The Wedding Cake

It’s been a while since the last blog! So here comes a new post, and for this time, let me write it in English 🙂

I barely write a personal story here, but this one is a must share! It was on May 27th, 2016, the day when I got married to the most awesome guy in the world, Ihor Smal. It was the happiest day in our lives, and for sure it was the most beautiful day in May! The sun shined, spring was in the air, the birds sang, it was just perfect.

 

And of course, as a cake baker and decorator, I baked my own wedding cake. The theme of the wedding was “Spring in Love”. It was one of the big projects I ever had. Not only with the dessert table, but also with the dress, venue, flowers and other decorations for that day. Trying to keep it simple (and on budget :p) we aimed to have the most beautiful wedding ever! It was a challenge, but definitely worth it.

Don’t worry, I will not bore you with the details. In here, I will just share the story of the dessert table. For our wedding, we decided to have a 2-tier cake and a few cupcakes. For the cake, I baked my best Chocolate Cake, and filled it in with cherry jam and butter creme. And for the cupcakes, we chose vanilla as the flavour. The cake and cupcakes are decorated with daisy flowers, leaves, and a few roses. And the handmade cupcake wrappers and initials from Alottestampingfun made everything even more perfect. I chose not to make a 3D bride and groom dolls from sugar paste, as I was a bit worried about the humidity on that day. But then I found this cute cake topper from the local shop at Nieuwe Binnenweg. It’s super.

Next to the cake and cupcakes, I also scattered a few marshmallows and sweets, yummy!

So, everyone was thinking that I was crazy, decided to bake my own wedding cake. Honestly, it depends. If you think you can handle the stress and the pressure, then I guess you can do it. And plus, you have to have a good planning. Even though most of the things can only be done at the last moment, I made sure that I followed the plan that I made.

Making those small tiny decorations take time – longer than you expect –  so to make sure that I had enough decoration and had them ready on time, I made them 1 week in advance, and kept them in an air tight container.

Another challenge was to make sure that the cake wasn’t dry. Here is the trick. Although I baked the cake 2 days in advance, I kept them in a plastic foil after the cake was completely cooled. I decorated them in the evening (it was definitely a long night). Then before I covered the cake with sugar paste, I filled and covered the cake generously with butter cream and jam. This will help the cake to stay moist. And the sugar paste practically sealed the air from coming into the cake 🙂 You might wonder, the cake might become super sweet with all of that butter cream. Well no. The recipe I use call for a dark bitter chocolate. It doesn’t give this strong sweet taste, so it was a good combination with the butter cream and cherry jam.

One last tip, if you want to bake your own wedding cake, get help from a friend/family! Yes, you might think you can do it all by yourself. And I do believe that you can. But an extra pair of hands won’t hurt right. My friend Eva helped me with building the cake. She was there also for a moral support. Because honestly, building a cake is always so “spannend” like the Dutch people like to say 🙂

I hope some of these tips can help you out with your planning (if you are planning your own wedding). And if you need help with the cake, just let us know 😉

Love,

Riri