Today's post is on making your own wedding cake. Wedding cakes can retail from £100 or more, so by making your own or asking someone you know whose good with cakes you can easily save £100s.
The best thing about making your own wedding cake is you can get super creative with it. Our wedding cake was three tiers of carrot cake, my husbands favourite! But of course you can make absolutely any kind of cake you want, in fact if you have the time you can make each layer a different flavour! Bonus - ours was freezable so I froze the un-iced cakes after making them two weeks before the wedding.
The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of cake you want to make. Will it be traditional fruit cake? Chocolate? Vanilla? There are plenty of ideas on the internet. Once you've decided what kind of cake it will be you then need to choose how many tiers, and if you are keeping them separate or stacked (If stacking you will need to use dowel to stop them sinking into each other.) Then lastly what sizes each tier will be - For reference ours were 12", 8" and 6". You might find it handy to sketch out a quick idea of your cake, so you have a rough idea of what you want it too look like.
The next thing I did was to purchase the cake topper, ours were Lord Of The Rings chess pieces that I picked up brand new off eBay, you can pretty much put anything on your cake! As these were painted lead, I did pick up a tiny cake board to put these on to prevent contamination with the cake. You'll also need to buy cake boards and boxes to fit your cakes (I think ours were roughly 2" bigger than the cake, a lovely friend bought ours so I can't quite remember what sizes they were). I also bought some sugared flowers to go on the cake, I was going to make my own but the cutters I'd previously bought were absolutely useless!!) I bought mine on-line and had a mini hissy fit when they turned up broken - fortunately the company were fantastic and replaced them the next day, but in retrospect I wish I'd ordered them earlier for less stress! Don't forget your ribbon if you are using it! You can work out the length you need by adding all the sizes of the cakes together and adding 1-2" per cake to allow for overlap.
You can hire cake tins fairly easily or beg/borrow or find them in charity shops if you are lucky. If you're using a stand you can also pick these up fairly cheap or hire/borrow.
Now, I was very lucky as I found a recipe on the internet for each size of tin, if you spend a little time looking you can more than likely find recipes for your cakes and tin sizes. If you can freeze your cake after making, do, it'll save you time and stress the week before the wedding. Just remember to defrost it at least a day before you want to ice it!
I went for cream cheese icing on your cake as it was carrot, but you can ice yours with anything you like. I then piped little stars around the bases and wrapped ribbon around them. (I colour tested my ribbon to make sure the colour wouldn't leak but putting a little of the icing on the ribbon and wiping it off 24 hours later!
Don't put your cake topper/sugar flowers on until the wedding reception as you may find they fall over during transport or go soggy and leak colour all over your cake!
You'll then need to place them in boxes for transport and either drop them to the venue the day before or very nicely ask someone to take them there for you to set up!
Even if you do find you have to buy a few things like tins, it'll almost certainly cost less than getting a cake made at a shop. Just make sure to leave yourself lots of time for them! Of course if you don't like making cakes some supermarkets are now selling plain iced fruit cakes to use for weddings, starting from around £25, you can then decorate these as you like!
But remember, what ever you do, it's your wedding and it's your cake so get creative with it! Good luck!
Ta-ta for now!
x
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