This year I am making the wedding cake of a friend I used to work with. Their theme is bright and colourful, and they have asked me to use classic 100's and 1000's on their cake to fit in with this. Two tiers will be completely covered in buttercream with the 100's and 1000's attached, and the other two will be covered in white fondant with circles of fondant with 100's and 1000's. They are having a different flavour for each of the four tiers so I wanted to have a tasting for them to show them what the decoration would look like and also to check they were happy with the flavours.
I started by making the fondant circles, leaving enough time for them to dry. I made different sizes so we could see how the sizes would differ when they were covered with the decorations.
I then covered each circle with a layer of edible glue...
...and pressed them gently into a plate of 100's and 1000's.
This is the result of one dip and as you can see they look a little thin. It worked well on the smaller circles, but with the larger ones I found a better way was to place the disc with the glue upwards and pour the 100's and 1000's over the top, pressing them down as I went.
I wasn't sure the glue was going to hold them on, however when I checked they were holding firm! There were a few that had escaped (mainly all over the kitchen floor when I was trying to decorate them) but I think that's just their prerogative!
As well as the circles I also wanted to emulate the buttercream tiers, so I used the carrot cake cupcakes that had risen well to be my guinea pigs.
I covered the domes with a layer of butter cream...
...smoothed it a little...
...and then dunked the cake straight into the plate of 100's and 1000's, moving it around to the edges so I made sure all of the butter cream was covered.
These stuck in a much thicker layer than the edible glue, and actually felt fairly sturdy.
Once they were dry I tried shaking the cakes to see if they would all fall off, however to my surprise again they all stuck firm! I imaging in transport I may loose a few, however with that many, I'm hoping the effect will still be lovely.
Lemon drizzle on the left and vanilla on the right. I hate it when cupcake cases fold in on themselves, grrr!
Vanilla buttercream was piped on to all of the cupcakes to prevent a transfer of flavour. When the cake is stacked all of the flavours are so unique I don't want them to merge into one. We decided that vanilla butter cream was the best way to do this and to keep a consistent look across everything.
I filled the Victoria sponge cakes with strawberry jam before replacing the top and piping over it.
I then added three fondant decorations to the Victoria sponge cakes...
...a medium disc to the coffee and walnut...
...and a large disc to the lemon drizzle.
All together they looked really pretty, but I still had to label them to make sure that I remembered what was what.
To make the cake tasting extra special I put on a little afternoon tea spread on our coffee table with a nice flowery tablecloth and baked some sultana scones as well. You really can't beat a freshly baked scone, and it was lovely to have them as a tasty extra for the cake tasting as well.
We went through all of the details of the sketches that I had done previously and checked that they were happy with all of the flavours. We confirmed the cake topper and I was delighted to hear that the only amends they wanted to make was to change the carrot cake for the largest tier as they liked it so much and more coffee in the coffee and walnut cake. I'm feeling a lot more confident about the design now I have practiced some of the elements, and I'm looking forward to the first week in May when I can get started!
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