My friends and I are constantly making messes in our parent’s kitchens, but this cake was the worst. By the time we were done the kitchen looked like a battlefield, with frosting and jams, fondant, and mixing bowls. We love to tackle the hardest recipes we can find and produce the most mess with the tastiest outcomes.
Mistakes
A wedding cake seemed like the perfect recipe to try for that challenge but we didn’t come prepared, no we decided to wing it. All we knew was that we wanted three tiers and 6-9 layers so that it was nice and tall. Turns out that you need structure for a cake like this one, as we soon found out. I’m talking rods and stiff frosting. Another mistake we made was our crumb coating. I hadn’t worked with larger cakes so I didn’t know how long the cake needed to sit for, or at what temperature the frosting was applied.
Ratio
Baking with three other people means you are bound to get your signals crossed. We made too much frosting and not enough jam, which means our second batch didn’t set properly before it went on the cake, saved only by a frosting barrier. The easiest part for us was of course the vanilla cake as we had made that before. But after the cake was mostly done we had to think decorations… trying our hand at buttercream flowers. Or not. These failed epically which was sad because I had wanted to try them for forever. However, I ended up making fondant flowers instead.
Flowers
Fondant is not hard to make, if you have marshmallows and powdered sugar that is the easiest way. I hate the way it tastes but it’s perfect for molding. I did plain white to match our already white cake. I got the hang of it making 75 flowers and letting them chill overnight. My friends helped me, making a range of sizes to look more natural. We topped them off with gold leaves at the base.
Assembly
We had a sleepover so everything could chill overnight… but the next morning we got to work. People would be there soon. Why eat a whole wedding cake by yourself? We invited our families to help eat it and they did 😋 We started by pulling out the crumb-coated cakes, which we had sliced evenly, and assembled so each layer was big, smaller, smallest. Now was the tricky part, do we frost before or after putting them together? I am no expert but it seemed better to frost before that way we could let each layer chill further and then put them all together. We did just that, touching up the frosting and making it as sturdy as possible. We added the flowers, and the leaves around the base, stepping back to admire our work. It was far from perfect but it was delicious. Now we just had to clean up the kitchen…
Hadley's Hues 