Having always enjoyed baking and succeeding in making a few very good looking cakes from time to time, when it came to choosing my own wedding cake I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look and taste like.
At every wedding I had ever attended, guests were served a huge meal, and just at the end when they were full to bursting, the wedding cake was cut and served. I always thought of how inappropriate it felt to have heavy fruitcake covered in marzipan at the end of a three course meal, and everyone around me always looked like they were struggling too.
So at my wedding I opted for a more informal buffet arrangement, with lots of lovely dishes, but giving guests the flexibility to mingle with whom they pleased. We had marquees setup in a wonderful big garden, and the wedding cake was the center piece of the desserts table. It looked gorgeous and it was just what I wanted: Mainly because I had made it myself.
Like many brides, when I first thought about baking my own wedding cake, my first reaction was to dismiss the idea. Since I wanted a cake with fresh ingredients, it would have to be made the day before, and surely the day before my wedding would be a hectic time during which I needed to concentrate on making all the plans and work of 8 months come together in one successful event… and make myself look pretty!
The problem - or at least one of them – was that my wedding was going to happen in a small village in the English countryside, far away from the chic London patisseries where I had seen my perfect cake, and try as I might, I could not find anyone that would deliver it that far for less than a small fortune. Having baked cakes myself, my mind balked at the idea of paying around £500 for a cake which I knew I could make. The second option was to try and get a local caterer to do it, but trying to explain to him that I did not under any circumstances want fruit cake was like banging my head against a brick wall. I finally gave up and started doing some research.
The main reason why people try to convince you that fruitcake is best for a wedding is mainly for their own convenience. It can be made months in advance, it holds its shape beautifully, it’s easy to decorate and you can put one cake on top of the other to form layers. The light sponge cake I wanted would not hold the weight of another cake, much less the three tiers I had my heart set on. The solution came from where many other wedding solutions had come from: EBay. There I found a three tier metal stand that would hold each cake individually. The second problem to tackle was the look of the cake. I wanted each cake to be completely surrounded by white chocolate cigarillos (thin rolled tubes of chocolate), but they proved very hard to find at a reasonable price. I finally found them on a website called Imaginative Icing and then all that was left was the small matter of making the cakes.
After a few practice runs where friends and colleagues happily critiqued the results, I decided on a light golden sponge filled with fresh whipped cream mixed with tinned summer fruit, topped with white chocolate mousse. I left out the final expensive touches in these practice runs, but they were still very beautiful cakes. I can’t stress enough how important it was to practice these recipes before the big day, because to get it just right I found out that I had to make several adjustment, including lowering the oven temperature, as the one recommended in my recipe book was much too high, and caused the golden syrup in the mix to burn black on top before the cake was anywhere near cooked through.
I took all that I needed to the house of my future parents in-law, and recruited my bridesmaid as a kitchen helper. As the day before my wedding dawned she arrived and we began the 4 hour process of making my cake. I felt a bit like a general marshalling the troops as I gave out my instructions, which included taking the cakes to the next door neighbor’s oven, which ran at a lower and steady temperature than my in-law’s AGA. The wedding was such a wonderful village affair, with everyone pitching in and offering to help where they could. I even had one of the village guests bringing exquisite berries from her own garden to help decorate the cakes.
