The Wedding Cake

Now, onto the wedding cake. I also baked the wedding cakes on Thursday. In the picture below you can get a glimpse of the chaos that ensued that day. 

Here I am about to make my 4th out of 6 batches of cake. I have cakes in the oven, cakes cooling, and cakes wrapped ready to be put in the fridge. The recipe I used was the Vanilla Buttermilk Cake that I found off of Smitten Kitchen's blog. She used this recipe to make a wedding cake for her friend that she blogged about. If you like reading about cake-making, her account is pretty fascinating as well. She used a swiss buttercream that is on my list of things to try. For my cake I used a standard buttercream icing, and raspberry jam for the filling.

I used 5 dozen eggs for this project between all the cakes.

The bride wanted her cakes to be separated by silver spheres. They are called globe pillars. Normally they are $9-10 for a set of four. For this cake I needed 12 for three layers. I didn't wanted to spend $30 plus shipping so I came up with another idea. I went to Michaels and found foam balls for $4.49 a bag. I got a bag of 2" for the bottom tier, and a bag of 11/2" for the second and third tiers. Then I got 3 wooden dowels that were under $1 a piece as the separator dowels for the cake. 

I borrowed Chris' drill and drilled a hole through each one. 

I think it looks pretty legit for styrofoam and cardboard. When I was at Michaels I also bought some metallic silver paint to make the spheres silver. It took 3-4 coats to cover it well enough. 

Then I assembled the cakes. It is helpful to smear a little bit of frosting onto the board before you put the cake on to adhere it and keep it from sliding.

For the second tier they wanted a hexagon cake. I didn't have a pan so I made it in a circle pan and cut off the sides. I know that I am not very mathamatical and there was probably a better way to measure than I chose. But even after 15 minutes of measuring and calculating the sides still weren't even. Then for some reason the top layer was not lining up with the bottom. I had already placed it and then tried to pick it up but the jam acted like glue and it was a mess. Cake was everywhere the jam started oozing out the sides because I kept trying to pick up the top layer and move to line it up correctly. haha Next time I am going to buy the cake pan. Or have Chris help me because he probably would have made it even. 

One of the cakes for the bottom layer got really brown and I didn't want to use it if I didn't need it. I had baked three layers and the other two were not overdone but high in the middle. So instead of leveling them off by cutting down the middle, I just cut off the top of the overdone cake and filled in the sides of the other two layers to make it level. It worked really well. 

All four cakes are assembled and crumb coated and ready to be frosted. 

The topper was the last thing to go on. When I opened the package they were broken apart and the bride was holding the grooms hand. Someone found super glue at the last minute, and Chris saved the day and put them back together before the wedding started. Yay Chris!

The finished cake. It was funny because in the middle of the cake cutting after they fed the cake to each other the bride looks over at me and said "oh, this is good". It made me smile really big :).

This is the aftermath. They surprisingly ate almost all the cake. I am very happy with how it all turned out and I am going to print off the pictures of the finished cakes and start a portfolio. I really enjoyed the whole process and I learned a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed reading about it and I can't wait for my next culinary challenge. Anyone in the Northeast GA area need a cake?