Wedding cake with fresh flowers

This weekend I did a two day course making an open stack wedding cake with fresh flowers at Cakes4Fun.

The first day was spent cutting and covering the cakes with Jen, a lovely instructor whose advice is always in my head when I’m doing cakes. On the second day we were joined by Patty, a florist with an infectious enthusiasm for both flowers and cake. I felt that I learned a huge amount from her about taping and wiring flowers, about how to use them on a cake, which flowers wilt or cause others to wilt, which are toxic and which are edible. I felt the tingle of a possible new hobby coming on and I swear I felt my credit card wince.

Jen showed us how to dowel and stack the cakes leaving a scary two inches of air in between the bottom two layers, something I have never done before. The space was filled with red and cherry brandy roses, salal leaves, rosehips, Chinese lanterns and plants I’d never even heard of like amaranthus and kangaroo paw (hilariously misheard as kangaroo poo). We also included some bird eye chillies on the wedding cake, which my mum suggested would make for a “hot night”. Ridiculous. Who would cook a curry on their wedding night?

The reds and oranges of the flowers and berries looked stunning and everyone was pleased with their cakes.

 I wish my rear view was this good

This was a really lovely course – I learned a lot about flowers, gained confidence in using them on a cake and am very keen to learn more. Plus I now have 100 wedding cake portions to eat on my own like a jilted bride.

Huge thanks to Petra and Dylan for having me to stay and credit to Dylan for his persistence in trying all week to eat the circus cake. Thanks also to the taxi driver who picked me up from Petra’s and asked if she was my daughter. She is TWO MONTHS younger than me for god’s sake. Perhaps it’s time to get some rest.

Wedding cake

My family has been in a state of high excitement as we've celebrated the first family wedding in ten years. My sister Lucy became Mrs Mark Wright at the weekend and we are all delighted.

I set about making the cake several weeks ago, baking a 12 inch fruit cake that would have time to mature. I forgot to make a wish when I mixed it, unless you count "I hope I get a slice". I was more careful with the next two tiers - chocolate orange, then lemon - and took requests. Lucy suggested a win on the lottery, my mum hoped for a baby girl, and I plumped for health, happiness, holidays and a kitten.

Lucy had asked for a plain white iced cake with pink ribbon and wedding toppers of her, Mark and baby Alex. This sounds simple but plain is hard to do - there are no flowers or decoration to patch up uneven covering. 

I made the wedding toppers referring to the notes I'd made at Cakes4Fun when Pen taught us modelling, chuckling at the instruction "make groom's trousers HIGH for support. Think Simon Cowell". I attached Alex to Mark's lap by sliding a piece of spaghetti into his stomach, completing hiding the waistcoat I'd carefully embossed and shimmered. The naked lump behind him is the bride's torso waiting for its dress. When I attached the toppers to the cake on the wedding day and turned the bride upside down to apply glue, she had a shamefully bare flesh-coloured bottom. I felt that I should have made some bridal pantaloons.

While I'm on the subject of flesh: when I was seven, I had a set of crayons with names like 'poppy red' and 'ocean blue'. Even in the late 70s, it was becoming unfashionable to describe the beige-y pink as 'flesh' and it was renamed 'salmon pink' as the crayon world woke up to the fact that beige-y pink is not the flesh tone for everyone. Yet in the 21st century world of modelling paste, I'm surprised to find this colour is still referred to as 'flesh'. Perhaps because it's the base for other skin tones too, or perhaps they're just a big bunch of racialists.

I carefully copied the belt design on Lucy's wedding dress, then cursed myself as I covered most of it up with the bouquet. The last thing to add was the hair, for which I used a craft gun and a slimy mix of brown sugar paste and Trex. It goes into the gun in a slippery brown sausage that looks disgusting. Having carefully modelled tiny little ears on the bride, I cursed myself again that I was about to cover them completely with hair, and toyed with the idea of leaving a bit of ear poking out between the locks of hair, an effect known in my family as 'monkey ear' and utterly reviled. I have done many horrible things to my sister over the years, from trying to convince her that she was growing a moustache when she was 12 (she wasn't) to telling her and her friends during school lunch break that the kitchen freezer had broken and they were giving away all the ice creams (they weren't). However, giving her monkey ear on her wedding cake would have been a step too far. The ears were covered up.

I stacked the cake on the wedding day at Bramall Hall, a beautiful Tudor building set in its own park, and the cake sat on a Jacobean dresser carved with wooden foxes.

The ceremony was beautiful, though the bride and groom were each flanked by a man with a noose around his neck. 

If there was a hidden warning, Mark chose to ignore it and happily signed the register, watched over by a small toy owl nestling on a light fitting.

The official photographer Sam Ryley made sure that the photographs were fun to do and very kindly took this photo of me, the cake, and Lucy reflected in the mirror. I like it and so must our mother, who described it as "a good photo of a scrawny lady. No offence intended". I hope she enjoys the official wedding portraits just as much.

We had a lovely wedding breakfast; the speeches were funny, the cake was cut and the first dance was danced. It was a very happy occasion. I got my wish for a slice of fruit cake twice over and I hope that Lucy and Mark get all their wedding wishes too - health, happiness, perhaps someone I can buy cute little dresses for, and a kitten. Possibly twice over.