Wedding Cake Testing and Tasting

Can you believe I am actually blogging as promised?! That's because Daddy and JJ are playing downstairs while I upload photos and write! Must be quick here. Here are the results from Friday's wedding cake test run. This is a cake I'm making for a friend's wedding in July, and we had the tasting on Friday afternoon. I did a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream and lemon curd, and chocolate cake with chocolate ganache. Both flavours turned out great, and we decided to use chocolate buttercream instead of ganache for a lighter textured cake.

Kate was deciding between two styles, both Martha Stewart designs, for her Fourth of July wedding. She loved the berry basket cake, which would look great as a whole but would be potentially disastrous when cut into (can you imagine putting a knife through all that fruit? I'm picturing berries rolling everywhere and bleeding juices). The daisy cake, on the other hand, would cut much better, and looks pretty and fresh. And more wedding-y, if you ask me. That's what we're going with. But I did mock-ups in both.

Some minor disasters didn't stop me from making my deadline, although I did have to recruit help from Daddy after my buttercream decided to curdle. Daddy made the accompanying strawberry sauce, which was delicious, fresh, and a lovely bright red.

Let's have a look at my handiwork:

There are about 55 daisies on this little 6" cake! I'll have to make hundreds and hundreds for the real thing, but at least I have 3 weeks to get the decorations done. I usually do two layers of petals for daisies, but with this many flowers on the cake, luckily it's unnecessary. (second of all, it would be the end of me to make hundreds of double daisies. I would have to cut out a THOUSAND to get the number I needed). Daisy-making will commence this week.

The actual top tier will be an inch taller and more densely covered in daisies like the photo. We might even make a 4-tier cake depending on the total number of guests, but it's possible we stick with 3-tiers and just do a few smaller cakes on the side.

Here's the basket cake, which did look beautiful. The weave is done with a leaf tip, which I thought was a nice innovation. It didn't look as stuffy and old-fashioned as a traditional basket weave, and it also didn't matter if my lines weren't piped perfectly. Unfortunately, this was a mess to cut if we didn't scoop the berries off first, which I doubt the banquet servers would be willing to do on a 130-person cake. Pretty though, eh?

I'm a little nervous about having the responsibility of making someone's wedding cake, but I'm sure it will be fine. Let's just hope it isn't the hottest day of the year that day, and that everything goes smoothly with the transportation. My fridge is going to be filled with nothing but cake that weekend, so Daddy and I are going to have to be creative about what to eat for dinners!