My Very First Wedding Cake

When I was asked to make my friends' wedding cake, I was both honored and excited. Shortly after that, I got a bit scared and then panic set in. Oh my gosh... a wedding cake! Those things are HUGE. And they have to look stunning and taste fantastic. I kept telling myself, it's like a birthday cake, only bigger. I can do this! I can do this!

I needed information from a trustworthy source so I went to my library. There were several books on the subject of Wedding Cakes. I browsed through several books but decided to take home Dede Wilson's "Wedding Cakes You Can Make". The first half of the book discusses everything you need to know, from tools and cake pans, to creating a schedule. I highly recommend this book because I learned a lot from it.

Another invaluable source of information was Rose Levy Beranbaum's website: "Real Baking with Rose". The forum is great with lots of cake experts willing to help out. One of the major contributors to the website and master cake baker, Hector, has graciously answered numerous questions of mine. I thank you sincerely, Hector!

After some experimenting, I finally decided on the cake to make: yellow butter cake from Rose's book, The Cake Bible. This decision came after baking several different cakes and having my husband, friends and coworkers give me their opinions on what they liked and disliked. This cake won hands down. After one bit of Rose's cake, my husband said: "this is the one". He said he didn't even need to taste the other piece cake on his plate, awaiting a taste test :o) The other thing I loved about this cake is that in Rose's book, the math for all the different pan sizes was already done for me. Piece of cake! :o)

For the filling I used my own recipe for a Strawberry Cream Cheese filling. The frosting needed to be white so I went with a buttercream frosting. Both were made in advance and frozen.

I used a floating tiers cake stand by Wilton. This way the cakes didn't have to be stacked on top of one another. This cake stand holds a 14" cake, a 10" cake and a 6" cake. To ensure there was plenty of cake fore everyone to eat, my friends wanted me to make an extra 8" cake (not displayed on the stand) and an extra 6" cake so they could serve one and save one for their first wedding anniversary.

The best part after completing my very first wedding cake project was that everybody loved the way the cake looked, and more importantly, how it tasted.

Without further ado, here are the pictures. Enjoy!

Roses and Baby's Breath for decorating the top of each cake

Bride and groom plus the wedding cake on the cake stand
(I asked and they were OK with me posting this picture on my blog)

A close-up of the 14" cake with a total of 8 lilac roses and 5 white roses

This is the 10" cake decorated with 6 lilac roses and 3 white roses

Another close-up of the 10" cake

This was my slice of wedding cake - very tasty, if I say so myself :o)

Birthday cake

I usually bake my own birthday cake. Although I skipped this “tradition” last year, I thought I’d make up for it by making this year’s cake extra special. With so many different cakes, fillings, and frostings to choose from, where do you start? I had just borrowed Flo Braker’s “Baking for All Occasions” from the library and wanted to bake from it. The idea of a deconstructed Black Forest Cake or Schwarzwalder Kirsch Torte came to me. Now I had everything I needed to start baking.



Instead of the usual sponge cake, I thought the cake would taste good with a vanilla bean-infused white cake. I used Flo Braker’s recipe for Silver Cake with Poppy Seeds and just omitted the poppy seeds as she recommended for a classic white cake.

I love fruit-based mousses and have made them multiple times for cake fillings. In this case, in order to stay in the Black Forest Cake spirit, I thought I’d make a cherry mousse. If you haven’t had a chance to browse through Rick Rodgers’ “Kaffeehaus”, you’re missing out on tons of delectable recipes for European-style baked goods. For my birthday cake, I adapted his recipe for Strawberry Cream Filling. For that extra cherry flavor, I arranged halved cherries on top of the mousse filling.

Now for the icing on the cake (literally), I decided to use white chocolate instead of dark chocolate, so I chose Flo Braker’s recipe White Chocolate/Cream Cheese Buttercream frosting. I highly recommend using good-quality white chocolate for this otherwise it will taste like wax. This frosting was very creamy with a great melt-in-your-mouth feel to it. The vanilla flavor in the white chocolate paired beautifully with the vanilla bean aroma in the white cake. The almond flavor added to the the frosting complimented the cherries very well, in my opinion. On top of the cake, I spread some cherry preserves for that nice dark red color contrast against the ivory-white frosting.