Three-Tier Red and Gold Wedding Cake - for BakingAddict

It was a great honour to be asked to make a wedding cake for a friend - and not just any friend, but a talented baker herself - Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker. She's given me permission to show you all pictures of the cake and to blog about how I made it.

I'd never made a wedding cake before, though I had done a short course of evening classes in wedding cake decorating, where we used polystyrene dummy cakes. You can see the two that we finished during the course here: a rose petal cake finished with a wired flower and brush embroidery and this three-tier cake with purple flowers and piping.

Ros and her husband had given me a lot of freedom to design the cake, asking me for red and gold accents on a white cake. She also told me that as the cake needed to feed 50 guests I could either make two tiers or three tiers but have the bottom layer as a fake cake. I liked that idea as it meant I could do the bottom layer well in advance, redo it if it went wrong, and not have to worry about baking a cake that would take the weight of two other layers.

She wanted the other two layers to be chocolate and lemon and I found some fantastic recipes on the BBC Good Food website. I did both cakes in advance as a practice and have already blogged about the chocolate cake here, which turned out perfectly. So when it came to making it for the wedding for real I did it in exactly the same way.





I used this recipe for the lemon cake and followed the recipe for the cake itself exactly, but didn't do the lemon syrup - I had been warned that the syrup would seep onto the layer below so I could only assemble the cakes at the absolute last minute and at the point of deciding on the recipe (when I did the practice a month or so ago) I didn't know how I was going to assemble the cake so thought it best to make without the syrup. As it worked well, when it came to the real thing I left the syrup out as well.



I used a 12 inch cake tin for the chocolate cake, which was the second layer (I bought a 14 inch cake dummy and 16 inch cake board which was huge!) and so did the lemon cake in a 10 inch tin. Those are quite big cakes but since only two layers were real, I didn't think if I did an 8/10/12 inch cake with only the 8 and 10 being real that it would be enough to feed all the guests.

The recipe for the chocolate cake turned out perfectly - 12 inches diameter and a good 3 inches deep with a flat top that I trimmed slightly. The recipe for the lemon cake said to use a 23cm tin which is 9 inches, so when I did the practice I scaled the ingredients up by a third.

That wasn't big enough by a long way so when I made the cake again I doubled the quantity given in the recipe, and found that filled the tin so the sides of the cake were 3 inches high. The cake did rise a lot in the middle so I trimmed it easily.

I thought about filling the cakes but worried that having something in the middle would mean they were less robust and when covered with fondant, if weight was applied on top the filling might spread and bulge out the sides. Thankfully both cakes were so deliciously moist and light that they didn't need filling at all.

I made a chocolate ganache buttercream which I spread around the sides and on the top of the chocolate cake, and placed the cake on a cake card (like a cake board or drum only thinner) covered it in fondant.

I made a lemon curd buttercream and did the same with the lemon cake, also placing it on a cake card the same size as the cake.

When it came to decorating, I did the bottom fake layer quite a long time in advance. I covered it with fondant and used a stitching or quilting tool  like this one PME Quilting Tool to mark diagonal lines all around the sides (I used a piece of cardboard as a guide) to give a quilted effect. I used some plastic tweezers like these Cassie Brown Plastic Tweezers Child-Safe, Blue to apply Dr Oetker gold balls (available in most supermarkets) using a little Culpitt Edible Glue 17 ml to make them stick.

I then stuck gold ribbon around the base of the bake and around the sides of the cake board, which I had also covered in fondant.

I didn't need to use dowelling in this fake layer but I did need to in the chocolate cake because it was going to have the lemon cake sitting on top.

My fiancé cut the wooden dowels to size - they need to be level with the top of your cake. Space them out at intervals making sure they are in the part of the cake that will be covered by the cake on top - this helps spread the weight.

 

I was going to leave the chocolate layer undecorated apart from the ribbon but I really struggled to cover a cake that size in fondant. I did the best I could but there were a few areas where I wasn't entirely happy with the fondant so I decided to add some red flowers - I had been thinking there wasn't enough red on the cake.

