Rose Wedding Cake

I have to admit this is my first epic wedding cake, although I've done wedding cakes before and some cakes that I styled like a wedding cake but this one is the first one with traditional design.

I was approached by a friend of mine to do a wedding cake for her cousin. When we met the bride-to-be she was very knowledgeable about caking and stuff and things are easier because she knew exactly what she wanted. The bride gave us a beautiful cake photo that she likes and ask us to imitate the cake, an easy thing in term of designing but a bit intimidating because the example cake was done beautifully.

After back and forth emailing and throwing idea and arranging delivery etc we finally came to the week before the wedding. This cake is pretty special because this is the last cake we did in 2012 and we were leaving the country the next day so we were excited with the cake and our holidays.

On the week following the wedding I started with the sugar roses, as per suggestion from many cakers, make more as petals are very fragile and you don't want to have anything break while being assembled as it took sometime for sugar flower to set.

I spent a whole day creating 10 roses, 5 big ones and 5 smaller ones plus some rose leaves. The bride point out that on the picture she supplied the center of the roses has a slightly peachy color which I missed when I looked at the picture. I love how these roses have peachy center rather than all ivory, thanks to a great observation from the bride, told you she's good like that.

This cake constructed by 3 layer of Lapis Surabaya cake, it's Indonesian cake with spongy texture so it's not super firm and I have to play with my ganache to create structure. Especially the top bit, because they have tendency to caving downward so I literally have to pour ganache on to create flat workable surface.

I can't remember how many kilos of ganache this cake took but sure a lot of them. Look at the picture how they're sitting side by side waiting to set.

I then covered them with ivory fondant, not really a challenge but you never take everything lightly. Lucky I got everything done in fist attempt.

The next challenge is stacking them together, I had a long dowel running in the center of the cake from bottom layer to top layer and I have some dowels supporting each layer. I have to make sure the structure is spot on as Lapis Surabaya not really the kind of cake that holding any weight plus I have to drive this cake 1 hour across the town.

Final step of the day is pipping, the design supplied is quite intricate and required me to do delicate pipping slowly and consistently. Pipping is not my strongest skill but I pushed myself to deliver and I think at the end I finishes around 3am.

After few hour of sleep I finally woke up on the wedding day to arrange the flowers. I did my best to arrange the flower according to the picture supplied. Even though my roses is not exactly the same as the supplied picture, I kind of like it because it is something that is 'me' that I contributed to the cake.

The roses definitely lifted up the cake to a whole new level, once I placed them all I stepped back and really see how it's officially a wedding cake now.

In real life you can see a faint touch of peach color in the center of the roses which gave the roses new dimension, all credit to a very observant bride-to-be.

I used an oversize cake board to make sure that the bottom roses sit on the cake board instead of squashed to the side of the bottom tier.

When I took the cake to the venue, I was hoping that I get to set up the table and placed the cake myself and of course took some picture of the cake in the venue. However, we arrived to early and the venue is not set yet and the cake table was nowhere to be seen. So I didn't get a chance to take any picture of the cake in the venue.

I had mixed feeling while doing this cake, at one point I was very excited, at one point I was kinda scare because this is someone's wedding cake the pressure to get everything perfect. At the end I was really happy with how the cake turned out and looked back at the journey and really glad for the lesson I learned by doing this cake.

While we were on our holiday we received a text message from the bride: 'Happy New Year!! Not sure if you have returned from holiday or not?! Just wanted to say a big thanks for the wedding cake it was absolutely lovely!! Just how I imagined it to be. All the details on the cake was there including silver beads.' This text message was made our day and made all the hard work paid off. Thanks for the bride who trusted us with her wedding cake and I wish I can cater for weddings more oftern.

Thank you for checking my blog, I will definitely update you with my next project.