Wedding Cake

I got to design and make the cake for Matt and Anya's wedding. It was definitely a learning experience for me, but I had tons of fun working on it. And through practicing for it I discovered that I really do love cake decorating and baking.
The cake was simple white cake with raspberry and white chocolate filling. Buttercream icing. I chose to use buttercream instead of fondant because I don't particularly care for the taste of fondant, even though it looks prettier.

The bottom layer was 15". I made an extra big cake because I knew that leftovers wouldn't hurt and that no one would mind getting a little more than the standard 2"x1" piece.

I chose to pipe a lace design on the bottom two tiers. Since Anya was using mum's wedding gown which had a lot of lace on it, I wanted to incorporate that idea on the cake. But I also didn't want the cake to get too busy, which is why I chose simple flowers to go with the lace.

You can see that by the time I got to the second tier I was doing a lot better with piping the lace. Of course, it helped that that was only a 12" cake! :) I think the bottom tier took me at least six hours just to pipe. The next tier only took a couple of hours. After that it was pretty easy. I stacked the third tier on the second and piped the monogram on and began adding flowers. (You would not believe how many questions I got about the monogram, "aBm? What does that stand for?")

Anya had asked that I use pillars to separate the tiers, but she didn't want the cake to be too tall, so I set the third tier directly on top of the second tier, rather than separating it with the pillars. I think that was my favorite tier.

To tie in the topper that we had selected (I narrowed down the choices and then let Matt and Anya choose--do you know how hard it is to find a bride and groom that are not the same height!?) I painted the bouquet and boutineer red.

After placing the bride and groom on the cake there wasn't too much to do except attach the flowers. Even so that took an hour or more, but it was fun to see the cakes suddenly come together into a wedding cake.

Oh, and actually, after adding the flowers Melissa helped me make fondant ribbon to put around the bases of the cakes. After we put it on the cake we painted them silver and I added a little piping to finish out the design. Then all that was left was to transport the cake from Rizhishchiv to Kagarlik the next morning. Gavin (one of the groomsmen) drove me and the cake (slowly) to the restaurant and helped carry it in (thankfully, cause cake is heavy!)

I had brought my own table cloth and skirt for the cake table (just in case), but the girls who decorated had done such a good job that I didn't bother using them. Under the cake you'll notice the hand embroidered cloth. Normally it is used under a special bread at more traditional Ukrainian weddings, but we traded out the bread for cake.

In the end, everyone loved the cake, both how it looked and tasted. I had people coming to eat the crumbs left on the cake board, which I took to be a pretty good sign! ;) And I had fun doing it all. Learned a lot and would love to do it again!