It looks like Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky have headed into the bush — they are celebrating their honeymoon on a South African safari! WWD reports, “sources say the newlyweds have headed into the wild — South Africa.” We guessed right!

President Clinton declined to comment on these speculations Monday, having said little since the wedding except to note his daughter’s nuptials were “wonderful.”

The paper goes on to point out the benefits of a safari for Chelsea and Marc, “First, few would recognize them in South Africa. And second, what paparazzi is going to risk being attacked by a lion or rhino just to get a photo of the couple?”

In our opinion, there may be more than a few paparazzi heading their now willing to take that risk for just one shot!

Amid glittering guests and watchful Secret Service men, Luc’s head chef Jason Hicks was hard at work two weekends ago, making risotto for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding celebration.

“I guess altogether we probably had about four chefs and 20 to 25 cooks,” said Mr. Hicks, a young Englishman who has worked at Luc’s Cafe on Big Shop Lane for about year.

“I was the risotto course, which was a trio of risottos,” he said.

“One plate with three indentations with an ounce of risotto in each: One was morel mushrooms and summer truffle; the other one was Meyer lemon; and the other saffron.”

Mr. Hicks worked in the New York City restaurant scene before coming to Luc’s. He got involved in the Clinton wedding through one of his former kitchen colleagues.

“The chef at the catering company was my former sous chef at La Goulue in the city,” Mr. Hicks said.

“And he’s now the chef of the catering company that did the wedding and he wanted some people like me there,” he said.

“He needed some eyes and ears and experience and so on to cover different areas.”

Chelsea Clinton married Marc Mezvinsky on Saturday, July 31, at Astor Courts, a 50-acre estate in Rhinebeck, N.Y., with a beaux arts mansion designed by Stanford White and built for John Jacob Astor IV in 1904.

The meal was planned for 550 guests, Mr. Hicks said.

“I think the final count was 527, 528,” he said. “We were working on 550.”

The crew of close to 30 chefs and cooks started days ahead and worked off-site and on-site to cater the event.

“It was being prepped the whole week, stuff that could be prepared ahead of time,” Mr. Hicks said. “Friday we did a big prep day and Saturday we started at 7 in the morning at the commissary, the kitchen. We loaded the trucks, transported the food, and got back to the commissary at 5:45 the next day — it was a pretty long day, a 23-and-a-half hour stint.

“There was a lot of staff, about 600-plus waiters, plus Secret Service and everything else,” Mr. Hicks said.

With the bride the only daughter of former President Bill Clinton and current Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, this was a wedding with a lot of precautions.

“The security was incredible,” Mr. Hicks said. “It was something to believe. You can imagine.

“We had to pass CIA checks for our ID — that was a couple of weeks before the wedding. Once we got to the venue, we had pass security to get our IDs, and we had to show our IDs,” he said.

“Then they bus you from that site, which is off the premises, they bus you in to the property. From there they check bags and so on.

“There was a lot of Secret Service there and, periodically, through the event, they did security checks — looking for bombs, or whatever.”

Mr. Hicks was born in Stratford on Avon, and brought up in Birmingham in the English midlands.

He’s been in United States about 16 years.

“Always been in the city, though, in Manhattan,” he said. “I’ve just been coming out here for the last year.”

He said Chelsea’s wedding seemed to come off fine — as far as you could tell from the kitchen, anyway — and it was a positive experience to work on the big event.

“It all went very well. There’s nothing that left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing,” he said.

“It was the wedding of Chelsea Clinton. But, the end of the day, my background is doing that kind of thing in a restaurant environment: For me, it’s wasn’t a ‘wow’ kind of deal,” Mr. Hicks said.

“It was fun,” he said. “It was as fun as a 23-and-a-half hour day could be.”

The ink has barely dried on Chelsea Clinton's marriage license, but already her lavish wedding is being used as a marketing tool to attract some of world's wealthiest consumers.

Astor Court Estate, the tony Rhinebeck, N.Y. manor where Clinton wed investment banker Marc Mezvinsky, is back on the market with a splashy new ad this weekend in the "House and Home" section of the "Financial Times," a British newspaper that caters to some of the planet's most sophisticated money men.

