The Icing On The Cake

Cake. One of my main food groups. Wedding Cake. The most important cake in my life. Did I bake it myself? Yes, I did! Would I do it again? Not so sure...
I found the recipes and assembling instructions for our 3-tier wedding cake on the BBC Good Food website. The suggested flavours corresponded very well with Marco's and my personal tastes and also had an element of the traditional, so it was perfect.
The cake consisted of a bottom tier of really rich chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling (I love chocolate), one tier of refreshing lemon cake drenched in lemon syrup (Marco loves lemon) and a small top tier of light fruit cake covered in marzipan (the traditional wedding cake flavour.) 
The instructions seemed quite lenghty at first read, but made complete sense and were easy to follow. I did one practice run in May and baked all the different layers once, and they all turned out perfectly acceptable, you could even say delicious. Our workmates were real happy bunnies, as we brought a lot of cake to our respective offices after the test bake. The chocolate cake alone weighed in at around 4 kilos!
Here are pictures of our vintage 1950s cake topper (in its original wrapping!) that I bought on Etsy sitting on top of the cake tins for size and of the cakes ready to be covered in icing one day before the wedding. 

Here is a picture of me spreading buttercream on the lemon cake, that Marco insisted on taking... If I look sleep-deprived and stressed, that's because I was!

The hardest part of it all was to get royal icing on the outside of the cakes smoothly. It was the first time that I had done something like that. You could tell when looking at the end result. It was probably the bumpiest wedding cake ever, it wouldn't have looked out of place here.

In hindsight, or if I ever had to make a celebration cake again, I would simply opt for buttercream icing, as you can make bumps and swirls a feature then! As a matter of fact, if I could make my own wedding cake again, I would definitely opt for buttercream! And yes, I am still slightly bitter about having had a bumpy cake...

Sniff.

Well, attaching some shiny ribbon around the tiers distracted from the *slight* imperfections, and it still tasted lovely, if I may say so myself. And it was definitely quite satisfying to be able to say that I had made it! But is was totally a nerve-wrecking experience.

We had a cake cutting song, if you would like to listen to that while looking at these photos* of the cake in action:

* taken by our photographer

 

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