Tiered Cake, Groom's Cake, and Cupcakes!

Hello!! I have wanted to start a blog for some time to be able to share my journey in cake decorating! The good and the bad. I shouldn't (although I might fail) share my flaws and frustration of cake decorating with everyone. I don't want them to notice. I want others to be able to see my cakes and think I did them with no problems at all. But I love cakes. And I want to talk about them all the time! Hopefully through the blog, I'll have an audience that is interested, that understands, and that could possibly help me when I encounter tough situations.


I thought this would be a good time to start my blog. I did a wedding this past weekend. Not my first, but I'm gradually moving up to bigger weddings. The first two were a challenge but simple compared to this wedding and the others I have coming up. What made this wedding such a step up was that I was to make 350 cupcakes, a small tiered cake, and the groom's cake. When it got closer to the actual wedding date, it hit me. Woah. That's a lot!! But I hate turning down cakes! I can do it :) Somehow...


So about two weeks before the wedding I start making a schedule for how I am going to accomplish all of this. I also tried to figure up how long it would take me to do roughly 30 batches of cupcakes etc. By the way, I do have a "real" job. Not to imply that this cake thing is not real work!! The point is, I did not have all day, every day to work on these cakes.  This is what I worked out:


Monday - Make fondant bows for cake, start making icing (I ended up making about 10 batches total)

Tuesday - Make more icing, pre-mix dry ingredients for cakes

Wednesday - Bake two 4", two 6", two 8", two 12"x18", two 9"x13"

Thursday - Bake 350 cupcakes, ice tiered cake
Friday - Ice all cupcakes, decorate groom's cake, work on tiered cake

Saturday - finish up any decorations for cakes


I think the schedule helped. I will say it did not all go as planned, but it all worked out. And here they are:

 Boy did this cake give me a harder time than planned! As you can see, there is cake in the icing. Incredibly frustrating! When I did my crumb coat, some that I scraped off had gotten crumbs in it and that was the icing I had to finish off with. I didn't realize it had crumbs in it until I was covering it again. And I didn't want to make more icing! But it was a gray jersey I was going from, so the speckled looked worked. That was a bummer... but then I started the red! Bluh... I hope all cake decorators don't shun me for this, but I bought red icing. I wanted it to be true red icing and not a kinda goofy-colored red, weird tasting, strange consistency icing. I just need more practice doing it on my own, which I do usually but this was a large quantity. Anyway, it all seemed fine when I dirty iced it. Then I put it in the fridge to harden... Hours later I come back to it. I don't know if it's because I did the gray first... but when I got to the red, it hadn't hardened... so when I was covering it again, all of the icing, including the first layer, was just moving around, crumb and all. And it didn't smooth out well. Oh gosh, I was so frustrated with this red icing!! I needed time away from this cake. After I had simmered down, I am pretty happy with it. Not perfect by all means, and learned the hard way on a few things, but I'm still happy with it. But did anyone notice that one sleeve is longer than the other?? See, these are things I shouldn't share, say, at the wedding with the guests... haha! (Don't worry, I didn't)

Yes, this is the inside of my fridge. It just "chilled" there right after I finished it and before we headed to the church.

One of the three cupcake stands, made by the bride's father. He did a great job!

See where I got the colors from?? Although the bride didn't give me the purple napkin so that's why there are no purple cupcakes. But six colors were enough for me anyway.

The tiered cake was tough too. Icing a cake frustrates me sometimes. Annoying because it's so basic. It all turned out though, again, with a few lessons learned the hard way again. And I did notice the tiers were not all the same height... after they were iced and ready to stack...

See, why I wanted to start the blog? For some reason, I have this tendency to want to point out all the tough parts and mistakes... I don't know why. Maybe because I put so much into it, I just want to talk about the story. I guess my stories just tend to have a lot of "oops". It's the learning process!!

Oh, and I had a cake for Sunday! I had planned to bake the cake amongst the baking for the wedding. Yeah, that didn't happen. So after the wedding (which I attended) I get to baking (around 4:30/5pm). It's a block cake. An  8x8x8 cube. I have one 8x8 square pan. I need four layers... Anyone catching on? So they're all done baking around 9. And yes, I should have done them earlier so they could've settled, but there was no time. I did experience air bubbles because of this, but I knew it was a possibility. I know better! But this is how it went this time. By 3 am, I finish! Hooray!

It was for a little boy's first birthday. That's his smash cake to the left. Yup, had to bake that too. This was my first cube/square cake. It was good practice! It's tough getting that shape. But the customer and her family liked it and that's (mostly) what matters!! I took a nice nap Sunday too. Still working on cleaning my kitchen that I had so wonderfully cleaned the weekend before...

It's looking a lot better than that! 

Well thanks for reading my blog! I know this was a loooong entry. I doubt they will all be like this. This just happened to be a eventful week full of cake! I will do my best to post whenever there's a cake, which hopefully will be often :)

Lydia