The Beginning

     Hi and welcome to the new blog, this one devoted to me making a wedding cake.

My eldest daughter is getting married in November and has very bravely asked me to make her wedding cake.
     Anyone following my other blog at Pa's Pies and Preserves Plus knows that my cake baking and decoration has been largely limited to Christmas cake and the odd experimental celebration cake.
     So this is a big step up for me and this is the result of my first test which I will go through with you step by step below.
     If you are thinking about baking a wedding cake I hope you will go through the learning process with me.
 





  Now we are coming at this from scratch and of course I had to decide with the happy couple on the details of the cake. They have decided on an Autumn theme, the wedding being in November and are running a natural organic style. After much searching the net for wedding cakes we decided that I would base my cake loosely on these two, excuse during reconstruction



We decided on a three layer cake without pillars and with a leaf motif. The pine cone toppers were my daughters idea and I intend to customise/humanise them for the final cake. We are going for a 12”, 9”, 6” structure, the bottom layer to be a light fruit cake, middle layer to be lemon Madeira sponge sandwich and the small top layer to be a gluten free sponge sandwich. We also plan for marzipan and fondant icing before decoration.


      The cake at the top is the beginning, the 6’’ gluten free cake and yes, you are right, you don’t get bright yellow leaves like that in nature. Apart from white that was the only coloured icing I had and I thought would be good enough for practice. The leaf cutters with veins that I could get in the Uk are good but not as large as the leaves on the demo cake, though they do nice little leaves, in 3 sizes  which is what you see here. I have since received a larger cutter from the US and I look forward to showing you that in action. The leaves do have to be made in advance and left to dry in shape. I had already made some flat bright yellow leaves and this session I tried blending colours as well as shaping the leaves, though yellow and white don’t mix as the autumnal colours will.

   A variety of cut outs are then left to dry shaped in a variety of ways over curved surfaces (cleaned beforehand)
     These do take a while to dry solidly depending on thickness. You will find a variety of different issues with different thicknesses and you will need to cover them. An electric fan does speed things up.