The ad, which occupies page 6, is headlined "Historic Estate Now on the Market -- Home of Recent Celebrity Wedding," a claim the house couldn't have made just 10 days ago.

Celebs notwithstanding, the sale itself is hardly breaking news: Astor Court was listed for a cool $12 million last October. It was only in early July that owner Katherine Hammer took the house off the market so that security and staff could prepare for the Clinton wedding.

The 30,000 square foot mansion is situated on 50 manicured acres overlooking the Hudson River. The laundry list of amenities includes an indoor pool, indoor tennis court, and 3,000 square feet of "staff quarters."

Little surprise, then, that on July 31 the house easily accommodated more than 400 guests hosted by the bride's parents, President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In addition to party goers, a small army of caterers, florists, valets, and groundskeepers was brought in for the day.

It's safe to assume real estate agents will be dropping the wedding's celebrity names for the foreseeable future, including Barbra Streisand, Oprah Winfrey, and director Steven Spielberg.

By Roger Friedman

Here’s some last little tidbits from Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Remember? It was a week ago, and it took up everyone’s attention. Now, hey…it’s been a week!

Apparently, Bill Clinton was very moved after seeing Chelsea and Marc do a dirty dance to “At Last,” choreographed by Maksim Cherchmerkovskiy from “Dancing with the Stars.” He said:”I just talked to the priest and he told me as long they were married before did that sexy dance it was still a PG wedding.” The father of the bride also added, according to a wedding guest: “As long as Chelsea could articulate a thought–which was about when she was 8 years old–I’ve been outnumbered two-to-one. Now it’s two-to-two and I’m so grateful to you, Marc.”

A little more on the groom’s father, Edward Mezvinsky. As I told you, he didn’t walk his son down the aisle. “He is shunned by the family,” says a source. The ex-con congressman got to sit at the main table–a long dais–but at the far end, away from the happy couple and his ex wife.

And Chelsea’s matron of honor was Nicole Davison Fox, her former roommate, married to a hedge fund guy.

Someone even likened the New York nuptials to America's "royal wedding," which would have been the antithesis of the young woman's raising. Whatever they did wrong, the Clintons did something right in rearing Chelsea.

We haven't heard much about her since she was a shy schoolgirl living in the White House. She hasn't been arrested for drunk driving, or romanced a movie star, or been a tabloid cover girl. She finished school, started to work and now has married a young man she's known for years.

Chelsea Clinton's  Private Life

The point is this: When running against the Clintons, Republicans always bragged about their stand for "family values." It was always a vague, nebulous -- some would say hypocritical -- term, but we voters knew what was meant. It harkened to Bill Clinton's womanizing and Hillary's feminism. We somehow were supposed to think Republicans had cornered the market on morality.

Guess again. The unlikely Larry Flynt made that point clear during the white hot heat of the Monica Lewinsky affair. For every Democratic skirt-chaser, he found three Republicans with loose zippers. Seems that no one political party had cornered the market on straying spouses.

As a hellbent political and professional couple, the Clintons have stumbled more than once. But from all evidence, they were on the same page about Chelsea. They fought for her privacy like tigers on the road to the White House, during a presidency kept on tender-hooks by political enemies, throughout a terribly public airing of dirty marital laundry. When an adult Chelsea campaigned for her mother during the failed Hillary presidential campaign, we were almost surprised.

Family values are different for each and every family. That's why they are called "family" values. They aren't decided by a single religion, a majority vote or one political party out to exploit mistakes of the other.

In choosing public lives for themselves, Bill and Hillary invited into their lives intense scrutiny, zealous critics and both sides of the coin stamped by fame. Some would say they thrive on it.

They had the decency, however, to protect Chelsea till she could choose a course for herself. How easy it might be for a Clinton daughter to run for office, write a best-selling book, travel the world meeting princes and trailing paparazzi. So far, at least, she's chosen a much more sensible route. As first daughter, even with protective parents, perhaps she had enough publicity to last a lifetime.

I think the abiding image this nation might have of Chelsea Clinton will have nothing to do with a fairy-tale wedding or with the peripheral hubbub like pepperoni pizzas with meat that spelled out "I Do." I think, instead, it will be the photograph of a much younger Chelsea, walking between her parents, holding both their hands, on their way to try to patch up an ailing family. Something about the young woman's body language exuded love and determination and, yes, hope.

