Jess and Ben's Wedding Cake

The subject of much controversy, this wedding cake was my first tiered wedding cake, and also the first time I used acetate paper. It is comprised of yellow cake with raspberry filling and vanilla bean buttercream frosting. I learned a lot about chocolate work with this project. I used a woodgrain varnish tool from the hardware store to paint the woodgrain effect in the chocolate.










For the template of the white chocolate leaves I used real leaves from the same tree where I got the crabapples which are coated in granulated sugar and purely for decoration purposes, although everyone wanted to eat them. I was hoping to find larger apples and I was dissatisfied with how disproportionate the leaf size is to the apple size, but I was on a tight schedule and had to work with what was available. I wish I had more pictures of the woodgrain from different sides, because you can see the seam here... Me, being a perfectionist, I wanted it to look seamless, but it was far from perfect. The cake definitely had a backside.

Here's the happy couple. They are awesome people and I was really happy they enjoyed the cake.



I was unable to make it to the reception site to assemble the cake myself, and sent it off in three different boxes along with two full sized sheet cakes that I put together for the 250 people attending. One was carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and the other was chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, a recipe which I created by modifying a buttercream recipe. I did all of this work in six hours. I made myself a production schedule in order to maximize the short amount of time I had to do it in. I felt like I was on that tv show Ace of Cakes, and I enjoyed the challenge immensely. It was hard to release my cake baby into the hands of another, and I was so worried about every detail. Based on the adorable thank you card and pictures Jess sent, it looks like it all turned out fine!