With my sisters wedding peeping it's head around the corner I decided that I needed to do a practice wedding cake. The few tiered cakes that I've attempted have turned out well.. not good.. so I really wasn't comfortable giving it a go the day before the wedding. I set myself a delivery date in order to get myself in check.
Ok, so I'm going to disclose a secret that apparently only those in the food industry know. When you get a cake chances VERY likely that at some point in it's life it's been frozen. I know I know! The nerve! You wanted something fresh! Logistically it is pretty much impossible to have a business run on cakes that are made to order. I know that some bakeries do claim that they do this but they either have 18 people on staff or only do 1 cake a week. So, for the rest of us in the real world we bake cakes in a larger quantity and freeze them. In fact, at the grocery store I worked at we didn't bake a single cake. All those sheet cakes that go flying out the doors? Frozen. All those pretty cakes in the display case? Either frozen cakes that are decorated on site and some are even brought into the store already decorated. Crazy, I know, it surprised me too. But the truth is people, I don't use preservatives in my baking and in order to keep items fresh and tasty, I freeze them. Trust me, you would never be able to tell, they taste fantastical.
I disclose the dirty secret about the freeze because after buying the pan I quickly realized that a 14" cake was not going to fit into my side by side freezer. In order to keep the cake from drying out I had to bake the cakes close to the delivery date and since I only had 1 pan I had to bake them at separate times. All in all it worked out and I no longer fear over sized cakes.
The bottom layer of the cake was a vanilla cake with a filling of pastry cream and fresh raspberries. The middle layer was a lemon cake with layers of lemon curd and butter cream frosting. The top cake was a chocolate cake the a chocolate mousse filling. My sister didn't ask for chocolate but I was so sick of making lemon that I had to do a chocolate one in order to keep my sanity. I covered each layer with marshmallow fondant. In a nutshell this thing was a BEAST. I am not comfortable in disclosing how much butter I used in it but I will say that it was A LOT. I was covered in powdered sugar from making the marshmallow fondant but it was worth it because it was super tasty and way better then your typical fondant. The bottom layer of the cake is a little jacked up, I wasn't striving for perfection and when the fondant started to stick to itself when I was applying it to the cake I just kept going. Of course I would have redone the fondant if this was anything but a practice cake. I also didn't want to really decorate it but had some gum paste flowers hanging around so I used them to cover the seams.
All in all, a huge success. The cakes were tasty, the cake was sturdy and the whole experience was a huge esteem boost when it comes to the actual wedding cake.
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