Flower Petal Wedding Cake

Hi there! I'm back with more cakes. I spent the better half of last week and most of the day yesterday working on these cakes. It was a lot of work but I'm happy to say that they worked out mostly as I had planned with very few hiccups. Originally the order was just for a wedding cake, but a couple months ago the groom's parents contacted me to see if it would be possible for me to also make a groom's cake for the rehearsal dinner. I told them, "Of course!", while wondering how exactly I'd pull both cakes off in one weekend haha. Since the rehearsal dinner was on a Friday night, I knew I'd have to have it completely decorated and ready by Thursday night. That meant baking everything on Wednesday.

By the time I went to bed on Wednesday night, our fridge was filled to the brim with all the layers needed for a 2 tier groom's cake, 3 tier wedding cake, and an additional sheet cake for the wedding. After a cake order like this, Joe and I are looking into getting a 2nd refrigerator for the basement :)

The other part of these cakes that I needed to get started on ahead of time was making all of the gum-paste flower petals that were needed to decorate the wedding cake. This was something completely new for me and after watching a few tutorial videos online and some trial and error I was finally able to make a passable flower petal. In the picture below you can see what I rigged up to dry the petals with. Just regular muffin tins with foil pressed into each of the cups. It worked really well and I did the same thing with with a mini-muffin tin for some of the smaller petals. I made all of these petals on Thursday night so that they would have time to dry before using them on Saturday.

Pretty petals :)

On to the groom's cake! The design was simple, but it's is surprisingly difficult for me to make straight lines while piping on the icing. In an effort to make the straightest and most evenly spaced lines as possible around the cake, I first marked off the bottom of the cake into 1" increments then used my bench scraper to mark the lines at each tick mark. It was quick and easy! But as you can see in the final cake, my final vertical icing lines were still a little shaky. For all the little dots between the lines I just eyeballed the spacing.

I also found that making chocolate curls is not as simple as you would think. 

I have to say, getting smooth sides and sharp corners on the hexagon cake was definitely more difficult than on a round cake. But with the help of the edge icing on the cake it turned out looking pretty nice. At least I think so :) I delivered and set up the cake on Friday evening after work then went home and got to work on the wedding cake.

The wedding cake itself was a super simple design. Just smooth white fondant on all the tiers. The slightly more difficult part was figuring out the arrangement and attaching all the flower petals. Since I transport the cake tiers while they're still un-stacked, I couldn't attach all of the flowers ahead of time at home. I did attach a few with the plan to fill in all the gaps once I got the cake set up at the venue.

Here you can see what the seams between the tiers looked like before filling them with icing. The icing definitely makes a big difference!

I used royal icing to "glue" the petals to the cake and it seemed to work well. Since I stuck the majority of the petals on at the venue, most of them were still drying when we left. I was just praying that no one would knock  the table or touch the cake before it was time to cut it. That's pretty much my worst wedding cake nightmare, that something will happen to the cake between the time that I get it set up and when the bride and groom get there and cut the cake. So far so good though!

My final comment about this cake is that I finally "caulked" the seams between the layers with some icing to fill the gap and make it look nicer overall. That was for you, Mary :) Though I have to give Joe credit for it since he's the one who told me I should bring the icing along just in case. So, thanks Joe!

I've got a couple months before another big wedding cake weekend. Between now and then I'm hoping to finish a few little projects I have going on around the house. This weekend, Joe and I made good progress on making over my latest curbside trash find. I found a really cool chair with a wood frame and upholstered seat and back that was really sturdy but just needed some love. Joe is refinishing the frame and I'm doing the upholstery update. So far it's looking really good! Hopefully by next weekend I'll be ready to share it on the blog. That's it for tonight though! Have a good week.