Every marriage has problems, every family its struggles. Chelsea and her new husband no doubt will have their share of trials, self-induced and otherwise.

Something tells me that life has given Chelsea a leg up in the coping department, however. I think the family values she grew up with -- yes, while living with Bill and Hillary -- will serve her well.

Read more: The Williamson Daily News - The private life of Chelsea Clinton

For anyone who wants to really have a wedding like Chelsea Clinton, there may be an opportunity: the estate in Rhinebeck, New York where her wedding to Marc Mezvinsky took place over the weekend is for sale for $13.5 million. The Astor Estate, which dates back to 1904 to the son of John Jacob Astor III, had been on the market for $12 million, but since hosting the so-called “wedding of the century” brokers said there has already been interest and immediately raised the price. Another Rhinebeck resident whose house went up for sale the day before the Clinton wedding said he had already seen an increased number of inquiries due to the interest of visitors to the town.

Like so many aspects of Chelsea Clinton's spectacular wedding Saturday, the cake was remarkable.

The nine-tier vanilla cake, filled with dark chocolate mousse, frosted in white fondant, and decorated with 1,000 edible sugar flowers, was also gluten-free.

That's because the former first daughter is allergic to the gluten found in most cakes and breads.

The creation was a triumph for Frances and Maarten Steenman of La Tulipe Desserts in New York's Westchester County. The Steenmans, who have owned and run their business for nearly 12 years, specialize in all kinds of exquisite tarts, pies, cookies, and of course cakes, not just those that are gluten-free.

Some media outlets speculated that the wedding cake was also dairy-free because the bride is a vegetarian of long standing. But Frances Steenman said that was not the case.

"Instead of flour, we used a special brown rice blend that contains no barley, rye, oats, or wheat," she said. "But no, it was not a vegan cake."

Gluten-free baking is not easy, said Monica Glass, pastry chef at 10Arts on the Avenue of the Arts here in Philadelphia. Glass also has a gluten allergy, so she knows the difficulties firsthand.

"A lot of gluten-free recipes are more dense, but you need a recipe that's moist enough to be tasty," Glass said.

At a wedding ceremony, all eyes are on the bride, but at a reception, the cake takes center stage. So it has to look good.

"But taste," Glass says, "is foremost."

The popular bridal website TheKnot.com estimated the cost of the Clinton cake at over $11,000. But Steenman said that too was incorrect.

"I can't speak to the price directly, but what the media speculated was not true."

"We work with all budgets and all kinds of dietary requests due to allergies or religion," Steenman said, "so we were definitely qualified to do this."

And how did they transport their 500-pound masterpiece from the bakery in Mount Kisco to Astor Courts, the beaux-arts mansion built for John Jacob Astor IV, about 50 miles away?

"There was a lot of engineering behind it, and a lot of practice," said Steenman, whose husband Maarten does the designing and baking.

"Throughout the years," she said, transporting cakes "has always been the most stress for pastry chefs."

"You can't possibly travel with a cake that big stacked up," said Steenman, so she assembled it on-site and left.

She said she did not know whether her cake was the only dessert option, or whether some of the 400 guests took pieces home. But she did say with certainty that there was no sheet cake in the kitchen that was served to guests instead of the real thing, a fairly common custom at some weddings.

And, she said, the couple definitely did not want a cake topper.

Steenman said she was hoping the bride and groom saved the top layer of the cake to eat on their first anniversary. That's a tradition that Steenman said she finds especially delightful.

Knockoffs of the bridal gowns (yes, Clinton wore one Vera Wang gown for the ceremony and another for the reception) are probably already in the works. Would Steenman do a knockoff of Chelsea's cake if a bride requested it?

"No, I would not duplicate the cake," she said. "Every bride deserves a special cake of her own."

WHEN it comes to publicly exploiting one’s nuptials, Chelsea Clinton could fairly be described as the antipode of Bethenny Frankel. Ms. Clinton, in the words of Joanna Coles, the editor of Marie Claire, “shows celebrities how they should be getting married and that it is possible to stay out of the limelight, if you want to.”

Oh, but who would want to?

