Monday 3 February 2014

Nice day for a white wedding

Actually it was freezing. But the snow and rain held off.

My little brother got engaged last year, and bless, they asked me to make their wedding cake. Oh how I do love to bake and yes, I do dabble with decorating, but never profess to be any good, quite the opposite actually, but I was never going to say no to them!

Somehow I then seemed to be making the favours too. These bad boys took ages but I think they looked beautiful, especially all bagged and tagged up at each place setting 








Onto the cake. The design was discussed, a whole afternoon was spent calculating cake tin sizes (as due to the design a degree in maths was required) and flavours were chosen: Victoria sponge, devil's food cake, lemon and salted caramel 

A maths degree would have been so handy as I then had to calculate how much batter for each sized tin would be required. Brain freeze!!!!! Gah!


I made the Victoria sponge using my famiy recipe but I added a bit more flour. Lemon is made just the same as Victoria but with lemon zest and juice added. The devil's food is the same as I've blogged about a few times. But salted caramel was the challenge. I've never made a salted caramel cake and it was actually quite difficult to find a recipe as most are chocolate based. But I came across one on an American site for salted caramel cupcakes and having never used an American recipe, I decided to give it a go for a really important cake. Sensible huh?!

But it worked. Kind of! I made the cake, did wonder why the batter was so thick and the cake so dense but figured it was just meant to be like that. Until I opened the fridge two hours later and found a pint of full fat milk. We don't usually have full fat. Then it hit me. I'd missed it out!

So I remade the cake and we ate the old one. Have to admit I thought it tasted amazing. I will definitely be making this cake again. Here's the recipe:
190g plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
200g dark brown sugar
100g caster sugar
115g unsalted butter 
2 large eggs
120ml whole milk

Beat the butter and sugars together for about 2-3 minutes until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and beat until combined. Mix in the dry ingredients then slowly mix in the milk. Pour into either 12 cupcake cases or a 2 x 7" cake tins

I used a filling I made at Christmas for my chocolate salted caramel ombré cake 



I needed to cover the cake board, something I've never done before. When I did my cake decorating course we were only taught to cover with royal icing. But YouTube has loads of tutorials for covering fondant and I found it really easy. I'll be covering loads of boards from now on, I've always left them with the bright silver cake board showing. 


All cakes baked it was time to assemble. I'd already made the roses. All 100 of them. With 5 petals each that 500 petals I rolled out. But I do love fondant roses.


I colour fondant to the colour I need, roll it out to about 2mm thick and using a very small round cutter, cut out 5 petals for one rose. Roll one of the rounds into a cylinder, add a petal and wrap round, add another petal and wrap round etc. I'll have to do a tutorial one day. There's loads if you google but I can't find one which shows the way I do it.

I stacked the cakes to see how they may look 


Then the most nerve wracking bit for me. Covering with fondant is my nemesis. I'm getting better though. I think.
Crumb coating first though!



The base of the square cakes were covered with ribbon and the round cakes had the roses "glued" to them with royal icing. Then I piped royal icing dots on the square cakes




I decided to assemble the bottom two tiers, the top two, transport to the venue then assemble the two together.

That was the most stressful car journey of my life. 11 miles, 33 minutes, speed bumps, roundabouts. I held my breath over each bump. But it made it there. Phew!

All assembled the day before the wedding 



And the finished cake with flowers and birdcage



It was very stressful but I really enjoyed doing it. Congratulations Mark & Heather


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