A Wedding Cake

When you’ve only just started decorating cakes, and you get an order for a wedding cake, what do you do?

According to hubby dear, “You should not have taken that order! You’re going to ruin somebody’s wedding!”

But you gotta believe in yourself, right?

The client wanted a 3-tier white wedding cake with red roses and some gold accents, and left the design up to me.

So I had literally 7 days to learn—how to make a three tier cake, how to make roses, and design, plan, actually implement those plans and accomplish the whole thing!

So this cake for me was a steep learning curve of lots of how to’s.

First thing to learn was how to make a 3 tier cake, the heights and proportions of the tiers that will make the over-all cake look good, and serve the right amount of people. So the first place I looked for some guideline was Wilton. Here is what I found. The basic guideline is- for a tiered cake to look good, each layer should be at least 4" tall. And the tiers should be in proportion. So for three tiers, you should basically go for 6"-8"-10" size pans, or 8"-10"-12" size pans, and so on.

So according to the Wilton guideline, for my cake to serve about 90 people, the sizes should be as follows:

Next job was to learn how to assemble and stack a 3-tier cake. There are loads of YouTube videos showing you how. I found some really helpful information here and here for a first-timer like me.

Now to learn the most important aspect of this cake: How to make a Rose!

I've never made Gumpaste Rose before in my life! And I'm going to have to learn how to make them in a couple of days! I saw some videos and gave it a try.

Complete and utter failure! Does the middle one look a little bit like a rose? You wish!

Now I was scared, and doubting whether I could pull the whole thing off after all!

But I found this very helpful video, and I had this little helper:

So I plodded on.......

And this was the result:

Maybe not as good as one would hope, but they looked somewhat like roses, and I could not hope for more, for now!

Next job was to design the cake.

This was 2012, and Pinterest was not there yet! So you did google image search, looking for some inspiration. When I had settled for a design, the next task was to make enough flowers- roses and fillers- to go with the design.

While I was all busy learning how to make this cake, I must not forget to order the large cake drum and cake cards to go under the cake and also a large delivery box for the cake!

And then came the actual job of baking the cakes, filling them, icing them and covering them with fondant!

How many layers of cakes can you spot in my messy, I mean, spotless kitchen?

By the time I was done baking the cakes, and filling and covering them, it was past midnight. I'd have to deliver the cake by noon the next day. So I started decorating the top layer, but I was way too tired by then. Decided to leave the rest of the decorating for next morning. But not before I had decided on what colour ribbon I should put on the cake. I had some red ribbons, and some yellow satin ones, and I couldn't make up mind. So it was time to call my bff, Tanzeeba, in Australia and ask her opinion.

We were not happy with either of them.

Then next morning DH went out and brought this treasure of an antique gold ribbon, that made all the difference to the cake! :)

So now it was time to get busy and finish decorating the cake.......

I would not be able to transport the whole 3-tiered cake to the wedding venue. The plan was to assemble the cake in the venue kitchen. So the top two tiers went in a box, and the bottom tier was carried separately.