothness really determines the quality of the Italian cream,” said Joseph Termini. “That’s why we get really mad at one another if it gets messed up.”

While the Termini brothers prepare the Italian cream, longtime baker Charlie Hearn is mixing the sponge cake, a delicate blend of batter and meringue.

Inside a giant bowl on a pedestal, Hearn literally gets up to his elbows hand-mixing puffy meringue with an egg yolk and flour batter. “The consistency is the secret,” offered Hearn.

To make the average wedding cake, Hearn prepares sponge batter for 14-, 12- and 10-inch round cake pans.

Friday

The buttercream icing.

The secret to the buttercream icing is the confectioner’s sugar. The better the sugar, the less grainy the icing. Termini Bros. uses Domino 10x, a highly refined confectioner’s sugar, to assure smoothness.

Baker Robert Deetz makes a wedding cake’s icing the day before the cake is scheduled for delivery. This allows the icing to remain supple for decoration. He blends vegetable shortening, butter and confectioner’s sugar until the icing is smooth, then delivers the batch to the cake decoration room.

Before any icing can be applied, the cake must be pieced together. This is done the day before the wedding.

Decorator Bill Fasarakis begins by spraying the cooled sponge cakes with both light and dark rum syrups. The cakes must be moist before the Italian cream can be applied.

Once the rum soaks in, Italian cream is piped from a pastry bag onto each layer of cake lining the wooden counter. Piping assures steadier layers when the tiers are stacked.

The piping is carefully flattened with a spatula and the cakes are gingerly stacked.

Once stacked, the cakes are ready to be iced and decorated.

Also on Friday, Fasarakis uses a rotating pedestal to decorate a wedding cake. He’ll stack four tiers at a time. For higher cakes, he’ll go to the reception site for the final assembly.

Fasarakis begins by applying stripes of white icing with a pastry bag, using a wide tip.

He switches tips and makes a scallop border around each tier. Using yet another tip, he makes roses spring to life from stem to bud to flower along the sides of the cake.

In a painstaking test for steady hands, Fasarakis switches tips to create roses by hand. Then he places them delicately on the cake, balancing them on the tip of scissors.

The final step involves choosing the proper cake topper. It could be a gazebo, fresh flowers or a statue of bride and groom. A completed, four-tiered cake serves from 175 to 200 people.