City-Inspired Wedding Cake

 This cake has been a pet project of mine for a while now.  My friend Mandi had requested I do her wedding cake back in the spring, and I had so much fun designing this cake for her occasion.  I worked on the gum paste components on the side over the last month, and needless to say, I didn't sleep much the couple days before her event.  It was totally worth it to see this design come together.

Let's go way back to the design.

Mandi was great to work with-- she gave me photos of her dress, the bridesmaids' dresses, a color swatch, save the date, centerpieces, etc.  She told me she was doing a city theme and was thinking of maybe using the king and queen buildings that are iconic on GA 400 as inspiration.

To give the cake an architectural look, I mixed square and round cake tiers and got the idea of adding a topper to look a little like the queen building.  My goal was to fuse architecture with feminine flair, so I thought of building a gum paste peony and bud into the the topper.

As you can imagine, getting those gum paste 'straps' to stand up like that required all of my cunning.  And I had to put the peony in before adding the second strap...

Another idea I had in my head was inspired by an old cake decorating magazine where I saw someone build a filigree tier out of pastillage for a cake show.  I thought, why not do it for a real cake, in gum paste instead of pastillage, and add some building profiles to add to the city theme.  The artist in me thought to put more gum paste flowers inside the mesh and the engineer in me thought... how about a light source so that when the sun sets the whole filigree is illuminated...

It is hard to see the light in broad daylight, but you can see it catching one of the rose petals (it is mounted to the top of a clear cake plate).   If I can get pictures of the cake from the reception after night fall, I will share them with you.  The bride told me the light worked! :)

Here are the gum paste roses and leaves that went inside the filigree tier.  I just clustered 3 roses and some leaves while I was setting up so no styrofoam was required.

The piping on the two round tiers was inspired by the details on the bride's wedding dress.  It is was hand piped with royal icing and then hand painted in silver luster.  The silver detail on the top tier around the topper was done the same way.

Sorry for the backlight (though the scenery is amazing!).  This venue is on a 14th floor downtown near the aquarium here in Atlanta.   You can imagine the view is gorgeous day and night.

The silver beads were done with gray 50/50 paste (half fondant, half gum paste) using a pearl mold and then painted silver to match the piping.

The squares on the bottom tier are actually an underlay-- I made fondant squares a day or so in advance and let them dry.  I adhered them to the bottom tier before putting on the fondant and then carefully smoothed to reveal the design using both my hands and some tools to enhance the details.

Here is a view from the back (with less back light):

And one more from the front!

Delivery to the 14th floor presented its own set of challenges.  It took a long walk and 2 different (slow) elevators to get all the bits and pieces up to the venue.  The bottom half consisted of a custom wooden board, plus the square and round cakes which together probably weighed 60 lbs.  I could not have done it without the help of the boyfriend, Craig, who assisted with heavy lifting, sandwich delivery, and general moral support.  If you decorate cakes then you know-- it's not over till you actually deliver it and get it set up.

I really enjoyed seeing this cake come together and pushing myself to try new techniques.  Thanks for looking and happy caking!

Ivory Wedding Cake with Champagne Bow and Gum Paste Flowers

This past weekend I made a wedding cake (and a groom's cake, next post) for my friend Amanda, who I met taking tap dancing classes here in Atlanta.  She asked me no less than a year ago about doing her wedding cake and groom's cake, so of course I accepted!  But this was no easy feat-- this cake weighed 50+ pounds and had to travel all the way to Augusta with the accompanying groom's cake.  And let's remember I have an apartment-sized kitchen and a not-so-amazing oven.  Making enough room in the fridge... also a challenge.  Here are the 4 tiers for the bride's cake and the parking spot for the groom's cake.  Not a whole lot of room for much else...

Another part of this story that has not yet made it to my amazing blog readers is that I defended my thesis on April 30!  And passed!!!  That means I finish up my thesis revisions and as of this Friday I am DONE with my PhD.  I'll graduate officially in August.  :)  This also means that I didn't have much time to work on stuff in advance as I usually do.

But I started the flowers about a month ago.  The bride wanted pale pink and green hydrangea, and I suggested pink cymbidium orchids as focal flowers along with some little dendrobium orchids.  I had a new mini-cymbidium cutter set that I was excited about, so this was a great opportunity to try it out.

This is the un-dusted cymbidium... cute huh?  I kind of love it.

I finished the flowers over the weekend and finished assembling the topper on Monday.
Here's the dusted dendrobium orchid:

And the painted/ dusted cymidium... it really comes to life, right?

Here's the assembled topper:

I had some fun figuring out how to get the fondant pearls to stay in place on the silver wires, but I thought the end result was pretty nice.

