Back in October last year when my sister told us the very exciting news that she was was engaged I knew immediately that I wanted to make her cake, I'd always fantasised about making a wedding cake and making one for my sister would be a very special challenge. The planning began straight away and when I look back through my lecture notes over the 6 months leading up to the wedding the margins and spaces on the pages are crammed with drawings and plans, getting more detailed and frantic as the wedding day in march approached and I realised quite how big a challenge it was going to be!
I think the challenge with a wedding cake is not only making it beautiful but managing to make a potentially very large cake taste good throughout, and have a good texture. So I did some research into potential recipes (we didn't want a traditional fruit cake recipe) and decided on a madeira sponge; a solid cake that would stack well and would also improve with age so could be make in advance. The cake would be filled and coated with a lemon and passion fruit curd and a vanilla buttercream and decorated with fondant icing. Instead of using marzipan beneath the icing as you would on a traditional fruit wedding cake my middle sister suggested using a coloured fondant icing that would give the cake some colour when sliced, brilliant!
The process of making and decorating the cake took about a week, and involved vast amounts of ingredients including about 10kilos of fondant icing!
The caked baked, filled and stacked.
Then coated in buttercream and covered in a layer of coloured icing; the top was fuchsia pink, the middle purple and the bottom pale pink. To match the wedding colours.
Then on with the white icing, ready for decorating!
The most intricate decoration was on the bottom tier, and it involved cutting out about 1000 tiny white icing daisies, (something everyone helped with) I then glued these in diagonal lines around the cake using royal icing - it took about 4 hours, but worth it I think :)
The other two i decided to simply dress with ribbon and some fresh flowers arranged by the florist to match the bouquets.
The finished cake!
xxx
