Did I just agree to make a Wedding Cake? PART 1

A friend of mine told me she was getting married – how exciting! I’m known around the office as the ‘baker’ making cupcakes for just about any occasion we have…from baby showers to birthdays and everything in between. I love to experiment with flavors and decorations – and my thought process is that if I screw something up – no big deal I can always toss one…or give the ‘bad’ looking one to my husband to eat.

So – back to my friend – we were sitting there one day next to one another and she was looking at wedding stuff on Pinterest. We came across a wedding cake that looked like a birch tree. I said something along the lines of ‘I could do something like that’ and the rest was history. Suddenly I was going to be the baker that made the wedding cake for a dear friend.

Luckily, that friend is really easy going – so I knew if it wasn’t perfect she would be ok. And my journey to making a wedding cake began.

To start – I wanted to decide on the flavors and make sure the happy couple got some resemblance of a normal wedding cake experience – so I made a ‘test cake’ to test out the recipe, flavors, and play a little bit with some of the decorating elements.

 

The couple picked two flavors – oreo and strawberry. So I decided to make every other tier one of the flavors. I kept both of the cakes with a buttercream frosting – filling the layers within the tiers with a buttercream based filling.

 

On the oreo tiers – I started with a white cake batter and added crushed oreos. Then in the filling for these tiers, I added a LOT of oreos. So much so that this filling was more ‘spreadable’ than ‘pipeable’ it was so thick.

For the strawberry – I had a strawberry cake batter and added some chopped strawberries to it. For the filling I mixed some buttercream with chopped thawed frozen strawberries. This filling was liquidy to a fault. If I were to do it again I would figure out a way to make the filling a bit thicker by draining the strawberries better, using fresh strawberries, or removing the liquid from the buttercream that I use in it. It kind of soaked into the cake and was less substantial by the time we served it.

I baked the cakes normally – but also used some of the tips I’ve picked up along the way. See my post about ‘Surviving Baking: Cakes & Cupcakes’ for more on that. Then I went about frosting them. Another great place to see tips on this part is in the post ‘Surviving Cake Decorating: Basics’ to see some of the things I’ve learned from classes, family, and trial and error.

One thing I hadn’t counted on was finding the absolute max my mixer would hold. As you can see – I found the limit – and ended up having to pour it into a larger bowl to halve the amount and keep on mixing. There’s never a dull moment – but my tip is to go with the flow. Nothing about this is perfection – it’s about being flexible and adjusting to things as they come.

I baked the cakes the weekend before the wedding. Allowing them to freeze during the week. I’ve always heard freezing cakes actually makes them tastier in the end.

Then – when I took them out the day before the wedding – I gave them a crumb coat while frozen, let them thaw out, patted them with paper towels and began the frosting and stacking phase.

I fully stacked, frosted and decorated each tier individually – with each tier on a cardboard circle using a glob of frosting as adhesive. To make the look of ‘birch’ on the sides – I simply took some Wilton food coloring and mixed it with a little water – then took toothpicks and dipped them in the brown concoction and scraped horizontal lines in the sides in varying lengths and spots.

Next, I made quick small batch of marshmallow fondant – it’s way easier than it sounds and tastes SO MUCH better than regular fondant. I used a recipe like this one, following the microwave instructions, but just did a really small batch.

 

Nothing about making this fondant seems like it is going to work until its done then you realize you did it! I added a little bit of green coloring to make it look like leaves – then rolled it flat and cut out some leaves using a knife. Then I 

laid them on parchment paper and pressed some veins into them with a toothpick to make it look more leaf-like.

Once all the pieces were done – I set 

them all in our guest room locked up to ‘set’ and dry a bit. The next morning it was time to pack everything up to head to the wedding. More on that – and a funny end no one could have predicted…in part two!

 

 

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