The Wedding and Cake! pt one

Making your own wedding cake....

First let me say is well worth it if you normally take pride in making cake for your family, yourself, friends etc.
Also let me qualify that with its not to be undertaken lightly! As I live in UK and got married in USA I couldn't bake the layers and freeze them ahead of time as I did with the trial wedding cake this spring.. so with much pleading, photo sharing and phone calls- I convinced my mother that yes she could whip up 9 layers no problem.. which after all this is the woman responsible for my cooking/baking love- she did.. and it was fabulous! BUT.. there is still a lot more to wedding cake than baking the cake. And it does mean you have a bit less chill out time- but perhaps I would of spent that stressing about something else silly.. at least this was a real challenge to worry about!


We got married on a Saturday, so all of Friday was devoted to 'assembly'! My mom and I had make the tricky Praline Silk Meringue Buttercream on Tuesday so we would have one last thing to worry about and everything had been coming to room temperature since Thursday night.


Cue the miracle worker..the wife of one of the groomsmen- she makes my cake making hobby look like mud pies in the back yard. almost completely self taught she loves making cakes- so much so she was tickled pink to get to ditch her kids and be put to work basically all day until the evening dinner on Friday.. so here she is in action...

Here I am trying my best to reassure her that yes I do want her to stack my cakes as I know that without her ingenious leveling I will get a sloped saggy masterpiece!

Witness here our fridge full of partially completed cakes and white chocolate ganache- see those bits on the corners of the top cake.. i would have never done that... but she did and I have level layers to show for it!

Note its the bottom tier on the bottom of the fridge (a 12' chocolate butter cake with silk praline meringue buttercream) and the middle tier on top with waiting bowls of chocolate ganache and white chocolate! (a 10" vanilla buttermilk cake with homemade raspberry jam and white chocolate ganache)

At this point I thought.. hooray we're almost done.. then remembered I still had to make all the chocolate faux bois coverings.. and there was still one more tier to assemble and it needed its filling made too.. and we had a rehearsal to get to, party dresses to change into and a party to go to!

part 2 coming soon!