I used a flower plunger cutter from this set Kitchen Craft Sweetly Does It Flower Fondant Plunger Cutters, Set of 4 to cut flowers out of red fondant and stuck them around the side of the cake using edible glue, and finished the cake with a gold ribbon.

The top layer was decorated with the same quilting pattern and gold balls as the bottom layer, and gold ribbon as well.

I made the flowers to go on top well in advance using pre-coloured red flower paste using the technique that I've previously described here. I didn't attach the flowers - or indeed assemble the cake - until I got to the wedding venue. I bought different size cake boxes and discovered they didn't fit in the boot of my fiancé's car so we had to take mine!

Ros had bought a really cool cake topper but I didn't actually know what it looked like until I got to the venue; it turned out to be the perfect thing to finish off the wedding cake!

I was very relieved that the cake made it to the wedding in one piece, and though it took a fair while to make it was surprisingly stress-free and a lot of fun. And it tasted great - I heard lots of nice comments about the cake and the main thing was that the bride and groom liked it!

I'm sharing this with Alphabakes which I host with the recipient of this wedding cake as our letter this month is W, which is very appropriate!

I'm also sending this to Simply Eggcellent hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen as the cakes use an awful lot of eggs!

How to make a Sugarpaste or Fondant Rose

Wired sugar flowers are really tricky to make and I've only done it once before, so when the tutor of my cake decorating class said we were going to make them I was really pleased. I was also a little surprised as the class is aimed at all levels and has several complete beginners but I thought it was good that we were going to do something that would stretch abilities and teach me something useful.

However, the flower we ended up making wasn't what I call wired at all - it had a wire as a stem but the petals were not individually wired. After the tutor had demonstrated, I asked her if we were going to make wired flowers as well - and she said this was a wired flower. Obviously we have different understandings of the term!
Even so this is a very pretty flower and you can make it a lot faster than a fully wired flower and you don't need much specialist equipment - we used a template rather than a cutter. There are a few things you need however, which you can buy from Amazon or any good cake decorating shop:

Culpitt 18 Gauge Dark Green Florist Wires - Sugar Flowers

8pc Sugarcraft Cake Modelling Tool Set - you need the balling tool

PME sugarcraft Foam pad

Renshaw Flower and Modelling Paste 250 g

You can make your flower any colour; I used Sugarflair Spectral Concentrated Paste Colour - Christmas Red

And if you want to make leaves:

Sugarflair Sugarpaste Colour Paste Holly Green

3Pcs Veined Rose Leaf Fondant Cake Cutter Plunger--White

Moss Green Stem Tape 90 feet x 13mm. Stem - Tex. For Corsages, Bouquets, Flowers, Arrangements and Crafts.

Optional: Wilton Gum Paste Flowers Drying Rack

That does look quite a long list but it's nothing compared to what you need to make proper wired flowers!

To begin colour about 70g of sugarpaste in your chosen colour. Make a ball and roll in your palms to form a cone. Bend the end of the wire into a little hook and insert into the cone; this is your central bud.

Roll out some more of the flower paste so it is very thin. You can use a large flower cutter (rather than individual petals) or draw a shape yourself and use it as a template; we used a card template our tutor had made and then laminated. Cut out around it.

Place the petals on a foam pad and rub around the edges with a balling tool, with the tool half on the flower and half on the pad. This will make the edge of the flower curl up.

Stick the wire through the centre of the petals and bring it up so it sits underneath the bud. Taking one petal, wrap it very tightly around the bud, then take a petal from the opposite side and do the same thing, overlapping it. Repeat and start to bend the tops of the petals out slightly until they are all wrapped around.

Repeat the previous steps with another piece of flowerpaste and another set of petals.

And finally repeat with a third layer, bending the final petals out more.

