Sunday 23 March 2014

Wedding cake... Again!

So this weekend has been the grand finale of several weeks of baking practice, burnt fingers and absolute anguish at the idea of letting a good friend down. 

When said friend asked me months ago to make her wedding cake for her I was still filled with confidence from the last success (see my previous wedding cake post) and so I readily agreed. She wanted the same cascading roses design as my last cake but with a burgundy and ivory colour scheme. 

The three tiers were to be 10, 8 and 6 inches. Plain sponge on the bottom, chocolate in the middle and fruit cake on the top. However I wasn't happy with the idea of trying to get two sponges to take the weight of a heavy fruit cake, even with dowelling, so we agreed that the top tier would be strawberry sponge cake. 

For the last several weeks I have been sending my other half to work with boxes of various flavours of cake which have been my practice runs of each recipe. The one which gave me the most stress was the strawberry cake. So much so that I will give it a blog post of its own, I think!

I have also been practising roses again. At first I used the five petal cutter which I used for the roses on the first cake I did. But this created flowers which were not only too small, but which didn't even look like roses! The same happened with the single petal cutters I had. At this point I was tearing my hair out, convinced I was going to let my friend down with a terrible cake with terrible flowers. 

So I turned to my favourite online cakey shop, The Craft Company. I cannot recommend this shop enough for cake decorating equipment. They have always had everything I needed for decorating and deliver it well packaged and in good time. (Ok I'm done advertising now, they didn't ask me to do that lol).  I was able to get some large 5-petal cutters which were shaped more like rose petals than the standard cutters, as they have a point in the centre of each petal which allows for curling it back more realistically. These were the answer to my prayers and I spent two weeks' worth of evenings rolling, cutting and sticking to create 22 of these in ivory and burgundy:


One thing I've definitely learnt from this experience is that it is infinitely better to use polystyrene cones for the centre of larger roses rather than making them out of flower paste. It makes them that much lighter and therefore made me slightly less terrified that they were going to fall off the cake on its journey to the venue. 

Now, the first wedding cake I made was fruit cake. This is much easier to cover with fondant smoothly as you can use the marzipan layer to hide any flaws in the surface of the cake, then the fondant will go on smooth and level. Throughout all my practice runs I gained this knowledge about covering sponge cakes so they are smooth and level. 

1. Taking your time, cut the dome off the top of the cake, making a guide line all the way around the cake with your knife before cutting through it so you can be sure it is level. Use a tape measure or ruler if you need to. Then turn the cake upside down so that the flat base becomes the top of the cake. 

2. If you are slicing the cake to fill with buttercream, draw a line vertically down the side of the cake with a knife so that when you put the layers back together you can line it up correctly, with this as a guide. 

3. After crumb coating the cake, put it in the fridge for the buttercream to set. Then add another layer of buttercream and use it to create a smooth surface for your icing to sit on. Set this in the fridge too. 

4. Make sure your fondant isn't rolled too thinly. If it is too thin then it will fall into all the cracks and crevices that there will no doubt be in the sponge, and show them up. Thin fondant will also rip more easily and give you more problems to fix. 

So as you can tell, this was a very steep learning curve for me. After delivering the cake yesterday (next time you are stuck behind a slow driver, just think... They might be delivering a wedding cake!) I spent the day a nervous wreck, worrying what the bride would think and if it had met her expectations. I was also (slightly irrationally I suppose, given that the venue is popular for weddings, so they know what they are doing) worried that the venue wouldn't treat the cake with the delicate handling it required and I'd arrive to the evening reception to be told that they had smashed the flowers. But of course my worries were completely unnecessary. The bride told me immediately upon seeing me that it was amazing, and apparently people were touching the flowers just to see if they were real. (I was gobsmacked by this as I hadn't believed they were quite that good!) I had a few compliments throughout the evening and the experience has left me filled with confidence. One day I could perhaps make a living out of this, you never know. I'd have to change my name though. I don't think people would be willing to buy from someone who called themselves a novice!

       Congratulations Kirsty and Andy!