Worth the Wait Wedding Cake
by Angel Rushing
(Clarkesville, GA)
Cake of the year!
A bride emailed me asking if I could make a wedding cake on short notice. Since she only had a couple of weeks before the wedding she told me her colors and said she was open to any design.
I had a vision of a beautiful cake in my head, now if I could just find a picture of something similar to it to show the bride and get her approval. Internet to the rescue, 2 hours later..found it!!
Oh this is the look and I could tweak it a little to get the perfect design. A day later the bride approves the picture so now it’s time to start working. Hmmm looks like there’s going to be a lot of time involved in making this.
You Tube To The Rescue
Ok so I’ve never made a cake like this, I mean there are a{ lot} of sugar flowers on it and I haven’t made this type of flower before. No big deal, I'll just watch {another} YouTube video and I'm good to go, after all that's how I've learned to do everything else.
While I’m on that subject let me give you my opinion on “professional” training verses self-taught skills. If any of you are thinking of paying money to take a class to learn how to decorate I would suggest thinking twice about that. Everything that you will be shown how to do in those classes can be seen for free on YouTube.
You may want to splurge and buy a $40 instructional DVD for sugar flowers since they are a little more tedious but all in all you’ll save a LOT of money and gain the same knowledge by teaching yourself.
I know some people may like saying, "I trained under Chef so and so" and I guess it does look good on a resume but in the end I think your work and customer satisfaction should speak for itself. Enough about that back to the cake, where was I?....Oh yes, sugar flowers.
Lots of Sugar Flowers
Hmmm looks like about 100 sugar flowers and the top is kinda rounded up. For this rounded topper my idea was to buy a half foam ball, cover it in plastic wrap then a layer of fondant, and last add the sugar flowers…better check YouTube, yep that’s what they suggest.
It took a while to make all those flowers and then I had to go back and add the black sugar pearls to the center of the flowers…good
thing my 10 year old daughter wanted to help. Oh, and did I mention SHE made some of the flowers too? Now if a 10 year old girl and a lady who has never taken a class can make sugar flowers then anyone can. YOUTUBE…I’m just saying.
Fondant Drapes Dilemma
Next - on to setting up the cake. One of the challenges I knew I would face would be draping the cake. I would have to pre-make the drapes at home and then add them after I had finished stacking the cake at the reception location. If I ever get enough extra money to buy one of the locking cake stacking systems like
Cake Stackers, you bet I will. What a time saver that would have been and it would have eliminated my drape worries.
My first experimental attempt at pre-making the drapes at home had failed. The folds in the fondant had stuck to themselves so it wouldn’t open up like it should have. I finally came up with the idea of sandwiching the fondant in between two layers of plastic wrap then folding, hopefully the plastic would keep the fondant from sticking to itself. When it was finally time to drape I held my breath and peeled off the plastic..it worked perfectly! Last was placing all the sugar flowers on the cake and then I stepped back. I LOVED IT, so elegant!
True Love
As I was packing up my things to leave, the lady who was working on setting up the food walked into the room. “Oh it’s just beautiful”, she said. I agreed with her and said that all the time spent was well worth it and that in the end it came together just right! I asked her if she personally knew the bride and she said yes. Come to find out, this was the first marriage of this bride who was over 40.
She then told me that the bride and the groom had been in a relationship when they were young but had gone their separate ways. The bride had never got over him and said that he was the only one for her.
Years and years later they reconnected and now she was marrying her one true love. Like I said in the beginning..I knew there would be a lot of time invested in the making of this cake…just didn’t realize it was actually YEARS in the making.
Just like the wedding cake, in the end it came together just right!
