Wedding Cakes 101

I love creating specialty cakes, especially wedding cakes.  There is such a huge space for imagination when it comes to what you can do with fondant, icing and gum paste.  They turn out so beautiful, since the sky is the limit when it comes to design.

This particular wedding cake, was my very first professional wedding cake that I did on my own.  It sold to the bride and groom and the very reasonable price of $495.00 +tax...hehehe!  The bottom tier is vanilla cake, the middle tier is chocolate cake, and the top layer is carrot cake!  What a way to mix it up!  The whole cake was frosted with a vanilla buttercreme and then wrapped in fondant.  Fondant, for anyone who might not know is a soft playdough-like cooked sugar mass that is draped and fitted over the outside of many fancier cakes and is usually white but can be colored.  It is very smooth in appearance when fitted to the cake.  You can also make a lot of figures and shapes with fondant (example: fondant daisies). 

This cake in particular, the bride provided a 1" white sheer ribbon to be wrapped around the bottom edge of each of the three tiers.  She also provided plastic pearl strings to be wrapped around each tier.  Then came in a large box of fresh pink lilies to be used in decorating her cake.  Sounds easy right?  Wrong.

The problem I ran into was that this cake was for a wedding in the middle of July which happened to be *the* hottest week of weather all summer.  It was a desperate 30 degrees Celsius outside which meant in the kitchens it was a mere pathetic 45 degrees Celsius.  The problem that presented itself was that it was so warm and *so* humid that the royal icing I needed for gluing the ribbon, pearls and flowers into place wasn't harding as fast as it should.    The buttercreme was getting so warm under the fondant that it was causing the fondant to sog, and the fondant itself started to sweat because of the humidity.  I ended up scrubbing down and clearing a section of the butcher shop for the assembly of half this cake as it was the only air conditioned area of the whole kitchen.  However, it wasn't as cold as trying to do such a task in the fridge, which would have caused worse sweating and sagging when the cake was hence removed into the hot day's air later. The other half of the cake was then assembled in the reception hall for the dinner after the ceremony whilst the servers were setting up for dinner service.

Did I mention the power was out the entire day due to a blown down tree over a power line?

It was definitely a challenge, but I got it done in the end just the same.  What turned out was the most beautiful wedding cake to which I take great pride in saying is all my creation.

~Sally