Alex and Pippa got married! For those of you who don't know them, they are they awesomest, craziest, loveliest, generousest couple in the world. Their wedding suited them absolutely perfectly. It was mental and amazing and so. much. fun. And to top it all off, they let me make their wedding cake! Here's how I did it:
1) I borrowed 3 cake tins: 11", 9" and 7".
2) I filled them with my go to fruit cake mix. 2x, 1.5x and 1x mix respectively. I baked them FOREVER and then had my mum and dad looked after them and fed them with 1tsp brandy every week for the next month.
3) When I came back home a month later it was time to decorate! First I levelled them off to the same height. I made a big cardboard loop which was as high as I wanted the cake to be, then took a knife and levelled them off to that height.
4) I then flipped them and put them onto cake boards. For the small layers, make sure that the board is exactly (or as near as you can get) the same size as the cake so that it doesn't show when you stack them.
5) Coat the cakes with runny, sieved, apricot jam. The sieving part is very important! Otherwise you get lumpy icing! Just put a few tbsp of jam into a little bowl, microwave for a few seconds and pour it through a sieve into another bowl.
6) Now comes the tricky part: covering the cake with marzipan and fondant! eek! I was super scared of doing this bit so I did some research and found this thing called THE MAT. It's basically two massive sheets of plastic that you roll your icing between and makes it easier to pick up and move around. whilst it didn't work perfectly (the icing would often stretch out into a funny shape when I was peeling the back layer off, or it would stick to the mat a bit and ruin the smoothness) it did help a lot! Maybe it just needed some more conditioning? It was the first time I'd ever used it, so maybe that was it? Anyway, I rolled it out, plopped it on, trimmed it and smoothed it x6. It was hard work. My back and abs caned the next day!
7) I gave the icing a chance to harden over night and then piped the decoration on! Alex and Pippa had a crazy hat themed wedding so I doodled crazy hats all over the cake. I then realised that piped writing looked much nicer that hats so I filled in all the gaps with their names. I just used a piping bag and royal icing made up like it says on the box. Defo do a practise run before you pipe onto the cake!!!
8) Then I put plastic dowels into the cake to support the upper layers. Learn how to do that here.
9) Then for the really nerve-wracking part: transporting and assembling! My amazing daddy bought me some proper cake boxes and drove me all the way to Cambridge so that I could sit in the back making sure that they didn't slide anywhere and get crushed. fortunately the cakes are super heavy so it wasn't really a problem. then I just stacked them up! I used a knife to help me get my fingers under the boards- they're very hard to lift otherwise. I made sure that all the good bits were at the front and any mistakes were at the back. Pin some ribbon around the base of each cake and bob's your uncle! I actually made the ribbon myself from some red fabric so that it was exactly the width I wanted it.
I also made some other cakes (above) as did other people (below) nyom nyom nyom.
All in all a very cakey day! (btw, all of this cake was gone in about ten minutes of bringing knives out to cut it with!)
xxx
p.s. sorry about the terrible photos, I took them all with my phone not my massive camera.
p.p.s. It looks like my mum is growing out of the cake in one of the pictures! hehe!
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