Wedding cake – the back story

Mary-Jo created the magnificent wedding cake for Dana and Adam, and now the whole story can be told.  Including experimenting with the design of the flowers, probably 40-50 hrs went into making  this work of art and the extra cakes for the guests to eat that were served from the kitchen.

All of the flowers were made early, from gum paste and royal icing. The big flowers are made from five individual pieces of gum paste, styled with a series of tools, dried in a form and then assembled into a flower. The small ones are two colours of icing, one icing tip for the petals and another for the centre. Several tests were made before the colours were decided on and many experiments for the final design for the big flowers.

Then Mary Jo prepared the two dummy bases,  (including a secret slot for the “cutting” ceremony) and covered them with rolled fondant. After some head scratching and half remembered geometry, we stacked the two layers concentrically and secured them with wooden dowels in a place that would later be hidden by the upper posts.

Now in a five hour marathon session, Mary-Jo iced the dummy cakes. She piped the green stems and leaves, attached the flowers with a dab of icing and then added the borders and the blue pearls. Clare (our dog) waited patiently to “retrieve” any pearls that got away. Mary-Jo chose to let her have them!

Here’s how the bottom layers look. Actually, this is how they look after a trip in the car, being on display, and coming back in a truck! The next task was securing the four pillars and test fitting the top layer. The pillars were iced into place and allowed to set so they were solid.

Despite our best efforts to eat enough out of our freezer to make room for four cakes (8 layers), it wasn’t going to happen, so all the baking and decorating of the edible pieces happened in the two days prior to the wedding, and after each session, someone (guess who?) had to make four individual trips to the basement where the cakes were stored in the spare fridge.  This was a bit of a rush, especially as Mary-Jo wanted to go to the rehearsal on Friday to meet more of Dana’s family. At one point, she had one the cakes on a decorating turntable, and she was piping leaves on the side of a cake and then as it turned towards me, I would add a pre-made flower – quite the assembly line.

Bright and early on the Saturday, we boxed the cakes and packed the car. The two bottom layers had the pillars “attached” with royal icing, and so the box lid would not shut, of course. At Dana’s house, we found that Anna’s makeup case was at the back, behind the cakes, so we had to partially unpack. When I pushed the cake back in, without the makeup case there was extra room, so the cake went further back, the box lid touched the trunk cover bar and came down, and two pillars were no longer cemented in place.

Next stop was the reception hall, and Mary-Jo did some repair work, and from then on the cake was someone else’s worry! This is how it looked:

And here’s Adam and Dana cutting it. The knife is the same knife that we used 41 years ago, and that Mary-Jo’s mother used at her wedding and her grandmother before that. It may even go further back, but they didn’t have blogs then, so we’ll never know.

Some other interesting facts:

• The top layer was gluten free, so Dana could eat it.
• In all, six layers were decorated
• 50 large flowers
• 400-500 small flowers
• 30 eggs
• 10 boxes of cake mix
• 2 kg of fondant
• Over 6 kg of icing sugar
• 1 lb of butter and 1 lb of shortening
• no calories, because they don’t count in wedding cakes.