The flowerpaste will start to harden quite quickly; be careful where you place the rose so it doesn't sit on one side. Ideally hang it from a drying rack or stick the wire through a hole in a colander -have a look around the house and see what you can find!

To make the leaves, colour a small piece of flowerpaste green and use the plunger cutter. These need to be fairly thick so you can get a wire through the middle. Cut a shorter piece of wire and carefully insert it into the centre of the leaf and bend the leaf backwards. Bind the wire to the main one holding the flower up using florist tape; repeat if you want to have two leaves.

This would be very pretty on top of a cake and it doesn't take too long if you need to make a few.

Birdcage Birthday Cake

Birdcages are a common theme at weddings and recently they have become popular as birthday cakes as well. I went to a wedding a few years ago of a couple whose surname is Bird, and they had a birdcage on each table – which I actually sourced for them – filled with flowers and decorated with little birds. I was given one of them to keep afterwards and replaced the flowers with dried ones, and I have it on display in my bedroom.

 

I’ve noticed a few birdcage cakes on the internet and thought they were really pretty and when I was sent a pair of bird cookie cutters to review by Cake Mart, I thought this was the perfect opportunity. I also used another item they sent me for review which was not exactly the purpose it was meant for, but it worked really well!

The cake itself didn't quite turn out as I'd hoped; despite making sure that my cakes all looked even, when I covered it with the fondant it looked a bit lumpy. I'm not sure how else I could have done this on this scale - if it was a smaller cake I could have left out the buttercream in between the layers, and made one or two large sponges and carved it. Maybe the way to do this is to make a mini birdcage cake!

I used the same lemon cake recipe that I made for this cake so I'm not going to repeat it here, as there are several steps to assembling the cake. Here's the cake, or part of it at least - I doubled the quantities in the recipe.

The top of the cake needs to be a dome and I would normally bake another cake in a hemisphere tin but I had some offcuts of cake left over from another recipe. I treated it like a giant cake pop, turning the cake into crumbs and mixing with buttercream until I had the consistency of a pliable dough, which I then shaped into a dome.

As you can see, the cakes look very neat when stacked together (other than the top), so I don't know what happened when I covered them with fondant! I think actually looking at the picture on the right, one of the layers shifted due to the buttercream.

I covered the whole stack of cake with ready-made fondant which I had coloured light blue with some Sugarflair gel colour. You can also buy a pre-coloured pack but that way is more expensive.

Looking at pictures of bird cages online I saw they had wide bands horizontally around the top and bottom and then thinner rungs (or wires) running vertically. I knew that I couldn't do this freehand, so had the idea of using this pastry lattice cutter that I was sent by a German company called Cake Mart - they also have a UK site. This allowed me to cut very thin strips which I separated with a knife. It worked really well and it's nice to know products can have multi uses!

For the wider strips I used a fondant ribbon cutter from Cake Boss that my boyfriend gave me for Christmas. It's a great little set that comes in a metal tin, consisting of a roller with a handle, and various wheels that give you different width and style ribbons, such as straight or wavy.

 

Cake Mart also sent me these bird cookie cutters, which come in a pretty box and would make a lovely gift. They are big enough to use for cookies but also small enough that you could use them for fondant in cake decorating projects, as I've done here. They are robust and comfortable to use.

I used a litte water to stick the bands around the top and bottom of the cake and stuck the smaller strips vertically around the sides. I made some very quick hand-rolled roses and stuck them down one of the cage rungs.

Here is one of the birds which I cut out using the cutters from the same pink fondant as the roses as I didn't want to introduce too many colours.

Another bird which I placed on top of the cage

I also made a handle for the top. Here is the finished cake - definitely not one of my best and it looks a bit messu which is largely down to the uneven cake and fondant covering. Next time I think I would make a smaller cake and carve it rather than stacking several layers together. You get the general idea of a birdcage cake though and it did taste good! I took this into work for my birthday.

 

 

I'm sharing this with Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabber UK; her theme this month is 'colour me pretty'.