Pink Polka Dotted Wedding Cake

I'm so excited that I can blog about this! Remember, back in May, when I mentioned that I found a gig as a freelance cake decorator? Well, I just started this past weekend - it was so much fun! Isn't it adorable? It's a lemon cake with vanilla buttercream and raspberry filling, and the outside is completely buttercream with fondant dots. The bride's colours were, as you can guess, pink pink and more pink. It was kind of cute.

Now, I'm going to be honest - it was my first day, so there was a lot to observe. I didn't exactly contribute a heck of a lot to this cake, since my boss, I'll call her A, had already baked before I arrived, but I did help with cutting out cake boards for each layer, filling the bottom cake, and covering the second and third layer with buttercream, and cutting out and pasting on the dots. Who knew you could get buttercream so smooth on the outside? I guess this is why you should hire a pro to make your cake. After painstakingly careful applications of more buttercream, each layer went in the fridge to firm up.

Did I mention how heavy the cakes were? To prevent the cake from smushing itself upon stacking, some dowels were cut and inserted into the bottom two layers to give it structural support. To prevent the whole thing from toppling over if someone picked it up and wobbled it, she also cut a huge long dowel and sharpened the end, which would be hammered through all 3 layers after assembly at the site. We also assembled 75 wedding favours of buckeyes (they're peanut butter and chocolate candies, for you non-Ohio folks).

The morning of the wedding, I tagged along on the delivery. We brought along extra buttercream to finish piping the borders, as well as some back-up supplies in case anything fell off or dented in transit. Fortunately, the cake layers behaved themselves in the car and arrived in one piece (really though, if your cake slides and goes smush, you're really screwed - I don't think people make a practice of bringing a whole extra backup wedding cake).

Here's the mega-rod going through the cake:

So there you have it, my first wedding cake experience. Next weekend, I've been told we're doing a realllllly cool cake. And an OSU groom's cake. I've been given permission to blog about them here (thanks A), so I'll be sharing how it all goes next week! Stay tuned!