My First Wedding Cake

I love to cook. Baking is not my specialty, but I do dabble in it from time to time. Recently I offered to cater a friend's wedding. Sadly, they had already settled on a local caterer, but she inquired if I made cakes. Hmmmm. I've made cute little cakes for my children. And I've attempted to make a cake for my sister-in-law's wedding 10 years ago. Those cakes turned out okay, but nothing I would take a picture and blog about, much less, use on a cake resume. So I thought to myself, "This would be an awesome opportunity for me to branch out and do something new!" I told my friend I'd make the wedding cake! And for the next 9 weeks, I thought about cake. I dreamed about cake. I perused Pinterest and YouTube, and called every friend I knew who made cakes professionally. Over the next 9 weeks, I made over a dozen cakes, including a 3 tier birthday cake, that resembled a wedding cake for my son's 1st birthday! This is my son's cake.

In this close up you can see A LOT of mistakes. I still had a lot of improvements to make in my smoothing techniques and only 7 days to do it!

Seven days later this is the final product. I was given full creative freedom on the cake, with one exception, which made me very happy. The only exception was they already had a topper picked out, and that is why there is a blank space on top without flowers. I personally don't like toppers. I love putting fresh flowers on the cake, and the bride's colors were daylily orange and fuchsia pink, which made for a vibrant flower display. I still had a lot of mistakes on the frosting, but less noticeable from a quick glance and many mistakes were covered by the flowers. :) Over all, I was extremely happy with my first wedding cake!

Here are the recipes:

Buttercream Frosting
Butter Cake (not a white cake)


Here are some links to YouTube videos that gave good instructions:
Smoothing buttercream
assembling a wedding cake
piping the seams of a tiered wedding cake
informative but long