Wedding cake, the fourth

I made another wedding cake this weekend (wedding date: October 14th). This one was a bit odd in a couple of ways. For starters, I made the cake in one place then transported it to another to do the decorating. Second, I only had part of a day to complete the work (i.e. I started icing at 8:30 am Friday, and had to be finished by 4:00 pm for the wedding). Also different (although not the least bit odd), I used my very own stand mixer to make the cake. We've been saving up Canadian Tire money for months and we finally had enough for me to cover the entire cost of a Cuisinart Stand Mixer. It's beautiful, and fast and it's my new baby (although I'll still kneed my bread by hand).

I baked the cake two weeks ago—bottom layer of chocolate, middle layer of vanilla, and two layers (another middle, and a small) of chocolate-vanilla zebra-stripped—then slipped them into our new cube freezer. Last week I made the leaves and set them out to dry in an egg carton to achieve the curled-up look. Then on Friday I set to finishing the decorations. I should point out that the lovely Andrew assisted me a here. Being busy the couple of days leading up to the wedding he was kind enough to level out the cakes for me and apply the first (crumb) layer of icing. Then Friday morning I slathered on two more layers of buttercream plus the fondant. I had all three layers suited up by about 11:30.

I find that the application of buttercream and fondant almost always take the longest. This might be because I've yet to do a really complex cake design, but it only took me another hour and a half to complete the cake. I'd changed my mind several times over how I wanted to decorate it. At first I'd thought I might go for some type of medieval theme, but quickly recognized that I simply didn't have the time for that. Then I settled on the fall theme, but wasn't sure how I should accomplish the motif. I scoured through cake pictures, toyed with the idea of drawing with a paint brush and food colouring, to finally settling on this piping/brushing technique. Naturally I'd never tried it before. Whatever. It worked. I was reasonably happy with the result, and the couple seemed pleased too.

Full-length shot of the cake.

Close-up on the side, showing the piping/scrolling work.

Top down shot, catching the leaves on top.

Mmmm...cake. I'm thinking of doing one for the Hallowe'en party I'm going to.

Ciao,

Andrea