As far as the rest of the cake, I designed it together with the bride based on some other ideas she liked, her wedding colors, her dress, and her number of servings.  I made a mold of the brooch she wore on her dress and created a replica to be featured in the center of the bow.

The cake traveled fully assembled all the way to Augusta, thanks to some help from my friends. :)  I borrowed a friend's SUV and had some heavy lifting help (+ sandwich delivery and general moral support) from my 'date'. ;)

I finished the cake with just a few more cymbidiums on the bottom corners.

The topper went perfectly with the centerpieces, and the ribbon/ brooch was a perfect match to the bride's dress.  And obviously, I was really happy that everything arrived in one piece.

Congratulations Amanda and Philip! :)

Butterfly Wedding Cake

On Saturday I delivered my first official wedding cake!

This cake featured over 40 gum paste butterflies in about 15 different colors, all hand dusted and painted with unique detailing.  The cake itself is a lemon butter cake with lemon swiss meringue buttercream, chambord flavor splash, and raspberry puree.

The bride picked out this cute little bunny topper, which is actually a ring holder (the rings go on the ears). Notice I wired up a little butterfly between his ears?  Yeah, thought I'd integrate the theme... :)

I started the butterflies well in advance and made a few of them on wires so they could 'fly' away from the cake.

I tried to plan for the right number of butterflies before the cake was made.

The bride did not want a smooth cake-- she wanted buttercream icing with some texture or sloppiness to it.    I used a paddling technique over the whole cake to give it the texture that you see.

The cakes were 10" round (~8.25" tall) and 6" round (~5" tall).  I delivered the cake like it was pictured above only I had already attached the ribbons to the cake board.  I carefully packed up all the butterflies and put them on when I got there; they were fragile enough that if they fell down in transit they were likely to break.

Fortunately, everything went pretty smoothly!  I set up the cake on what was to be the dessert bar-- it was surrounded by little pies and pastries on the platters.  I really like the rustic look of the whole setup.

I hope the bride and groom (and guests!) loved it. :)

Something blue-ish?

I just finished a wedding cake class at the Cake Art store, and here is the cake we made in class today!

That's the short story... let's talk about this cake a little bit more.

Remember that Thursday night I wrapped up Wilton Course 3, for which I needed a fondant covered cake and a dummy, and 40 fondant roses.  So I had Friday off, and then for today I needed another cake and 2 dummies iced and ready to go, 350+ royal icing drop flowers, and a whole lot of buttercream. 

Well, I had already made a triple batch of buttercream on Monday, and I was hoping that would be enough, but at midnight last night I had my doubts and made an extra batch.

I started making my cake (the 9" tier) at around 3:30 PM yesterday afternoon, and I decided to try a new recipe from Margaret Braun's book.  Her recipe was for 10" pans, and I thought I scaled down enough batter by making some cupcakes and poured generously into my 9" pans so that I would be sure to have a 4" tier without additional torting.  I overfilled the pans so badly, and made such a mess, it took a Christ-like miracle to make these cakes into something that looked like a reasonably stable 9" tier, and the scraps filled 12 baskets.  Not to mention the giant mess in the bottom of my oven, which I still haven't dealt with...  

So I managed to make it to class on time with all my supplies at 10:30 this morning on not nearly enough sleep and with a serious case of caffeine jitters from my morning coffee. 

I did this whole cake in 3 hrs and 15 minutes.  The class was 3 hrs long, and after we were done with the doweling and stacking, I pretty much felt like I was on TLC's Ultimate Cake-Off.  When there were 15 minutes left I was positively frantic, my hand was shaking like a leaf, and just plowed through to create a complete cake by the time we had to pack up and go.

As a result, I can see sloppiness in parts of the cake, but I think the overall result is still pretty nice.  If I had more time, it would have looked more polished.  But I have real perfectionism issues....

Again, I don't like the plastic pillars, but I did not design this cake.  I learned some new techniques, like the vertical shell columns on the middle tier, and the crown shell border on the top of both the 6" and 12" tiers.

I really enjoy doing stringwork, but I was doing it in a rush, and it drives me crazy when all the strings don't look identical (which to my eye they don't.)  Again, that perfectionism problem.

At the last minute, there was an opening in Cake Art's Business of Cakes class this afternoon, so right after constructing my wedding cake, I ran to Subway for some sustenance (I was shaking violently at this point from lack of nutrition), and came back for a 3 hour lecture on the cake business.  This lecture reaffirmed my suspicion that there is no way I could get a food service permit for my apartment kitchen, but I definitely learned a few new things...

Anyway, it's been a long day of cake!  I'm kind of relieved that my cake courses are over for a bit so I have time to catch up on cleaning up and working out. My kitchen is a mess and my hands have a constant smell of sugar.  But not to worry, there will be more cakes soon...