Let Them Eat Cake!!

The wedding cake. Angel wanted it to be huge. It didn't necessarily have to taste good, but it had to LOOK good. It was a challenge that suited my perfectionist disorder perfectly. So, in the past few months I have made a couple "practice cakes" and worked out some of the particulars of the whole procedure. The first issue was that she wanted it all covered in fondant. This isn't a problem except that once you cover a cake with fondant it can't be refrigerated. If you DO refrigerate it, when you take it out, condensation will mess of up fondant because the cake is cold and the air would be warm. SO, that meant that I had to use buttercream frosting, which is SUPER sweet. Then I thought that maybe I could use some sort of jam-type filling because that would make the cake more yummy - but it turned out to be too "squishy" and when the cakes were stacked, it mushed out of the middle and made a little bubble all the way around the middle of the cake. These are the types of things that you don't learn if you don't do a trial run...and luckily, there were lots of people willing to eat the test cakes.
I took two vacation days to make this cake. The wedding is on Saturday. Yesterday afternoon (Wednesday) I left work a little bit early and finished up the shopping so that I had all the supplies on hand before I got started. I had 21 cake mixes (a couple extra, guess I couldn't count!), 5 lbs. of butter, a huge tub of shortening, 20 lbs of powdered sugar, 6 dozen eggs and a giant bottle of vanilla, lots of oil. In addition I had wooden dowels, pillars, cake plates in 5 different sizes, a cake leveler (looks like a hacksaw), 7.5 lbs of fondant, and some gumpaste for the flowers. OK...off we go.

I started baking cakes on Wednesday night and got 6 of the 10 done, saving the largest 4 for the morning. Each layer needed to be baked separately because the pans wouldn't fit in the oven otherwise. While those were baking, I made about 300 light purple royal icing flower and let them dry overnight.

This morning I got up and baked the last 4 layers and let them cool. While those were going I was making batch after batch of frosting - starting with the smaller layers. Each had to be leveled with the cake leveler, covered in frosting, then the fondant needed to be rolled out and put on each cake. Sounds much easier than it is actually.Here are some more pictures of the progress...The layers are:8" - red velvet cake, 10" - yellow cake, 12" - white cake, 14" - chocolate cake, and 16" - strawberry cake.

And here are the finished cakes. I have to make little green leaves tonight so that they can dry overnight. Tomororw, Angel and I are going to get the ribbon that goes around the bottom of each layer. Then I will "glue" the little purple flowers and leaves on with icing, and arrange the flowers that go in between each layer in the center of the cake. On Saturday morning I am taking the disassembled cake to the hall to "build" it there. OH BOY! I'll take some more pictures at later stages. I should have a rather entertaining blog post after the wedding Saturday!

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