My Wedding Cake

My wedding cake

In case you didn't catch the post about the wedding cake project, I should note that this is not the cake from my wedding, it is the wedding cake I made for my second to last project (the last being the final exam showpiece and food) at the FCI. We were given a wedding held at Gaudi's Park Guell. The colors were orange and golden yellow; the attire was formal; the general feel was formal yet modern and sleek; and the flowers were gazanias, red poppies, orange blossoms, and wheat.

I decided on a relatively tall, narrow cake. The bottom tier was 8 inches in diameter, the middle was 6 inches, and the top was 4 inches. The middle tier was about double the hight of the other two layers. To achieve this look I sat a cake dummy (a styrofoam cylinder) on top of the regular hight middle layer then I just crumb coated the entire thing and covered it in fondant like it was all cake.

I took inspiration from the mosaics and 

curves on this wall at the Park Guell.

A close up of the mosaic on the middle tier

I knew I wanted to do mosaic decorations on the cakes, but I wasn't sure what. After quite a lot of sketching and looking at pictures of Park Guell, I settled on doing narrow mosaic borders on the bottom and top tiers and a large block of mosaic on the middle tier. I chose to use a variety of oranges and golds ranging from almost red to pale yellow. I was going to mix in a section of dark blue, green, and purple, but when I dyed the fondant I didn't like how the colors looked together so I left it off.

My cake topper: I'm really proud of the flowers!

As for the flowers, the orange blossoms were easy enough to make. The wheat was easy as well, though it definitely required some trial and error before I figured out how to make it look right. The poppies weren't too hard, but I realized after I made them that they looked more like British remembrance poppies (those paper or plastic poppy pins worn to commemorate soldiers who have died in war) than actual poppies. Ah well, they were still beautiful. I was planning on making one large gazania for the top of the cake. I'm really glad I only planned to make one, because it was really difficult! It came out quite wonderfully, albeit not a very accurate depiction of the real flower.

More flowers and another shot of the mosaic

One last picture of my sugar paste flowers

By the way, the base under the cake is a stack of 10 inch cardboard cake circles covered in foil, then in fondant. I glued--with nontoxic glue, just in case--a nice coordinating ribbon around the edge to spiff it up a little.

The inside of the top tier

By the way, the cake itself was amazing! It's a Martha Stewart recipe for a really stable, moist, white cake. We were meant to use vanilla buttercream for the whole cake--filling and frosting--but there was a little mix up--which was a bit the storeroom's fault, a bit the chef's fault, and a bit my fault--that resulted in my having a coffee buttercream filling and a vanilla coating under the fondant. I'm actually glad about that; I liked the coffee flavor a lot.

The back of my cake (I like when the back
is still pretty so that it can be a proper
showpiece) after the chefs cut a slice out of
the bottom tier and then shoved it back in.

There are a few spots in the fondant that got a little stretched in some spots and was slightly bubbly in and I'm a bit bummed that the block of contrasting color mosaics didn't work out in fondant on my cake like it did in marker on my sketch. But overall, I'm really, really happy with how the cake came out. I think I did good work, kept the cake clean looking, and still embraced the wedding theme. Apparently the students that gave us the theme agreed, because they chose my cake as the best in the class!