PART 1 - MAKING THE CAKE
- We decided to make 3 different types of cake, Mum made the bottom 18in one, a fruit cake recipe she used for her own wedding cake, and the top 14in cake, a rich dark chocolate cake I found the recipe for on the BBC Good Food site.
- I made the middle tier, 16in and madagascan vanilla flavour, I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food site as well. What made it extra special was that the vanilla pods I used were actually brought back from Madagascar by my Aunt!
- The vanilla recipe is brilliant, I'd made a couple of practise runs of it over the last few months and had got it just how I wanted it. The secret ingredient is Greek yoghurt, it makes the cake really moist, there's also a vanilla syrup you pour over the sponge once it's baked.
- Making the sponge was the easy part, I'd never actually practised cutting it into three layers - very carefully to keep them as straight as possible, and then filling them with butter icing. Because Mum had made her tiers taller then mine, we then added extra butter icing and thicker marzipan to make all three tiers a similar height.
- We'd never used confectioners icing before, but it was really easy to roll out and we stuck it to the marzipanned cakes with apricot jam.
- We smoothed the icing down, very gently and here I wish we'd had more time to really smooth it as the more you polish it the glossier it becomes, but by then it was late Thursday afternoon and we had to deliver the cakes on Friday morning.
- A quick mention about cake size. I literary bought the 3 biggest tins in Lakeland, assuming that the bigger the cake the better. However this, and also Mum making her cakes v. high, meant that the cake was MASSIVE, really huge and really heavy.
- We put each cake on a silver board and left the icing to set for a couple of hours. We also added a white satin ribbon to the bottom of each. By now it was Thursday night and we were running out of time!
- I bought the pillars from M&S, they were plaster and really pretty. I also saw plastic ones but thought they weren't as nice. A slight annoyance with these is that the M&S shops had stopped selling the pillars so I had to order them online, but you could only order online for them to be delivered to a store, so it took about 5 days for me to get them!
- Nothing on the pillar and dowel set said anything about cake heights, and when we got the dowels out, they were too short for our mega-high cake! Basically the way it works is that you have a plastic dowel rod that goes all the way through the cake to the cake board at the bottom, the other end sticks up out of the cake and you put the hollow pillar over it, and there should be a little nub of dowel sticking out the top of the pillar.
- Unfortunately our cakes were so tall that the dowels were about half an inch too short. We had no time to buy longer dowels, so we devised a cunning plan. Rather then have 4 pillars on each level, we had 4 on the bottom and 3 on the middle, that way we had a spare pillar and dowel to use. I then cut the dowel into 7 equal pieces (using a serrated kitchen knife) and we poked these pieces down to the bottom of the holes for the dowels, we then put the regular dowel on top of this, and placed the pillars on top of each cake.
- Measuring the angles for the bottom layer was easy as there were 4 each at right angles to each other. The middle tier now had 3 layers and we couldn't find a protractor to measure the angle. Mum came up with a great solution, she took a 6 pointed star from C-bear's shape sorted and placed it in the middle of the cake. We then put the 3 pillars in straight lines from 3 of the points!
- We were still worried about the weight of the cake, particularly as we no longer had strength in the dowels, but went to bed happy that we'd got it finished in time.
- On the Friday morning T, C-bear and I took the cake along with all the other wedding bits and pieces (confetti, guest book, table numbers etc) to Wellington Barn. The two heaviest tiers each went in a box, packed in so they didn't move around. The top tier was on a tray on my lap.
- The lovely people at the Barn agreed to stack the cake for us on Saturday morning, rather then me stacking it a full 24 hours before it was needed and risk it collapsing over night.
To be cont.
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