Assembly of the Cake!

The Wedding Cake!!(Trial run)

Ah.. its a sigh of relief I have now that I have finished the trial wedding cake. I got loads of compliments and I've decided that yes I will make my own. I will have my mother and at least one bridesmaid (who are equally competent as me in the kitchen) to help and a solid 4 days before the friday night rehearsal to get things done. Here are my pics and comments on the process. I baked the final tier on thursday night and made the fillings and assembled the cake during the day friday to take to my orchestra rehearsal friday night.

First things I took the cakes out of the freezer the night before, leaving them in their plastic wrap to come to room temperature.

Here you can see the freshly baked (night before) pumpkin chocolate chip top tier layers (which I didn't have room to freeze)

I also made all the chocolate faux bois planks the night before. My wood grain came out much better this time and I also reversed the colors to make one white chocolate cover for the vanilla/middle tier.

I had a bit of a problem with some of the largest 12" planks being a bit warped and cracking, but otherwise it was pretty simple!-- next time I will have to make some extra to replace any breakages.

I started out filling and icing the bottom tier (chocolate with praline) I didn't really have enough icing, only making a 1/2 recipe (6 cups), so next time I will make the full recipe so I have enough to do a crumb and then final coat.

I just barely managed to squeeze this 12" tier into my little British fridge!

Next up I needed to make the frosting for the top tier. I decided on a cream cheese frosting to go with the pumpkin. Unfortunately the recipe I choose from the sky high cakes book just did not perform. I had to stick it in the freezer to get a consistency unlike cake batter! It started out well with a separate mixture of butter, cream cheese and icing sugar.

This was then added to a very similar egg white, sugar syrup akin to the Italian Meringue in the Silk Praline buttercream.

Unfortunately the end result looked like cake batter and did not hold up at all! Here it is in the fridge, look how thin it is covering this cake (and its not because I ran out of frosting!) this was another time I was happy that all the outside of the cake will be covered with chocolate faux bois so not really an issue.-- Anyone have a good stiff cream cheese frosting recipe for me?

I next moved on to the final filling, white chocolate ganche for the middle tier of vanilla butter cake. Look at all the white chocolate here its about 1400g!

The ganache was simple to make and my biggest mistake was being impatient in waiting for the ganache to set up, so the filling is not quite as thick as I'd like it (oh yeah there is also some raspberry jam between the layers!

Here is the middle tier covered with white ganache, in its box with the above tier supports (straws) to take the top pumpkin layer cake tier.-- mental note to get cake boxes that are slightly bigger than the cake, so the sides don't touch/mess up the frosting!

Here's another view of the final cake assembled. I served it to my 60 person orchestra (I'm going for 80 guests) and cut extremely large slices. I had tons left so I'm thinking to perhaps scale back the size of the layers. (12-9 and 6?)

I also realized that its good to have a bit more straw poking above the surface of the cake, as most of the top of the bottom tier was stuck to the board below! (didn't happen on the middle tier though..)

And finally I wasn't happy with the size of the planks, true if I had been in a kitchen, or had more time to check I could of taken a hot knife or something to cut them to the size of the cake!