Wedding Cake Numbah 1!

A few weekends ago I made my first wedding cake! My dear friend Lindsay, who I went to high school with, got married! : ) Her wedding was cherry blossom themed, so that is what she wanted her cake to be decorated like. After doing tons of research I found some awesome flower veiners (which are kind of like molds) to use for the blossoms. I started making those a few weeks in advance.

I also did a ton of research to figure out what to make a branch out of! There are tons of cherry blossom cakes online, but most use fondant as the branches and just lay it against the cake. I didn't like the look of that because the branches just look like worms. ha...so I decided I either wanted to do a sculpted branch or just paint one onto the cake. I knew if the branch wasn't edible it would look weird, like if I made it out of floral wire or something. I also didn't think molding chocolate would hold its shape...so my only option was gum paste! So I molded a branch with brown gum paste over top of wire.

...buuuut aparently gum paste takes longer to dry rock hard than I thought it would. And it cracked and broke. I didn't actually feel too bad about it though, because it was kind of ugly and would have been a pain to deal with. After my branch broke I decided I was just going to have to paint the branches.

The wedding was in St. George so I had to prepare everything in advance so that everything would run smoothly once I got down there. Wednesday night I literally was baking cakes from 10 pm to 9 am! I had to bake 5 10" cakes! And I know baking the cakes doesn't sound all that hard...but it is sooooo time consuming. Each cake has to bake for an hour and then it has to cool for an hour or longer before you plop it out of the pan or else it will crumble apart. Now, I only have one pan of each size or else I could bake the cakes one after another and not have to wait for them to cool. Anyway, each batch of red velvet takes 1 1/2 ounces of red dye!...that is a lot. I went through 8 boxes of red food color!

Well, once I had all the cakes baked and the flowers attached to their wires, me, Heather, Hannah, and Brai loaded up my car with all my cake supplies and headed to St. George. We spent the night at Lindsay's aunt's house, where I had to make my two little fondant babies Thursday night so they could settle overnight.

At about 8:30 Friday morning I whipped up some cream cheese frosting and began to stack the cakes!

Now, the design for this first cake is a little different. Lindsay didn't want a 3 tiered cake for the first reception so I decided to do a tall cake. I saw this here: http://hello-naomi.blogspot.com/2011/05/definition-of-ginormous-ji-norms1-adj.html

I will say now before you see any of the pics that my cake did not turn out like I wanted it to AT ALL.....but cake will be cake right? The idea was to have it nice and tall and smooth and perfect with one simple branch crawling up the front. Uuuuum that didn't happen as you will see...

The pic below is the stacked cake before I put the fondant on. The proportions weren't quite what I had planned. I think maybe 10" round cakes were too big and I also could have had one more cake on the top probably.

Well, once the cake was frosted it was time to roll out the fondant and lay it on the cake!

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yeah, didn't quite work the first time.

: (

I covered the cake and the fondant was ripping and sliding and it was the biggest disaster! Seriously, this cake project was going as bad as it possibly could have.

So...it was a good thing that I had made 2 batches of fondant just in case. I smoothed the frosting on the cake again, making sure to put less frosting on the sides, hoping that was why the fondant slipped off. I was so nervous the second time around I was shaking as I rolled out the fondant and covered the cake. This time it didn't rip and tear off the cake, but it did rip and tear. They were fixable though, so me and Heather went at them! We smoothed them the best we could, but there were worse problems than a few cracks...the stupid fondant was sliding downward! Even after I stopped smoothing the cake it kept sliding down. Finally I just had to let it sit there and hope that it would dry enough that it would just stop moving!

So here is my sad sorry excuse for a fondant covered cake...notice you can see every layer underneath because basically all the frosting squoze out the bottom.

So, what was the problem? I still am not sure that I know. My guess is the cream cheese frosting. I have never used it before with fondant and it was too warm and slippery! It isn't as firm as buttercream and didn't stick to the fondant well enough. Also, another problem was probaly the height of the cake. Since it was so tall the weight of the fondant just kept pulling itself down. I know it is possible because I have seen it be done, but I just have yet to figure it out!

So once I got the cake covered, I started painting branches all over the place to try and hide the ripply, cracked cake. After a lot of reassurance and some tears the cake was done!