Few images of Ms. Clinton’s wedding to Marc Mezvinsky have been released, frustrating those whose livelihoods depend on a feed of nuptial news. Think of the publicity-seeking designers, the poor caption writers for InStyle, the knockoff artists hoping to make a buck off a Chelsea-inspired trend. Once, designers talked freely about their designs, but this week, an assistant to Vera Wang, who made the wedding gown, hung up on a reporter calling for more details.

“Many of us would also love to see her lineup of lavender-clad bridesmaids as well as the children rumored to have been members of the wedding,” wrote Bridget Foley in Women’s Wear Daily. “And, oh yes, a good look at Hillary’s Oscar de la Renta gown, its Italian organza in a high-drama ombréd range from magenta to pale pink.”

That dress (possibly gorgeous, but who can tell?) can barely be seen in the official images. Allen B. Schwartz, the copycat king who has said he will remake the dress, has his work cut out for him. Mr. Mezvinsky, meanwhile, may have suffered a disservice for the lack of a decent photo op. In the image that the men’s suit designer Alan Flusser saw online, the Burberry-clad groom, he said, “looked like Ichabod Crane.”

“The man has a very long neck, and unfortunately, he is wearing a dress shirt that is probably two inches too short,” Mr. Flusser said. “He looked less — how shall I say this? — less stylish than his wife looked.”

Interest in the wedding is understandable, said Susan Cernek, an editor at Glamour.com. “Weddings serve as a calling card for one’s personality and lifestyle. In 24 hours you showcase your social circle, sartorial preferences, family background, visual aesthetic, even your diet preferences.”

Ms. Coles had another theory as to why people might be disappointed by a mere trickle of photos: Despite growing up in the White House, Ms. Clinton appears to have emerged “relatively normal,” she said. “People can’t quite believe it. They long to see a picture of her lying upside down with her dress hanging over her head.”

If it seems like everybody is talking about Chelsea Clinton's wedding these days, it's probably because everyone is. 

Rumors are swirling around about the super secret details of the former First Daughter of the United State's July 31 wedding, which is rumored to be taking place at John Jacob Astor IV's former 50-acre country estate – now called the Astor Courts – in nearby Rhinebeck, NY. Clinton, 30, will wed longtime boyfriend  Marc Mezvinsky, 32, and speculation has been flying about the local vendors tapped to cater the family of American royalty.

The latest we're hearing is that one of Scarsdale's favorite among foodies, on Garth Road, has been asked to provide the big cake: Lulu Cake Boutique.

According to The New York Times, suppliers for the wedding have signed a confidentiality agreement, but regardless, details are starting to surface.

Jerry Eimbinder, a food writer and Patch freelancer, was watching Good Morning America as well as Eyewitness News this afternoon when he immediately recognized Lulu's logo on the television screen.

Lulu's owners were unable to be reached today, and the shop is closed.

ABC has been running coverage about the wedding and details emerged that the cake would be coming from a local Scarsdale bakery.

Now, there are a few bakeries in town, but thanks to his detective-like discovery and quick eye, it seems as though one piece of the puzzle has been found.

"The first clue was on ABC News when they mentioned that a Scarsdale bakery had been hired for [creating the cake]. Then I re-watched the story and saw Lulu's logo on the screen," said Eimbinder. "They didn't mention it by name, but I saw the logo, and I know the bakery and owner quite well. They're known for their wedding cakes."

Oliver Cheng Catering, a lower Manhattan company that was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal as one of the food preparers for the wedding declined to comment, as did Boston-area's Blue Ribbon B-B-Q Catering, whose catering manager let out a nervous laugh when asked if Lulu was indeed making the cake, before saying, "I don't think I can confirm that." 

Scarsdale residents know and love Lulu for their delicious and ultra-aesthetically pleasing delicacies, but the little bake shop is known far and wide for their wedding cakes with flair.

[Lulu has a special place in Patch's heart for donating piles of delicious cookies to our July 15 Gulf wildlife fundraiser that, along with La Renaissance and Christie Place Bakery, we were able to raise more than $1,100 for the National Wildlife Fund.]

According to the Associated Press, the total cost of the wedding is rumored between $3 and $5 million, and with regional vendors being used, it can only be a welcome boon for the local economy.

Of course, none of the many little secrets of the fete will be revealed until after the wedding, but...well, come on, it's always fun to speculate.