Wedding Cake

When I offered to make the wedding favour for my bro, I decided to "throw in" a wedding cake as well. I was thinking it's the perfect opportunity to try my hands on a wedding cake, complete with fondant, royal icing and stuff.

So I started my research for the cake... down to the tiniest detail. Thanks for Rei and Elyn for their generous help and advice, I'm able to pull this thru'.
I started with a design in mind, after going thru' many (and I do mean MANY) sites and pics of wedding cakes. Initially I decided to be cautious and do up a single tier 8in cake. But as the days drew closer, I was informed that the wedding guests will hit over 100 ppl! Well, a single tier cake will not be able to feed even half of that number, so I finally settled on making a 2-tiered one. Having settled on the design (more or less), I started off with the royal icing flowers. It's a definite 1st for me to try piping those flowers and working with royal icing (the iced cookies don't count). It took me a few tries to finally work out on how to pipe decent looking flowers. However, I was impatient and after drying the flowers overnite, I started trying to peel it off the waxed paper. Of course, it all broke into thousands of pieces! (and so did my heart)...I then had to leave the flowers to dry for a couple of nites before trying to do the same again. Well, this time it worked out beautifully and even survived a drop test when I accidentally knocked onto the tray and some flowers landed on the floor.. UNHARMED! LOL....

At the same time, I was working with gumpaste. Initial idea was to use tylose powder but it meant having to make a trip to BIY which was rather out of the way for me.... A visit to a nearby phoon huat store got myself a small container of gum instead. So I tried out a gumpaste recipe. Got the butterflies cut out and left it to dry. Magically, it dried pretty fast. In fact, it was totally bone dried by the 3rd day.

Having the decorations ready, I was left with the cake to bake on Friday (the wedding being on Sunday). I did 2 butter cakes, one at 9in and the other, a 6in cake. Left it to cool down overnite and then did a chocolate ganache and got it filled and covered. Again left it to harden and cool down in the fridge and got to work on it on Saturday nite. I bought a few packs of pettinice fondant for the job. It's quite a challenge to roll out the fondant and making sure it did cover the whole 9in cake base well. The choco ganache was wet from the condensation, which means there's no room for mistakes! If the fondant got stained by the chocolate when it wasn't laid well in the 1st try, I can't really reuse the fondant. But it's a do-or-die situation.... LOL.... glad to say that it was finally done.

The rest fell in pretty fast and when the cake was completed, I really heaved a huge sigh of relief!

The verdict of the cake, after being cut and served to the guests was that they really love it! yay to me!

Finally, with the cake done and the wedding reception over, I've finally "acquired" myself a Sister-in-law. :)

I wish the couple a happy and blessed marriage!

ps : sorrie that I've uploaded too many pics for this post.... can't blame me as it's my 1st attempt on a wedding cake rite? The pics are not well taken as I've a big problem trying to find a spot with sufficient lighting to take pics. Finally settled for a corner that had some natural light coming in from the glass panel. The official photographer had also taken some pics of the cake. I'll post those when I get them. Meanwhile, will have to make do with these!