One of the things that I decided with our wedding was to continue a tradition (well kind of) that my father did when he got married. Some of you know that my father cooks a lot. One of his most known food items, is “the cake”. He makes the best fruit cake (or as some people call it, rum cake). When he got engaged he had made his usual cake and had transported it to Sydney where he was visiting my mother. When they got engaged, they decided to keep that piece of fruit cake and use it as the Top tier of their wedding cake. So what did I do with our cake? Rather than make one tier… how about the whole cake! It would save us money, we could have EXACTLY what we wanted and I could be happy with what we achieved.
We wanted at least 2 tiers, but wanted to have a cake that we could freeze the top tier (per that tradition) till our first anniversary. So that meant a multiple tier cake. I wasn’t sure if an 8″ cake and a 6″ cake would be enough, so we ended up with 3 tiers, just to make sure we had enough cake. We were only having a small “reception” (more on that in the next installment) but I wanted to make sure everyone had some cake, and some to take home as well. It may have caused many, many “discussions” with Heidi, but in the end we both were happy.
The cake was decided on a Lemon Buttermilk cake (we found the recipe online actually) and with a filling of Lemon Curd. The frosting was the part that we always went backwards and forwards over. Unfortunately Heidi doesn’t like fondant, so it meant that we had to have a soft frosted cake. I wanted to make sure I had a frosting that wasn’t to heavy with the cake, but Heidi wanted full buttercream, something that could be quite heavy.
We tested it several times over to find the right one. In the end with the wedding cake, there was a total of 10 cakes made…. that’s right, 10 sponges. 2 double layer test cakes (so that is 4 cakes right there) plus the actual cake itself. It was a lot of cake! Each cake had almost a half dozen eggs, so much flour, butter, sugar. O lordy just thinking about it scares me!
But let’s look at some of the pictures:
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
That’s what my kitchen looked like after the first set of 8 sponges being made that day!
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
Thankfully I have a nice high powered stand mixer!
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
8 Sponges, 6 for the wedding cake and 2 for the final test cake
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
The Final test cake, testing 2 different kinds of frosting, mere days before the wedding
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
Starting assembly
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
First Tier Complete
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
Lots of Frosting!
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
2nd tier ready to go up
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
Starting the frosting process
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
Final Tier Up
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
The Final Cake!
So the day of the wedding came around, I had already spent two full days stressing over the cake (don’t even start me on almost covering the kitchen in frosting due to the mixer almost overflowing with Swiss Meringue Frosting) and I had one last thing to do. I had hoped that it would be an easy day, just drive the cake from Renton to Columbia City to the restaurant and it would all be ok…. Nope! I got the cake ready to travel and since I spent the night alone (again, more in the next piece) I had to get it over to the restaurant alone and as easily as possible.
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
It rained unfortunately that morning so here I am stressing to make sure the cake has no marks, or any problems while I transport it down 4 floors to the car park, then on wet, crappy Seattle roads drive it across town. Joy of Joys! I had barely gotten the cake into the car when this:
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| From Life in Seattle 2014 |
The seatbelt slipped out of my hands and caught the top of the cake. I was swearing, cussing, all kinds of bad things, but thankfully I still had frosting and had it in a container in the freezer. I ran upstairs and grabbed it, along with a pallette knife and off to the restaurant. Once I got there I fixed it, and I also left the extra frosting there, just in case. In the end I did have to make a few touch ups to the cake right when they bought the cake out of the kitchen as unfortunately the staff didn’t treat it that kindly.
But the cake was a success, everyone liked it and it was a good choice. We still have the top tier in our freezer and it will sit there for a solid year. I don’t regret making the cake, but to anyone contemplating making a wedding cake…. DON’T DO IT!