Picking out our wedding cake was one of the most enjoyable parts of planning my and Erik’s wedding. I knew from looking at countless photos of cakes that I definitely wanted fondant—it has such a clean, polished look. As far as I can remember (all our film was stolen from the reception hall, so there are no surviving pictures of the cake), our cake was ivory fondant with ivory swirls and scrollwork all over it. It also had some of our wedding flowers in between the tiers: aubergine and flame calla lilies.
I looked forward to the cake tasting for weeks, and I could barely restrain myself from inhaling all the little slices the bakery gave us. We settled on three tiers: one was raspberry Chambord cake with vanilla buttercream, one was chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, and the top tier—also raspberry Chambord—was ours to take home.
The cake was delicious and it made me very happy.
Erik is out of town this weekend. He’s on a “mini tour” with the super awesome Akina Adderley & the Vintage Playboys. Originally, I thought I’d make myself a coconut cake this weekend (one of my absolute favorites) because Erik doesn’t like coconut very much and it wouldn’t be fair of me to make a big, delicious, fluffy coconut cake when he’s home and then not be able to share it with him.
I started to plan the cake, and decided to go all-out with some decorating. I’d always wanted to try playing around with fondant, so I figured this would be a good opportunity. I also thought I’d try messing around with gumpaste flowers, too. In essence, I was making a mini-wedding cake.
As my decorating plans grew in complexity, the cake itself became simpler. Instead of spending the whole weekend making a multi-layered coconut concoction, I opted for the simpler—but no less delicious—classic yellow layer cake with chocolate frosting. I knew I could bang it out way faster than a coconut cake, leaving me more time for decorating.
On Friday I made the cake and the frosting. I decided to make a six-inch cake—my favorite size for home consumption—which gave me enough left-over batter for six cupcakes. I doubled my usual chocolate buttercream frosting recipe and had more than enough left after frosting the cake to frost the cupcakes.
I froze the two six-inch cakes I made on Friday, and then sliced them into four even layers on Saturday. I frosted them with room-temperature frosting, and then put the whole thing in the fridge until today.
This morning I rolled out my fondant, which I tinted light blue on Friday afternoon. I rolled the fondant a little too thin, so there are a few blemishes on my cake, but all in all I think I did a pretty good job.
With royal icing I glued some pearly nonpareils along the bottom edge of the cake to hide the seam, then added rows of dots of icing all over the cake. My original idea was to make some white gumpaste roses and pile them on top of the cake, but you know what? Gumpaste is really hard to work with. I realize now that I need a lot more practice before I’ll be making anything decent-looking enough to grace a cake. So, I just went with all-over dots. I like the way it turned out; it’s a bit simple, maybe, but I‘m definitely proud of the overall effect.
I used the following recipes for this one:
Rich and Tender Yellow Layer Cake
Easy Chocolate Buttercream
Sadly, due to Eliza's delicate constitution, I have to give up dairy products for a while (see A New Direction). I don't mind, really; it's a small price to pay for for my child's well-being. But now there's a lovely cake in my fridge that I can't eat . . . does anyone in the greater Austin area want a piece?
No comments:
Post a Comment