Wedding Cake

by Jane
(Bucks)

Just prior to getting engaged, I’d made a novelty birthday cake for my boyfriend, and had a lot of fun doing it. I decided it looked a bit iffy in places so signed up for a course in basic icing. I liked it so much I signed up for another whole day course in basic wedding cake decoration provided by Bucks adult education. Then out of the blue came "The Proposal", and so when I went on the icing course on Valentine’s Day of all days. I had a lot more incentive to learn what to do as by then I’d found out that the minimum cost locally for the kind of royal iced fruit cake we like was over £350. The course covered sugarpasting, frills, swags, smocking, lace, embroidery and roses. Ideas started to form.

I read on the web that we ought to make cakes to suit our personalities and so we were left with how to combine gardening and cats. Trying to make an icing representation of a watercolour painting we have of the cat would have been a nightmare, so we put that on the invitations instead and put our heads together for a cat idea for the cake. Sometime in March we designed a formal, three-tier cake with icing roses to match those in the bouquet and cat pawprints!

Both of us like fruit cakes, so that ruled out sponges, and in any case, the idea was to do the cake in advance so I didn’t have to worry about it near the day. At the same time, I started practising making roses... First panic was in April, when my parents brought the tins from *their* wedding cake (1955), and we realised the 6" was missing. Sourced one in a hurry! Quite weird to know that the 8" tin hadn’t been used since their cake...

The cake was baked over the May Day weekend 2004, and gradually fed with brandy over the next few months. The recipe was one out of an old cookery book that the family has been using since the ‘60s for Christmas cakes, so we knew how reliable it was!

I then started on the proper icing roses and leaves, having finally decided on cream roses for the wedding, and they were gradually made over the summer. Larger ones for the bottom tier, getting smaller for the upper tiers.

Come September, there was another panic as I went to the local cake shop to hire my stand and found that both designs I needed were already out that day. They offered to order me a new stand for £140. I said I’d have to think about it, fled and googled the maker of the cake stands. Got it for £89 inc postage and VAT, more expensive than hiring (£20 plus deposit), but sellable afterwards and useful if I ever did another set of cakes for anybody. By 27th, I had the stand and the cake boards, and a couple of days later there were three marzipanned cakes.

The final step was icing, which was a last-minute job - finished four days before the wedding! We both had fun putting little footprints all over it and popping a curled-up cat (also made from sugarpaste and coloured to look like our cat) on the top in the ring of roses! It looked like she'd walked over all three cakes with outsize feet, hopping up each level and eventually curling up for a snooze.

I paid £29.85 for raw materials, though probably another £30 for equipment, all of which has now been re-used for other cakes (and added to substantially!).

Tips: contact your local cake shop. They often do basic cake decoration courses as well as those solely on flowers. They usually sell books on making flowers, and the kit to make them. You only really need a few things to make roses and they're not hard. It's the time taken to do it all which costs you if you buy a cake, not the materials.

Cake tins: Traditionally they step up in 2" increments, so you’d need e.g. 6", 8", 10". Round are most common, though you get more portions from square. They can be found cheaply at jumble sales and in charity shops.

You line them with greaseproof paper before baking so the state of the tins doesn't matter. Any dents left in the cake are filled with marzipan or icing. You can arrange them separately on stands like I did or pillar them.

Using pillars involves putting dowelling rods through the cake and balancing a pillar on the protruding part of the dowel, so the weight’s all taken by the wooden dowells onto the cake boards, not onto the cakes. Stacked cakes, where there is no gap between layers, are done the same way but obviously with no pillar.

They’re done to have a very small gap between layers to help separation for cutting, which is disguised by piped icing shells, and it’s a simple but effective way of getting a nice cake.

Addendum:
As traditional, we saved the top tier as well as all the flowers and the cat, and it was re-iced in March 2008 for the Christening of our first baby. It was done to look like the original cake, bar the fact that the covering icing was pale blue :)