The Almighty DIY Wedding Cake

Photo credit: Rouvelee’s Creations

Wedding Cakes are so expensive……I’ll just make my own.  I mean seriously, how hard can it be?

Take this lovely cake above (courtesy of pinterest) for instance.  It’s a beautiful three-tier cake with some ribbon and little scrawly designs.   Hmmmm……simple right?  I can do it!!  I make cakes all the time, albeit they are usually just one double layer, so adding a few more layers has to be just as easy.

First things first, I need to design out how I want my cake to look.  I’m thinking fleur-de-lis’.  I love fleur-de-lis’  being from Louisiana an all.  Yes, I definitely want fleur-de-lis’ on my cake!  I’ll be the first to admit that I am not particularly good at drawing things out in icing so off to amazon I go to order a chocolate mold.

Chocolate mold delivered, rather quickly too! (Thanks Amazon) It didn’t cost very much, so this means I’m off to a great and inexpensive start.

Fleur-de-lis mold

Deciding on the cake flavors was easy.  It’s all in the taste buds and my taste buds love raspberry and lemon.  First things first, I have to google how to make the raspberry filling.  Did you know that fruit fillings will bleed through the cake?  I didn’t.  Very interesting indeed.  So I have learned thanks to a YouTube tutorial that I must mix in a raspberry jello mix to keep it firm and in place.  So good so far.  I add raspberry jello mix and raspberry preserves to my shopping list.  Oh looky there, another YouTube tutorial on how to keep the cake moist with simple syrup.  There’s even one recipe that adds a little brandy to it.  I must do that as well.  No one likes to eat dry cake!  Ingredients for simple syrup is added to list.

I have , what ended up being, a very long list and I headed off to the grocery store.  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX DOLLARS!!!!!  Thank goodness that I already had all the necessary pans for what is sure to be the best wedding cake ever.

Fast forward…..

It’s now the day before the wedding and I have a lot to do.  First things first, I need to make my chocolate fleur-de-lis’.  I chose Ghirardelli chocolate, well, because it’s very good chocolate.  Chocolate is melted and put into molds.  I stick them in the fridge to deal with later.  The pesky chocolate didn’t want to firm up otherwise.  I bake my lemon cakes……phew, this kitchen is hot!  Several hours later the cakes are done and must be chilled for carving.  Off to the fridge they go.

The cakes are chilling, so off to make the simple syrup and get the icing all mixed up with this scrumptious raspberry flavoring that a friend insisted I buy.  (Thank you friend. Great call!)  Another hour later the raspberry filling is all mixed up now and sitting idly by. Time to carve the cakes.  They must be level.

I spend what must have been at least an hour and a half trying to level off all six cakes.  I made a mess.  I have cake crumbs everywhere.  Where’s my broom?

Okay, everything is ready and its time to assemble.  The kitchen is somewhat clean again.   Wow, this icing is yummy and I have managed to get it everywhere.  Must clean kitchen again.   Thirty minutes later and I have managed to somewhat wipe all the icing off of everything and stack the cake together with all its yummy filling. This is turning out great.  Now for a sample…..ooooh, yummy!  Left over crumbs with a dab of filling and a dab of icing assures me that this is going to be the most delicious cake ever.

It’s time to icing the cake now and it must look smooth like all the pretty cakes I see on Pinterest, so off to YouTube again.  Tutorial found and watched and it didn’t look that hard.  Now to put it into action.

One hour later…..this is more difficult than that lady made it look.  My cake is pretty smooth though and it passes inspection.  Now to add my beautiful chocolates to the cake.  Did I mention that I made milk chocolate and white chocolate ones?  Well I did.  I open up the fridge and to my shock, all the milk chocolate ones had little white dots on them.  Apparently the butter separated or fat separated or something.  I’m no chocolatier so I honestly couldn’t tell you with any certainty what happened.  All I know is that now the milk chocolate ones are not usable unless I want my guests to think the chocolate has some sort of disease outbreak.  The white chocolate ones look perfect though.  I caught a break!  White chocolate fleur-de-lis’ have been added to my beautiful cake.

All finished.  It’s beautiful and I did it all by myself.  I made my wedding cake.  In the fridge it goes.

Day of Wedding

It’s the morning of my wedding day.  I have a cup of coffee and go over in my head the list of to-do’s for the day.  It’s going to be busy for sure.  I’m glad that we decided to have an evening wedding.  No rush for anything.  I have all day to get all the other preparations taken care of.  Time to go open up the fridge and admire my lovely cake that I had spent all the previous day working on.

Open fridge…..

Wait….uh oh…..is my cake tilting? It can’t be.  Pure panic mode sets in.  I call the soon to be husband to come have a look and offer his opinion and yes, the cake is definitely tilting.  It kind of looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  I know that I was going for this whole French look and all, but this was taking it a little too far.  I realize at that moment that I forgot to add the dowels for support.  Cake must be disassembled.

One hour later, cake is disassembled and all chocolate pieces have been cleaned of any icing.  Now I must mix new icing, cut dowels, and reassemble the cake.  This is not the way I planned to spend the morning of my wedding day!!

Several hours later…..

My cake is once again complete and all the finishing touches have been put on it.  It’s beautiful and I’m tired but what a masterpiece!  My wedding cake and I made it all by myself and I even managed to spend half of what it would have cost to have someone else make it.  Yes, it took a lot of time (a day and a half) but I was able to save at least a hundred bucks.  I give a huge sigh of relief.  Now off to do all the other things that I am now running behind on.

Two hours later (not very far from go time)

OH NO…..NO NO NO NO NO………Is my cake leaning again?  Is that a budge I see?

My Wedding Cake

I can honestly say after all this, bakers earn every penny that they get.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have gladly paid the extra money and ordered my cake from someone who does this for a living.

So, who plans on making their own cake?