A Succulent Wedding Cake

I made another wedding cake this weekend, would you like to see?







It was for my friends Ian and Ashleigh (their story was featured in Style Me Pretty!), who can only agree on red velvet when it comes to cake, so I made a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. I’ve loved the look of two tiered cakes for awhile now, it feels casual but still special. And Ashleigh selected a perfect garden rose and two pretty succulents to top it off. I loved it!

(A Wedding-y) Weekend in Pictures

Celebration season continued with a wedding! My former roommate Kaylie got hitched, I made them a tiny wedding cake, and then I slept all day Sunday to recover. Sorry for the lack of photos! I hope your weekend was lovely :)

Making a Wedding Cake: Part II

After months of planning, worrying and buying way too much butter, Wedding Cake Day was upon me. My biggest concern was getting the tiers there without anything cracking or breaking. Oh, did I mention the reception was being held in another borough? It was. The cake had to get from the west side of Manhattan to the east side of Queens.

Thankfully, I have very good friends who helped me get all three tiers into a cab, and also kindly flirted with the cab driver to get him to drive very slowly and smoothly (a major miracle, if you've ever ridden in an NYC cab). I put the crumb-coated cakes in individual boxes and then we held the cakes and our breath in the back of a cab. We arrived at the reception site with the cakes still perfectly intact. Hooray!



After the cab ride was over and I could breathe again, I set to work assembling and frosting the cake. I love frosting cakes, but frosting a giant one was more fun than I thought it would be. I kept exclaiming, "this is so fun!" to no one in particular.



While I was in my own little world of frosting joy, a few engaged couples were wandering around and looking at the venue. One of them looked at me and said, "Oh, the baker would know! How many people are they expecting tonight?" I was thrilled that they thought I was a professional! But then, a little later, another couple came by and the groom asked for my card. Eeee! I probably should have been a little cooler about the whole thing and given him my email address or something. Instead, I smiled like a goof and told him I wasn't a professional, just a friend of the bride.

After the frosting was done I cascaded some yellow & white ranunculus, baby's breath and greenery down the front of the cake and called it a day! Well. Actually, I went home, showered, and changed from Nervous-Cake-Baker to Happy-Wedding-Guest-Who-Needs-A-Drink.





All in all, making a wedding cake was (honestly!) really fun. And I'm really happy that my friends could have a cake they liked and that it tasted good (why is that so rare in wedding cakes?). So, congratulations to the Kings! Thanks for trusting me to make a giant cake. I loved it.

Making a Wedding Cake: Part I

Oh my. I did it! I made a wedding cake! Crazy.

I've been dreaming about making a wedding cake for ages. After making the groom's cake for a friend's wedding this summer, I was even more excited about someday making a wedding cake. So when Tracey said, "Hey, you could do our wedding cake!" I jumped at the chance. I've had so much fun with this project and I'd love to share the behind-the-scenes details with you! (I'll write about the day-of-the-wedding details next, if those interest you too :)



Thankfully Tracey and Greg were very laid back about the whole thing, and weren't looking for something super fancy or perfect. That really freed me up to focus on how it would taste, knowing if my frosting style is a bit homemade-looking, that's ok. We decided on a fall-flavored cake, with a tier each of carrot, pumpkin and apple cake covered with a thick layer of cream cheese frosting.



After the question of flavor was answered, I turned to the Internet to answer the million other questions I had. Like, how does a three-tiered cake not cave in on itself? And how on earth am I going to get a giant wedding cake from my apartment in Chelsea to the venue in Queens? The Internet was very helpful. Thankfully, Queen Deb had already attempted this feat and I learned (as always) a lot from her.

After the Internet taught me about using dowels (I used straws) to keep the cake from caving in on itself, I made a full-sized test cake. Which was maybe a bit insane/wasteful, but turned out to be the best thing I could have done for my sanity and my confidence level. I tested all the recipes, built the cake, figured out that it was super easy to hide the cake boards in between each layer, gained confidence that it wouldn't cave in, and saw how the frosting would behave after sitting out all day in a warm apartment. As a little cheat, I only frosted half of the test cake.



After the test cake survived the day in my apartment without anything catastrophic happening, I took a giant box of it over to Tracey and Greg, who gave it the thumbs up. Then I threw the rest away (I know! I'm sorry) and waited nervously for the wedding day to make the real deal. Oh, and I suppose since this is the behind the scenes post I should tell you that I made all the cake a week before the wedding day and froze it all. It worked beautifully—cake is much easier to move around when it's frozen solid, it thaws to taste exactly the same as it did when it went in, and it allowed me to enjoy the pre-wedding festivities without having to come home to bake nine cakes at the end of the night.

I think I've bored you enough with the details for now (or, if there's anyone out there like me, fascinated you), more on how it all went down later today.

Weekend in Pictures

{rainy saturday}

{wedding cake baking}

{lower east side, morning sun}

{ha! hanksy}

{soho signage, blue sky}

{west village signage, blue sky}

As planned, I holed up in my apartment on a rainy saturday and baked a wedding cake. (The picture of cake up there is technically not from this weekend, it's from last week's test cake. But I couldn't keep talking about the cake and not give you a tiny peek at it!) Sunday was thankfully-finally-truly fall weather, which was celebrated with brunch and a long walk through the West Village. I'm so glad I scheduled cake baking on the rainy day, not the gloriously fall day!