In the end, my flowers saved the day! They hid the ripples and distracted everyone with their glittery goodness. And the cake actually didn't look all that shabby once we put it on its stand with all the cute decorations. : )

Everyone always asks if I hate to see the cake be cut...NO WAY! It is the absolute best part. Because even if I love the cake, after a million hours of stress and worry, destroying the cake is kind of therapeutic.

Cake Numbah 2!

Well, even after the St. George adventure there was still more cake fun to be had! Last weekend was Lindsay's second reception which was in Coalville. This cake was going to be a 3 tiered, more traditional wedding cake. And I also decided it was not going to involve cream cheese frosting, which eliminated the option of having a red velvet cake. We decided on a nice lemon cake. This lemon cake recipe is my absolute favorite to make!

I mean, lemons are so fun to zest and they smell really delightful. Also this cake batter is so thick! It is like a dough. It makes it so easy to work with.

Well, after baking the cakes I had to attach all the stamen and wires to second round of flowers I made. I probably sat at the table glueing for around 5 hours!

Oh and I just realized I never said what these flowers involve. They are made out of gum paste. To make the different shades of flowers I just used more or less gel frosting color and kneaded it into the paste. Then for the centers, to add some dimension, I painted each one with some pink pearl dust.

Saturday morning, the day of the reception, I cut the cakes, stacked them, frosted them, and covered them in fondant.

Notice the crisp edges on these cakes...that is why I love this lemon recipe. These cakes are so dense which make them strong for decorating, but yet they are still moist and delicious! Course I got this recipe out of my favorite Margaret Braun cake book!

Lindsay decided for this 3 tiered cake that she didn't want the whole thing to be cake...which was fine with me because baking all those cakes would have taken forever! So instead of using cake for the bottom 2 layers I used foam dummies! Yes, that is the technical term apparently : )

Frosting the dummies was hard because they weigh nothing, but other than that they were fun to work with because they were so easy to get nice and smooooth!

Here is the cake all stacked and ready to be decorated! I decided to transport each layer seperately to the church where Lindsay would be having her reception and decorate the cake there to avoid the possibility of the cake tumbling over. I ended up decorating the cake in one of the classrooms, hence the chalkboard in the background.

paintin some branches...

I almost forgot...I realized just in time on the first cake that there was no such thing as brown powdered food coloring. Well, there might be but I didn't know where to get it! The only powdered food coloring I could find was at Gygi's and it only comes in basic colors. Powdered color is the best to paint with, using lemon extract. It sticks really well and you can get different shades. Anyway, I was contemplating mixing some colors to get brown when I had a genius idea!...I could use cocoa powder! Course I didn't know if it would work...but I tried it and it worked great! And for hours while I painted I smelled chocolate lemons.

Here the cake is starting to bloom with cherry blossoms...

DONE!

After I put all the flowers on, I had to paint some white pearl dust on the little flower buds so they would glitter.

the reception area all decorated with the cake to the left on its stand.

This cake, for the most part, turned out just like I pictured it in my head!...Thank goodness...

I like to always get a picture with my cakes. Well, I was attempting to do just that but the photographer took the most awkward picture...

ha ha ha

So, all in all, I enjoyed making both of these wedding cakes. I think all the worry that goes into them makes them more rewarding once they are finished. I think I am going to take a break from cake decorating for a month or so, though, until I am done with school. And besides the huge disasters, like fondant falling off the cake, there are so many little things that happen that you don't anticipate. Like how long it takes to stab little bendy wires into foam cakes, which are a lot firmer than real cakes! haha...and how to dye fondant ivory, or how to make brown food coloring, or how to attach the wires to the flowers (i cheated...the answer is a hot glue gun), or how to attach the stamen to the flowers (cheated again and used super glue), or how to put the ribbon on the cake without an extra set of hands! The list could even go on...

But they are done! : D

You know what I am excited for?

To go to culinary school and learn how to do all the little things in a professional way. I don't think hot glue guns are allowed at culinary school! : }

Ok...ready for the stats?!?!

Here are all the ingredients that went into these two cakes (actually only the most interesting ones):

7 1/2 ounces of red food color

16 eggs

3 boxes of butter

15 cups of sugar

20 cups of flour

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22 POUNDS of powdered sugar!