Wedding Season! October

Sadly, this is my last wedding cake of the year. I'll have to start making other cakes again soon, or I'll have nothing to post about!

I was quite excited for this wedding cake, as it was a cake/cupcake combo. This was my first time making cupcakes for a fancy event. Usually I make them and eat them all myself. Anyways, this was a beautiful fall design, in lovely autumny colours!

The cake was three round tiers- the bottom tier a mocha cake with espresso buttercream; the middle tier a chocolate cake with vanilla bean buttercream; and the top tier a vanilla cake with vanilla bean buttercream. Each tier was covered in fondant and decorated with faux leaves and chocolate stems. The big cupcakes were chocolate and the mini cupcakes were vanilla, both flavours with vanilla bean frosting that featured swirls of those lovely fall shades.


If there's one thing I'm really awful at, it's practicing techniques or making test cakes or whatnot. The only time I've ever made a test cake was the very first fondant covered cake I ever made, and that was just because I had never touched fondant before. So, a few months ago I read some blog post or something about making the coloured swirls on the cupcakes, and thought to myself that I'd try it sometime. And perhaps I should have tested the method out before icing cupcakes for a wedding, but whatever. I may have ended up with more even stripes of colour, but really, that's a fairly small detail to me.

One of the things I had to figure out was how to attach the silk leaves to the cake. These are the same leaves that the bride was using to decorate the tables, making the cake fit right in to the decor. Normally I insist on finishing a cake before going to bed on Friday (when it's a Saturday delivery) but this time it didn't work out that way. So, Saturday morning I faced a dilemma- I knew that the icing would show through the leaves, and I didn't want to have little blotchy oil spots or anything like that, so in some strange stroke of genius (I didn't even realize I was awake at the time) I decided to pipe the chocolate icing on the back of the leaf in the pattern that the veins would run. Apparently this was a successful technique, because Dad thought the dark veins were part of the way the leaf came.


One of my concerns was the cake topper, or more specifically, the groom's feet. I really didn't want him to sink into the cake. He didn't. But in looking back at the pictures, I realized that this is the seventh wedding cake I've done in two years, and this is the first one that had a bride and groom on top! Is that weird?? Not that long ago every wedding cake had a bride and groom on top, didn't they?


Anyways, I'm going to wrap this up. Here's a photo of the final spread (originally the cake was supposed to be on top of the box for more height, but it was WAY too wobbly, so I switched the table up a bit). I'm told that there wasn't a single cupcake or piece of cake left at the end, and that it was all tasty.


Happy caking!!
- Carolyn