My First Wedding Cake - THIS IS MY WORK

It finally happened, my former roommate commissioned me to make her a two-tier wedding cake. She wanted lemon cake with raspberry filling. I found a new cake recipe (I discovered the WASC recipe and will never go back to regular cake!) as well as a better frosting recipe using Meringue powder(definitely an improvement on classic buttercream). Here are the professional pictures of my work, woohoo!

Isn't it lovely? The colors requested were gray and yellow and she specifically wanted twigs and flowers. I thought it turned out alright, but I wish I would have been better at piping the twigs and such. The base of the cake was my idea since I knew she was going to decorate with jars and twine. The topper was made to match the name plates at the tables. I thought it was all a nice touch.

The first cut!

Me and the bride with my creation! This also gives you a better sense of the actual size of the cake.

The guests enjoyed the cake quite a bit!

I learned a lot from making this cake. 1) Found better frosting recipe for wedding cakes 2)discovered the most delicious cake recipe, and 3)learned that if you use ribbon you MUST line it with wax paper or the grease from the frosting will soak through. A little double-stick tape and wax paper did the trick perfectly.

The Professional Wedding Cake - NOT MY WORK

Here is the wedding cake I ended up ordering. It was too much work to make my own wedding cake with everything else I had to do. It was a pretty cake, although not quite what I had ordered, and it tasted delicious:

I wish I could make buttercream that perfect, but I would probably need better tools for that! Notice the poor "celtic knots" that they tried to make. 

Just for Fun: Some Dust Mites!

Just to change things up, here are the dust mite cake balls I made for a Totoro party I had with my coworkers. I purposely sabotaged them just a little to make them look especially silly:

Practice Wedding Cake #2

Knowing that my layering techniques definitely needed some work, I attempted cake number two. I wanted to practice my Celtic Knot making as well. Here was the result:

This cake still had a bit of a tilt to it, but it was better than the last try! The decorations mainly were centered on giving me a chance to practice celtic knots. 

The top was a large eternity knot. It was a difficult thing to pipe so I was at a loss to know the best way to design it in the end. Too bad I never ended up having to do it.

It was a yummy lemon cake filled with raspberry jam. 

I think my skills were definitely improving by this point in time.

Practice Wedding Cake #1

Well here it is, my first practice wedding cake! I was pretty pleased with my work on a first try, but I still needed more practice, that's for sure.

I choose to make my cake Red Velvet for practice since I'm pretty much obsessed with any kind of food with the word velvet in it. There were two fillings that I alternated between layers: cream cheese and chocolate cream cheese. The cake was wonderfully delicious, although I have since found a cake recipe that I find even tastier. I'll post the recipe later on.

I was having a lot of fun making my cake so I'm posting my joyous face for you to see!

And here is the final outcome! She sat crooked but I thought the decoration was fun. I was still dissatisfied with the taste of traditional buttercream, however!

I think I would have been satisfied to have this little cake at my wedding! I thought the decoration was charming, if I do say so myself. The chocolate cheesecake filling was also enchanting.

Wedding Cake Practice Begins

With my wedding soon approaching, I decided I wanted to try my hand at making my own wedding cake I was going to need to practice getting it right, especially the part where I would have to make tiers! I also wanted to practice cake flavors and decoration styles. We wanted to have a celtic theme running through the wedding a bit since my ring was designed with an eternity knot in it.

I designed this in Paint(very tech savvy, ha!) thinking I might want my wedding cake to look similar. Here's my rough design, and in the next two posts I'll show you my practice cakes! Let me warn you now though that I didn't end up making my cake and I was a little disappointed with the work of the bakery I hired. I gave them a simpler design than this but they completely butchered the celtic knot design.

Practice Cake for Coworkers

After we got engaged, I really wanted to have a go at making my own wedding cake. I took as many opportunities as possible to practice making cakes. We have a monthly birthday party at work so I decided to make this little number in celebration. It was chocolate cake filled with peanut butter buttercream. The inside was tasty but I wasn't a fan of the straight buttercream. I was pleased with how the roses turned out.

My cake writing clearly needed some work. I find I do much better when I am copying the font exactly from something I'm looking at. Good thing there are infinite fonts available online for me to use as examples! I also feel like I was finally starting to get a good handle on making my frosting smooth. I think it was soon after this cake that I bought plastic spackling tools to help me make things as smooth as possible. Best three dollars I ever spent on a cake tool! I might even try metal ones in the future.

I thought the roses and mums turned out rather nicely. The picture makes the dark blue flowers look black, but they weren't nearly that sultry in real life!

Impressing the In-Laws

About a month before we got engaged, my mom and sister flew out to visit me. I took them to meet my boyfriend's family. Since my sister was in town I wanted to take advantage and make a cake with her! This is our creation:

This is my lovely sister modeling the cake in my tiny apartment kitchen I shared with three other roommates. The frosting is made with evaporated milk and less shortening and butter than the average buttercream. I liked the taste much better than buttercream. The clever use of strawberries around the edge of the cake and the fancily cut up strawberry in the middle were all Lynette's design. She has quite the creative flair! 

Here's another bonus shot of us both. Sorry you can't see the cake too well in any of these. It was delicious though!

A Y-themed Birthday

Continuing on with catching up to present day cake making, here is the next cake I produced.

This is a birthday cake for my future husband. It is decorated with the BYU Y logo. Again, I think my proportions needed some work, but I thought I made a good go of it. I used a star tip to make the design. My designs hadn't gone beyond this and the Jamaican flag cake at this point in time.

Birthday Cake for My Future Mother-in-Law

After just a few dates, my future husband wanted an excuse to go out with me again. I had told him I enjoyed making cakes and conveniently his mom's birthday was just a few weeks away. We set a date for him to come "help" me make the cake. And by that I mean he sat and watched me make it. The next day we went to his parent's house and I met the whole family. After that, I decided we could officially be a couple because I liked them so much. Here is the fated birthday cake!

I realized after this cake that my frosting writing needed some work!

**Side note on this cake: When I was little my mom would always hide a marble in birthday cakes and whoever found it in their piece got a surprise. I decided to do this for my future husband's family. I didn't have a marble so I used a marble charm from a necklace my dad got me in China. I was terrified they would break a tooth or something, but it turned out well and they loved it!

Birthday Cake Jamaican Style

It was months after the class ended that I had an excuse to make another cake. This time my roommate decided to throw a Jamaican-themed birthday party for her brother. Yes, it sounds random, but it was an awesome party! Here is the simple 9x13 cake I made for it of the Jamaican flag.

This was a fun one to make, but I think I definitely needed to work on my proportions.

As an aspiring Cakestress, I decided that posting my baking attempts online would be a good way to get feedback and tips on my work! To start out, I'll give you an update on my cake history.

It started two and a half years ago when my sister and I decided to take a basic cake decorating class together at Hobby Lobby. I had just returned home from living in the Dominican Republic for a year and a half and decided I wanted to fulfill one of my life goals and learn how to make cakes. I enjoyed it just as much as I thought I would! Here are some of my creations. As is obvious, I was very new to the art, although I had a lot of fun inventing cake ideas:

I love the well-used table cloth this little cake is sitting on. This is our first cake in the class. I decided to experiment with polka dots using my two favorite complementary colors! My dot making wasn't so good, and I'm still working on it. Dots are hard!

Here is our first full-size 8 inch cake. We were practicing boarders and roses. I decided to spruce mine up with a little Alice in Wonderland theme. Unfortunately at this time I wasn't eating desserts so I never got to eat it and shrink to the size of a mouse.